Thursday, December 13, 2007


Economy: What's in store for 2008

Economy: What's in store for 2008

London, Dec 4 Some experts are expecting an obvious negative impact on global and particularly developed economies for 2008, but that was already announced by International Monetary Fund and World Bank reports.

According to Jeremy Batstone-Carr, Director of Private Client Research at Charles Stanley, a London-based broker firm, there would be slower global growth next year and the slowdown will be driven by weakness in the United States economy, forecasting a recession between the last quarter of 2007 and the first of 2008.

A longer and deeper recession in the United States is a real possibility, says Jeremy Batstone-Carr, although it is not the central projection of his firm.

Taking his distance from the IMF-WB consensus, Batstone-Carr believes that Brazil, Russia, India and China will not be able to decouple from the US slowdown, thus taking their blow and growing at a slower pace than before.

As for the United Kingdom, the London expert believes that official growth forecasts of 2.0 percent for 2008 are too optimistic and in 2009 there will not be a strong rebound. Equally, eurozone growth is set to slow next year too. At present the 2009 outlook is hard to predict with any great certainty.

Another negative consequence of the US slowdown is the contraction in imports that affect the exporting nations´growth prospects and the US domestic market lacking those supplies, although the trade deficit of 6.0 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to fall to 2.5 percent, according to Charles Stanley estimates.

Even more significantly, Charles Stanley looks only to a partial recovery in economic activity in 2009. This suggests that the trend in corporate earnings, has only very limited scope to recover strongly over 2008.

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