Stephen Roach on the Cost of Global Resilience

Excerpt from Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach's October 9th essay:

Convictions are deep that a $46-trillion world economy has acquired a new Teflon-like resilience. On the surface, recent events appear to bear that out: Despite unprecedented outbreaks of terrorism, mounting geopolitical instability, soaring oil prices, and the bursting of a major equity bubble, the global economy has hardly skipped a beat. In fact, by the IMF’s metrics, world GDP growth appears to have surged at a 4.9% average annual rate over the 2003-06 period -- the strongest four-year global growth spurt since the early 1970s. And most forecasters, including those at the IMF, are banking on a similar outcome for 2007. Is this resilience a new organic feature of an increasingly globalized world, or has it come at a much greater cost than widely appreciated?

I am firmly in the latter camp -- that the world may have paid a very steep price for its newfound resilience. That price, in my opinion, is very much associated with the second-order effects of excess liquidity -- namely, a profusion of asset bubbles, record disparities between current account deficits and surpluses, and a mounting protectionist backlash. In a myopic rush to celebrate the immediate dividends of faster economic growth, the costs of what it has taken to achieve that outcome have all but been ignored. As long as global growth remains strong and the liquidity cycle remains accommodative, I suspect those costs will continue to be finessed. But when the tide goes out and the global growth engine slows for any one of a number of reasons, an increasingly integrated global economy and its tightly interdependent financial markets could well have to come to grips with these costs head on. That remains the biggest potential pitfall of 2007, in my view.

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[CrossProfit_:]

Very well put with only one caveat; if the global recession doesn’t hit in the second half of 2007, then the party can go on for another 3 or even 4 years, perhaps longer.

The reason for this is that the U.S. economy, though still extremely important on a global basis, no longer commands 25% of all economic activity. U.S. global input is at 18% and declining. The 82% non U.S. share perceives it as a necessity to disconnect from the U.S. altogether. Such being the case; foreign governments will continue to push their economies and borrow today in order to build for tomorrow.

This is a concept that most American economists simply can not grasp as it is perhaps viewed as anti-American. The truth be told, this is not anti-American. It is the will to achieve financial independence. Teflon-like resilience is good but a strong will to become independent is far more potent.

Disclosure: This comment was submitted by a CrossProfit analyst and may not reflect the opinion of CrossProfit.com.
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2006 Oct 10 03:45 AM