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Yesterday the Financial Standard’s annual Chief Economist Forum signalled the real start to the working year. This gathering of prominent economists shared their views on the economic and investment prospects both in Australia and globally. BlueChip was there – and brings you these highlights.
Christopher Probyn, Chief Economist, State Street Global Advisers
Mr Probyn focused on the four global growth engines – US, China, Eurozone and Japan – and pinpointed three trends we’re likely to see from them this year.
- Improvement: global growth, which has slowed since 2010, should accelerate on improvements in both the advanced and developing economies in 2015.
- Divergence: performance is going to diverge across the four growth engines. The US, Europe and Japan will all see stronger growth, reaccelerating to around 3% in the US while languishing to near 1.0% in Europe and Japan. There’s no doubt China’s growth will slow down, the question remains around whether it will be a hard landing or a soft landing. Mr Probyn leans towards soft landing.
- Decoupling: monetary policy will be begin to decouple, most noticeably the Federal Reserve will tighten its monetary policy this year following the end of its asset purchase program in October, this will likely be mid-year.
Bob Baur, Chief Global Economist, Principal Global Investors
Mr Baur believes in 2015 we will see many global trends begin to unwind.
According to Mr Baur, these “unwindings” include:
- The China investment boom (advantage becomes disadvantage). Much like Mr Probyn, Mr Baur believes there will be a marked slowdown in China’s growth this year. This will be the result of four factors; a shrinking labour force (thanks to the long term impact of the one child policy); reaching a peak in productivity growth; diminished competiveness (a combination of soaring wages and a shrinking labour force mean China is no longer the world’s lowest-cost manufacturer) and excess productive capacity (as a result of a surge in investment over the past decades).
- Commodity super-cycle. The tremendous commodities boom we’ve been accustomed to has ended. The surges that drove one record price after another were authoring their own demise. High prices curtailed demand and increased supply, driving down prices.
- Outsourcing surge from developed countries. Thanks to higher wages, increased transport costs and currency appreciation, many global companies that once “outsourced” manufacturing to low-cost countries are now “reshoring” as manufacturing in developed countries, particularly the US, becomes competitive.
James Bond, Chief Economist, Financial Services Council
Mr Bond’s outlook for Australia focused on the implications of the mining investment boom slowdown. While this has been on the cards for a while Mr Bond says there was a significant shift last year and the two speed economy is now truly in reverse.
Taking a state-by-state view, Mr Bond showed that growth in WA and Qld, which typically relied heavily on the mining investment boom, has slowed. Meanwhile other states are showing significant growth, particularly NSW and Vic. The latter is due in large part to their reliance on professional services, particularly financial services, which he says is set to be one of Australia’s top exports (on par with iron ore) in the next five years.
The massive growth in residential construction (peaking in NSW and Vic), is also driving retail trade in these states in particular.
He predicts strong domestic consumption to drive growth in our economy over the next year.
Saul Eslake, Chief Economist, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch
Mr Eslake echoed Mr Bond’s view regarding the subsidence of the mining boom and the strong upturn in dwelling construction (despite the fact that demand in property is largely from investors who typically don’t want new dwellings). However, higher house prices aren’t boosting consumer spending as they used to, and Mr Eslake believes it will remain soft throughout the year.
In addition, Mr Eslake observed that our terms of trade have been much more volatile than those of other comparable countries. While we have gained far more from the rapid growth of industrialisation of China, real GDP growth failed to note the effect of changes in the terms of trade on real GDI (gross domestic income). In fact, last year we had two successive quarters of negative growth in real GDI, and yet he notes we weren’t in a recession.
Touching on the Aussie dollar, he says that this will continue to fall as the capital inflows financing resources fall away. The RBA prefers that support to economic growth comes from a lower Australian dollar rather than lower interest rates.
He did note that 2015 shows some mildly encouraging forward indicators for business capex and employment.
