One Bank Reminds You That ‘The World Is Still Flat’

Ostensibly, trade talks between the US and China are making progress.

Or at least that’s the message Washington and Beijing are keen to project now that 2018 provided a crash course (figuratively and literally) in how sensitive markets are to trade tensions.

Right up until Q4, the Trump administration felt like it could afford to take a hardline stance on the trade dispute. Trump’s fiscal stimulus juiced the domestic economy and shielded US stocks from the deleterious effects of the trade tensions, giving everyone a false sense of security and perpetuating the notion that the rules governing international trade and commerce could be rewritten virtually overnight with no pain for the country doing the rewriting.

Additionally, there’s a solid argument to be made that the president’s political capital depends on him having a battle to fight somewhere. The preservation of the populist “dream state” depends in part on Trump’s base remaining convinced that he’s hard at work fighting for their interests against the myriad external agents he’s successfully made scapegoats of while “explaining” the decline of the American middle class.

Read more

Dream States: Why No Resolution To Current Political Conflicts Is Possible

But the idea that the US economy and US equities would remain immune from a slowdown in global growth catalyzed at least in part by Trump’s trade war was exposed as a lie in Q4. US monetary policy played a large role in the selloff, but never forget that Jerome Powell’s “long way from neutral” misstep on October 3 came just as the US went ahead with tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods, a move many viewed as the first meaningful escalation in the trade war and the first sure sign that Trump was serious about going “all in”. In other words, don’t let it be lost on you that Jerome Powell wasn’t the only problem for US markets late last year (Trump’s protestations notwithstanding).

Trump’s policies have been variously characterized as an attempt to dismantle the post-War world order on a number of fronts and his populist agenda (like those in Europe on  which it piggybacked) leans heavily on the notion that globalization is bad and needs to be rolled back. Everyone with any sense knows that’s the furthest thing from the truth, but it plays well with disaffected voters in Western democracies who have seen wage growth stagnate amid rising inequality. Never mind the fact that Trump’s tax cuts were explicitly designed to perpetuate the wealth divide.

Well, as the Sino-US trade discussions go down to the wire ahead of the March deadline beyond which the above-mentioned tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods will more than double, it’s worth highlighting a couple of passages from a new BofAML note called: “The world is still flat.”

“The two biggest themes in the global economy at the moment are arguably the global growth slowdown and the US-China trade war. At the intersection of these lies the fate of global trade”, the bank writes, in a piece dated Friday, before suggesting that while “a popular narrative is that globalization peaked” a few years back, “trade is still a critical engine of global growth, for better or worse.”

Spoiler alert: it’s for “better”, not “worse.”

Citing the dollar value of global merchandise trade, BofAML notes that the series dove in 2008 around the crisis and then, after rebounding, “stagnated” between 2011 and 2014, before falling again through 2016. That, the bank writes, “lent credence to the idea that globalization had peaked.”

trade1

(BofAML)

Of course it recovered following the deflationary doldrums of early 2016 and has trended higher since despite Trump plunging America into protectionism and also despite the recent slowdown in global growth.

After reminding you that the measure itself is flawed because i) it’s influenced by FX fluctuations that in some cases have nothing to do with trade, and ii) it’s measured nominally and is thus influenced by inflation and especially crude, BofAML goes on to caution that “export growth in recent years has been weaker in nearly every major economy than it was in the pre-crisis years”. That said, it’s generally still higher than GDP with a couple of exceptions.

The good news, then, is that “the ratio of export growth to GDP growth remains above one in most of the economies in our sample, and thus exports are still contributing disproportionately to growth in those economies.”

ExportToGDP

(BofAML)

A quick look at the chart betrays the “bad” news. Here’s BofAML:

The ratio of export growth to GDP growth has fallen in most economies. There have been large declines in China and countries that are linked to Chinese supply chains, including Japan, Korea and Indonesia. Therefore, there is strong evidence that much of the low-hanging fruit in terms of replacing expensive DM labor with cheaper EM labor (in manufacturing and services) has been picked.

This is perhaps not as worrying as it sounds. As the bank goes on to point out, common sense dictates that multinationals will invariably “look to eliminate the largest inefficiencies first” and so, the ratios should converge on one over time. Given that the ratios are still above one across developed markets, the implication is that, from BofAML, “multinational firms continue to find innovative ways to exploit gains from trade.” That, in turn, means trade is still critical to supporting global growth.

The critical point, though, comes next when the bank implores you to note that in the chart above, the ratio of export growth to GDP growth rose since 2011 for the eurozone, Russia and Brazil, all of which suffered recessions. Those downturns were cushioned by trade. To wit:

As Table 1 shows, external demand was a countercyclical buffer for these economies when they were in recession. Exports continued to grow at a decent pace, offsetting some of the weakness in domestic demand. Remarkably, the external sector has been the only source of growth for the Euro area economy since 2011: the growth rate of the rest of the economy has been zero. Looking further back, exports also played a countercyclical role in South Korea during the Asian crisis of 1998.

Trade2

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that seems pretty relevant right now considering the likelihood that Europe succumbs to a bloc-wide recession sooner or later. Italy, you’re reminded, is already in a recession and it seems like Germany might be next.

With ECB net asset purchases having ceased starting last month and a new round of TLTROs still in limbo even as the data continues to come in soft, one can’t help but wonder what a recession across the pond would look like considering the outlook for global trade and the points made in the excerpted passages and table above.

Read more

Italy Succumbs, Falls Into Recession — Now How Long Before Salvini Seizes Power?

Aaand It Just Keeps Getting Worse For German Manufacturing (And French Services)

What Does The Worst Slump In German Industry Since 2009 Have To Do With Samsung?

Of course trade can’t buffer a growth slowdown if that slowdown is synchronized. As BofAML goes on to say (underscoring the other takeaway from the table), “in 2008-09, the collapse in trade amplified the global recession, similar to 2001, when goods export volumes were roughly flat even though global growth slowed only modestly and remained firmly in positive territory.” In other words, this becomes a chicken-egg problem if it goes beyond the realm of idiosyncratic, country-specific slowdowns. If trade tensions are the cause of a synchronous slowdown, obviously trade can’t buffer that slowdown.

You can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump doesn’t grasp any of the above and while Peter Navarro and Lighthizer are doubtlessly cognizant of it, they don’t seem to care a whole lot about it. Fortunately, Steve Mnuchin does and so does Larry Kudlow, even though he’s constantly torn between telling the truth and the necessity of staying in Trump’s good graces, because if Larry loses his position in the administration, what exactly does he have left? Certainly not credibility.

And on that note, we’ll leave you with one final passage from BofAML:

So the question before us is whether the weakness in global growth will be broad based or contained to a few economies that are already sputtering, such as the Euro area and Japan. The answer, we think, hinges on the US and China. And the fate of those economies, particularly China, is largely dependent on the outcome of the trade war.

Leave a Reply to JohnnyCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

10 thoughts on “One Bank Reminds You That ‘The World Is Still Flat’

  1. What’s gonna stop China from steamrolling anything left of the US tech growth narrative given any trade deal? That, for me, is a big question and I have no idea how to answer it with a positive spin beyond “Well, you know how much Americans left with disposable income love cheap shit from China.”

  2. Kudlow has zero credibility in my book – I communicated w/ him a bit leading up to ‘housing crisis’ in 06, then during GFC. He was wrong about damn near everything imo. He was just a loud mouthpiece for a certain belief system.

    Now he works for Trump. That tells me pretty much NOTHING has changed. One self-important, attention-seeking clown aiding & abetting another.

  3. There is a deep rot in the world that our current understanding of politics and economics is not quantifying. Throughout the world, the major center-right and center-left parties have been gutted by populists, Socialists, and ultra-right nationalists of different shades of Fascist. This is not normal in times of even nominal economic growth, low unemployment, peace (the war on terror being conducted by a narrow band of the population), and low inflation. And speaking of inflation, in the United States at least, after years of tax cuts, deficit spending, money printing, and now, tariffs, consumer and producer prices and wages have remained flat. Japan is actively destroying their currency and they literally cannot buy inflation. I think we are approaching the limits of our understanding in the social sciences, and may need a paradigm shift the equivalent to quantum mechanics in physics.

  4. Sorry H, these are top-view diversionary charts/graphs. The natural assumption from your target audience is the Exports are to the USA. The diversion comes from using a USD denominated baseline. Whereas in reality, the exports from each individual exporting country go to more than one trading partner. For example, the majority of my dried tomato crop production from Chile SA go to North Africa food manufacturers, but usually LC’s are paid in USD.
    Globalization is equalizing market and production efficiencies, thereby flattening the world. The USA may control the language of money, but the means and tools are shared by all.
    God Bless Google Translate and Maersk Logistics.

    1. clearly you didn’t read one of the caveats from BofAML and in addition to that, you should be careful about making assumptions about original material (in this case a note from the bank’s global economics team), that you haven’t seen/read.

    2. This article is VERY relevant to those of us in the retail trash camp, who intuit Bitcoin and Iraqi Dinar as capable of only going up because that’s what pretty much all assets seem have done for decades now (I wish them luck). Everything is ultimately a USD story for me, and it’s even anecdotally confirmed among those who do or consider doing retirement in say Mexico or Thailand…even if few of us can claim to understand why (I have my own understanding but so what in the end? I am more likely wrong than right).

      And Japan is doing anything but destroying its currency. In fact, the BOJ is collecting meaningful assets from all over the world in exchange for its printed paper. Who is really winning there? The yen holder or the asset holder? Why is the Fed able to move US markets so violently with press releases and public announcements now? Because it prints more dollars or because it currently owns a much larger amount of assets for which the monetary value is also under Fed control? (Ergo the QE/QT controversy and confusion)

      The PBOC doesn’t even see the yuan as anything but a means to an end as it pressures spot oil as low as humanly possible by hook or by crook monetarily to modernize an economy that must support so many more people with relatively far fewer domestic assets.

      The answers are really right in front of our faces I think (and I hope…I don’t really want to live like Pink Floyd’s Echoes). The paper/asset relationship even extends to American citizenship for example, as it possesses strength yes because rights but also because of what those rights offer (e.g., gun ownership to protect oneself and one’s family from harm by others). So I think yen and USD matter ultimately because of the assets Japan and the US own as much as (maybe more than) any monetary theory thought train. For me, the national challenge is to bring intrinsic value back to people and labor to mend the circle that got shattered by the US “war” on borderline hyperinflation only 50 years ago. I think it can be done when we collectively recognize that asset value is ultimately imposition rather than derivation (gold, USD, SDR, crypto all evidence this imposition in currency)…but a bride from culture, worldview, and social systems need to be built first to get us consciously moving towards that also I think…

      Or maybe I’m just a gold bug at heart and am failing to see both the real problem and a cleaner answer for it..?

      1. Would you rather hold Japanese Yen, or a 10-year Japanese Government Bond that yields a cool -0.02% because that is where a lot of Yen goes. The balance sheet of the Bank of Japan is larger than the G.D.P. of Japan, including over 440 TRILLION Yen in JGBs. Japanese public debt is twice national G.D.P, and there is a great deal of financial repression in order to finance this debt load. That the Yen yet remains a safe haven status is truly one of the great mysteries to me.

NEWSROOM crewneck & prints