MacroScope

After bad economic news from Germany, China and the United States over the past few weeks, here are two more. Brazil and India, two of the world’s largest emerging economies, are increasingly vulnerable to another crisis or to the eventual end of the ultra-loose monetary policies in developed economies after five years of a severe global slowdown.

Weak demand for Brazil’s exports and the voracious appetite of local consumers for imported goods widened the country’s current account deficit to 2.93 percent of GDP in the 12 months through March, the widest gap in nearly eleven years. In dollar terms, that amounts to $67 billion.

To help fund this gap, Brazil could at first loosen the currency controls adopted in the past few years and let more dollars in. But if the dollar flows change too swiftly, Brazil would find itself with three other options: curb spending by growing less, allow a decline in the foreign exchange rate at the risk of fueling inflation, or burn part of its international reserves – which are large, at $377 billion, but not infinite.

Such an outlook could get even more challenging if commodities prices drop – and last week’s tumble in many products sent a reminder of how volatile these markets can be, hurting not only Brazil but many other Latin American exporters.

    ”Whereas the region entered the 2008-09 global financial crisis from a position of relative strength, it is now much more vulnerable to another external shock,” said David Rees, emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, in London.

Four years ago world leaders, meeting in the G20 crisis session, agreed they would all work to move from recession to growth and prosperity.  They agreed to a global growth compact to be delivered by combining national growth targets with coordinated global interventions. It didn’t happen. After the $1 trillion stimulus of 2009, fiscal consolidation became the established order of the day, and so year after year millions have continued to endure unemployment and lower living standards.

Only now are there signs that the long-overdue shift in national macro-economic policies may be taking place. The new Japanese government is backing up a "minimum inflation target" with a multi-billion-dollar stimulus designed to create 600,000 jobs. In what some call the “reverse Volcker moment,” Ben Bernanke has become the first head of a central bank for decades to announce he will target a 6 percent level of unemployment alongside his inflation objective. And the new governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has told us that "when policy rates are stuck at the zero lower bound, there could not be a more favorable case for Nominal GDP targeting.” Side by side with this shift in policy, in every area but the Euro, there is also policy progress in China. It may look from the outside as if November’s Communist Party Congress simply re-announced their all-too-familiar but undelivered wish to re-balance the economy from exports to domestic consumption, but this time the promise has been accompanied by a time-specific commitment: to double average domestic income per head by 2020.

The intellectual case for change is obvious. A chronic shortage of demand has developed for two reasons. First, as the IMF announced at the end of 2012, the adverse impact of fiscal consolidation on employment and demand has been greater than many people expected. Secondly, the effectiveness of quantitative easing has almost certainly started to wane. As former BBC chief Gavyn Davies has put it, “the supply potential of the economy is in danger of becoming dependent on, or ‘endogenous to,’ the weakness of domestic demand. ...With demand constrained in this way for such a lengthy period of time, supply potential is beginning to downsize to fit the low level of demand.” It is a new equilibrium that can be reversed only by boosting demand.

An obscure gauge of shipping costs rose to prominence in geeky macro circles during the financial crisis because its plunge provided a telling lead on the economic crash that unfolded in 2008 and 2009. Now, the Baltic Dry Index has again taken a nosedive, falling to its lowest level in more than two decades.

This time, analysts are explaining it away as a reflection of an increased number of carriers at sea.

Julian Jessop at Capital Economics, acknowledges this has indeed been a big factor behind the index’s decline. Still, he suggests the magnitude of the drop should give forecasters some pause.

As January 2012 drifts into the rearview mirror as a bumper month for world markets, one way to capture the year so far is in pictures - thanks to Scott Barber and our graphics team.

The driving force behind the market surge was clearly the latest liquidity/monetary stimuli from the world's central banks.

The ECB's near half trillion euros of 3-year loans  has stabilised Europe's ailing banks by flooding them with cheap cash for much lower quality collateral. In the process, it's also opened up critical funding windows for the banks and allowed some reinvestment of the ECB loans into cash-strapped euro zone goverments. That in turn has seen most euro government borrowing rates fall. It's also allowed other corporates to come to the capital markets and JP Morgan estimates that euro zone corporate bond sales in January totalled 46 billion euros, the same last year and split equally between financials and non-financials..

China has defied predictions of a hard economic landing for some time now so it is somewhat unsettling to see  investors positioning for a sharp slowdown in the world's second-largest economy.

Over the last 10 years, the world has become accustomed to Chinese annual GDP growth of above 9 percent. A seemingly insatiable demand for commodities from soya beans to iron ore has catapulted the Asian giant to near the top of the global trade table. China is the biggest trading partner for countries on nearly every continent, from Angola to Australia.

But many are now fretting that an unhappy coincidence between stuttering global demand and domestic strains in the property and banking sectors could knock Chinese growth to below 7 percent (the level commonly identified as a 'hard landing'), with grave implications for the rest of the world.

What went wrong and where we should go are topical post-crisis discussions and many books have been dedicated to tackle this question.

Eric Janszen, U.S.-based economic analyst, is the latest in analysing the crisis and its aftermath. He thinks that the problems of the global economy are rooted in the flaws of the debt-driven FIRE Economy (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) and the only way out of the crisis is to change the fundamental approach.

“The entire economic system has been glued together by one profound fantasy: Finance can substitute for production, and credit for savings. Private debt, of households and businesses, and public debt, of governments federal, state, and local, foreign and domestic, piled up like snow by a blizzard of lending through mortgages, bonds offerings, and securitizations over decades. It then avalanched upon us,” Janszen wrote in his new book.

The growing acrimony in the international debate over China's currency policy has led some to warn that Beijing could dig in its heels if pushed to hard to let its yuan rise.

But Barclays Capital says Beijing could let its currency strengthen as early as next month, notwithstanding its public resolve against Washington's threat to label it as a currency manipulator.

"They do have a 'If you stop pushing, we'll do it' attitude, which is kind of childish, really. But it will happen because they are the only country in the world, besides India, where there is a whiff of inflation," says Barclays' asset allocation head Tim Bond.

Mohamed El-Erian, CEO and co-CIO of the world’s biggest bond fund PIMCO, says 2010 is the beginning of the multi-year resetting of the global economy.

In the period up to the crisis, there were two labels that dominated the world — Great Moderation and Goldilocks. Not too cold, not too hot. 2009 was about crisis management — the label was ‘whatever it takes’. The 2010 label is post-crisis. It’s not just about post-crisis. In our view, 2010 is about multi-year resetting of the global economy. It will be a bumpy journey to the new normal.

Speaking in London ths week, he warned that migration of wealth and growth dynamics of advanced economies to systemically important emerging economies must be on top of investor radar screen in 2010, as well as sovereign risks.