Ask…

from MacroScope:

What emerging animal are you?

Ever since Goldman Sach's Jim O'Neill came up with the idea of BRICs as an investment universe, competitors have been indulging in a global game of acronyms. Why not add Korea to Brazil, Russia, India and China and get a proper BRICK? Or include South Africa, as it wants, to properly upper case the "s" - BRICS or BRICKS?

Completely new lists have also been compiled -- HSBC chief Michael Geoghegan has championed CIVETS to describe Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa (ignoring the fact, as Reuters' Sebastian Tong points out here, that a civet is a skunk-like animal blamed for the spread of the deadly SARS outbreak in Asia).

Fun though some of this is -- and no one can argue that BRICs has not had an impact -- there is a danger that the acronym could become more relevant  than the actual countries involved. For example, imagine Mexico, Uruguay, Panama, Philippines, Egypt, Turkey and Sierre Leone being lumped together because they spell MUPPETS.

With this in mind, the Spanish bank BBVA is now arguing that what is needed is a more dynamic concept, one that can remain in place acronymically,  so to speak, but allow for new entrants without the need to rewrite everything. Enter BBVA's EAGLEs -- an Emerging And Growth-Leading Economy, defined by its incremental GDP rather than absolute size. The founding 10 are China, India, Brazil, Korea, Indonesia, Russia, Mexico, Turkey, Egypt and Taiwan.

But BBVA reckons that is not enough. It also has an EAGLE's nest, which included fledglings that might soon grow up to soar -- Nigeria, Poland, South Africa, Thailand, Colombia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Argentina, Peru and the Philippines.

MacroScope likes the idea of animals coming to the aid of investors and economists. It would like to suggest FERRETs -- Fast Emerging, Relatively Robust Economic Treasures. But it encourages anyone who feels inspired to submit their own suggestions.

from MacroScope:

Will China make the world green?

Joschka Fischer was never one to mince words when he was Germany's foreign minister in the late '90s and early noughts. So it is not overly surprising that he has painted a picture in a new post of a world with only two powers -- the United States and China -- and an ineffective and divided Europe on the sidelines.

More controversial, however, is his view that China will not only grow into the world's most important market over the coming years, but will determine what the world produces and consumes -- and that that will be green.

Fischer, who was leader of  Germany's Green Party, reckons that due to its sheer size and needed GDP growth, China will have to pursue a green economy. Without that, he writes in his Project Syndicate post, China will quickly reach limits to growth with disastrous ecological and, as a result, political consequences.

This will have serious consequences on the the way the West lives.

Consider the transition from the traditional automobile to electric transport. Despite European illusions to the contrary, this will be decided in China, not in the West. All that will be decided by the West’s globally dominant automobile industry is whether it will adapt and have a chance to survive or go the way of other old Western industries: to the developing world.

This is not the usual view of China. Many greens have long feared the impact of a huge leap in Chinese growth on the global environment -- refrigerators in a billion homes, cars in a billion garages etc.

from MacroScope:

Who will win this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics?

And the Nobel laureate for economics in 2010 is?

Thomson Reuters expert David Pendlebury might have an idea. At least one of the picks from his annual predictions of winners (economics, chemisty, and so on) has won a Nobel prize over the years. Here is his short-list for economics this year.

* Alberto Alesina of Harvard University in Massachusetts for research on the relationship between politics and macroeconomics, especially politico-economic cycles.

* Nobuhiro Kiyotaki of Princeton University and John Moore of Britain's University of Edinburgh and the London School of Economics for their Kiyotaki-Moore model, which describes how small shocks to an economy may lead to a cycle of lower output. It described Japan's real-estate crisis in the 1990s and could describe some of the causes of the recent U.S. recession.

* Kevin Murphy of the University of Chicago for research in social economics, including wage inequality and labor demand, unemployment, and how medical research pays off.

But what are your views? Who do you think deserves the prize for 2010 on October 11?

from MacroScope:

What are the risks to growth?

Mike Dicks, chief economist and blogger at Barclays Wealth, has identified what he sees as the three biggest problems facing the global economy, and conveniently found that they are linked with three separate regions.

First, there is the risk that U.S., t consumers won't increase spending. Dicks notes that the increase in U.S. consumption has been "extremely moderate" and far less than after previous recessions. His firm has lowered is U.S. GDP forecast for 2011 to 2.7 percent from a bit over 3 percent.

Next comes the euro zone. While the wealth manager is not looking for any immediate collapse in EMU, Dicks reckons that without the ability to devalue, Greece and other struggling countries won't see any great improvement in competitiveness. Germany, in the meantime, has sped up plans to cut its own deficit.  It leaves the Barclays Wealth's euro zone GDP forecast at just 1 percent for next year.

Finally, Asian growth is under threat from tightening policies. Dicks says this is the least problem of the three, but there are indications that powerhouse China needs a period of slower growth to get things under control.

So,  there are three problems -- and a not very bright outlook. Are there any others? Or are these three all being overstated?

from MacroScope:

Crisis reading: What’s in the book bag?

Readers of MacroScope who live in the northern hemisphere will be gearing up for some summer reading.

James Montier, the market psychologist who is also an equity analyst at Societe Generale, has come up with his annual recomendations of what to read. The full list is here, but for the current economic and market crisis he has this to offer:

My favourite book in this category is Bill Fleckenstein’s ‘Greenspan’s Bubbles’ -- an excellent exposé of incompetence during Alan Greenspan's tenure as Fed Chairman. The next choice in this group is Whitney Tilson and Glen Tongue’s ‘More Mortgage Meltdown’. This book explains clearly how we ended up in this mess (and is based on the authors -- real time experience), and an added bonus is the insight into Tilson's investment process provided by the case studies. My final choice in this section is Jim Grant’s ‘Mr. Market Miscalculates’. I've mentioned this excellent book before, and I believe it deserves a place on all investors' bookshelves.

Montier got MacroScope thinking. There must be many more crisis books, or related ones, that are worthy of a read as the summer rolls in. How about John Kenneth Galbraith's 'The Great Crash, 1929' or Tom Wolfe's 'Bonfire of the Vanities', which still has one of the best descriptions ever of how bond traders make money.

So let's have your suggestions. What should you read to mark the crisis?

from MacroScope:

Waiting for the G20 to….?

Finance ministers and central bankers from the G20 meet this weekend in the English countryside to discuss the world's financial and economic crisis. With this in mind, MacroScope asked a number of economists what they want to see from the meeting and the G20 summit to follow later and what they expect to see.

The answer, in short, appears to be that much is needed but not much expected.

Paul Mortimer-Lee, head of market economics, BNP Paribas:

"There will be progress on agreeing that regulation needs to be more effective and more effectively co-ordinated on a global scale but I am unconvinced we are going to go a long way further.  Some populist posturing on bank bonuses etc should be expected. The less is achieved in other areas the more this will get played up. On bank recapitalisation, they will all agree strong capital is a good thing, but in no way do I expect a concerted plan -- it's driven by events and the exigencies of the local banking system.

"I would like to see progress on the international financial architecture/the IMF and its resources. Maybe we'll get some new facility and some agreement on more new cash ... but a radical overhaul requires the power structure to be rejigged -- more power to the (emerging economies) and less to Europe. This is not something European politicians will want to be high profile when it comes out."

Sarah Hewin, senior economist, Standard Chartered:

"The economic data continue to worsen and markets remain in a state of fear. So the best outcome from the meeting would be a co-ordinated response to frozen credit markets and collapsing global economic activity.

from MacroScope:

Welcome to “The Great Recession”

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a name. We are living through "The Great Recession". Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, used the term to describe our current angst on a trip to Africa this week. He may not have been the first to use it -- we have found other citations, including JPMorgan -- but the guessing here is that it may  stick with him because of his role.

It's a pretty neat moniker, actually. It resonates, of course, with "Great Depression" but without the soup lines and Hoovervilles. At the same time, it differentiates between the severe contraction now under way and run-of-the-mill economic misery. It also has the snappiness that media folks like -- hence this post.

The Bretton Woods duo of IMF and World Bank have been underlining how bad things are. Strauss-Kahn, for example, tells Reuters that delays in bank restructuring could mean economic recovery is not on the cards even in 2010 (which sounds a long way off, but is only next year). Then comes Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, who opines to Britain's Daily Mail that global growth will probably fall about 1 to 2 percent this year.

Not that any of this is particularly surprising to economists. Reuters polled around 250 of them in the past week or so and found expectations of a 1.4 percent contraction in the U.S. economy this year, a 2.6 percent one in the euro zone and a 4.0 percent one in Japan over its next fiscal year.

So "Great Recession" it appears to be. Unless you think otherwise, in which case, suggestions below, please.

(Reuters photo: Dylan Martinez)