by Nouriel Roubini
For the last few years the global economy has been running on two engines, the U.S. on the consumption side and China on the production side, both lifting the entire global economy. The U.S. has been the consumer of first and last resort spending more than its income and running large current account deficits while China (and other emerging market economies) has been the producer of first and last resort, spending less than its income and running ever larger current account surpluses.
For the last few months the first engine of global growth has effectively shut down as the latest batch of macro news from the U.S. are worse than awful. More worrisome there are now increasing signs that the other main engine of the global economy – China - is also stalling. Let us consider now in detail the evidence that China may be on its way to a hard landing.
The main outlet of Chinese exports – the U.S. consumer – is now collapsing for the first time in two decades. Chinese exports to the U.S. were growing at an annualized rate of over 20% a year ago; while the most recent bilateral trade data from the U.S. now show that this export growth has now fallen down to 0%.
After an ok second quarter in the U.S. (boosted by the tax rebates) U.S. retailers hoped that the consumer downturn would be minor: they thus placed over the summer massive orders for Chinese (and other imported) goods for Q3 and Q4. But now the U.S. holiday season clearly looks like the worst that the U.S. will experience in decades and the result of it will be a huge overhang of unsold Chinese good.
Thus, you can expect that orders of Chinese goods for Q1 of 2009 and the rest of 2009 will be sharply down dragging Chinese exports to the U.S. into sharply negative territory. And it is not just Chinese exports to the U.S.: until a few months ago the U.S. was starting to contract but the rest of the advanced economies (Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia/New Zealand) were growing at a sustained rate, thus boosting Chinese exports. But there is now strong evidence that a severe recession has now started in almost all of the advanced economies. You can thus expect that Chinese export growth to Europe, Canada, Japan, etc. will sharply decelerate in the next few quarters, thus adding to the fall in Chinese net exports.
A hard landing in the Chinese economy and in investment would lead to a sharp increase in non-performing loans of the – still mostly public – state banks; the implicit liabilities from a serious banking problem would then add to the implicit and explicit budget deficits and public debt. Note that the poor quality of the underwriting by Chinese banks –that financed a huge overinvestment in the economy - has been hidden for the last few years by the high growth of the economy. Once net exports go bust and real investment sharply falls we will see a massive surge in non-performing loans that financed low return and marginal investment projects. The ensuing fiscal costs of cleaning up the banking system could be really high.
The first engine of global growth – the U.S. on the consumption side – has now already shut down. The second engine of global growth – China on the production side – is also on its way to stalling. Thus, with the two main engines of global growth now in serious trouble a global hard landing is now almost a certainty. And a hard landing in China will have severe effects on growth in emerging market economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America as Chinese demand for raw materials and intermediate inputs has been a major source of economic growth for emerging markets and commodity exporters. So brace yourself for an ugly and protracted global economic contraction in 2009.
