MacroScope

2012 has been a year to forget for Brazil’s struggling industry – just like the year before. But a weekly central bank survey of around 90 financial institutions says that will all change next year and industry will grow at healthy 4 percent pace.

Will it?  One year ago, the same survey predicted 4.1 percent growth for 2012. Despite massive stimulus by President Dilma Rousseff’s government, including record-low interest rates and billions of dollars in tax cuts that were off everyone’s radar, industrial output in Latin America’s largest economy is set to fall by 2.3 percent.

The same pattern happened the year before. Two months before the start of 2011, analysts expected an expansion of 5.3 percent in Brazil’s industrial output but in the end it grew by only 0.3 percent.

Have economists been overoptimistic?

Luciano Rostagno, chief strategist at WestLB in Sao Paulo, said his 2013 forecasts consider a gradual recovery of the global economy and the effects of all the stimulus provided by Brazilian authorities. His estimate for industrial output is even more positive: 5 percent growth.

But the risks are clear, he admitted.

If global economic growth remains sluggish, Brazilian entrepreneurs may postpone their investment plans even further, despite all the stimulus offered by the government.

U.S. manufacturing activity shrank for a second straight month in July as recent economic weakness spilled into the third quarter, according to the Institute for Supply Management’s closely watched index. But that wasn’t the worst of it: new orders, a gauge of future business activity, also shrank for a second month, albeit at a slightly slower pace.

Tom Porcelli at RBC explains why the status quo may not be good enough to keep the economy expanding:

The historical record back to 1955 suggests a rather ominous outcome when ISM new orders remain at 48 or less for two straight months. In fully 75% of those instances we were hurtling toward recession. The recent headfakes occurred in 1995 during the mid-cycle slowdown and in 2003 shortly after the recession ended and when the housing boom was in its infancy. Our call remains that we’ll (barely) skirt a recession but with evidence mounting that the economic headwinds are placing significant downward pressure on economic output, we find it striking that forecasters – as bearish as we’ve been told they are – still expect growth to average 2.2% in the second half of the year.

The closely watched Institute of Supply Management’s nationwide manufacturing index showed contraction in manufacturing for the second month in a row in July and Bradley Holcomb, chairman of the ISM’s business survey committee, sounded equally subdued in a morning teleconference.

An overall softening and flattening is going on. It’s a reflection of the overall state of the global economy.

New orders for manufactured goods also shrank for the second straight month, and backlogged orders fell for the fourth straight month. Prices weakened for the third month. Said Holcomb: