Asia’s economies are already in recovery mode, but there are still many uncertainties ahead. In a ‘Webinar’ held with the American Chamber of Commerce (AMCHAM) in Singapore, BMI analysts Yoel Sano and Eugene Leow discuss the following questions:

• Which economies will be outperformers in 2009 and 2010, and why?

• Are Asian economies decoupling from the US?

• Can Asia [Read more...]

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia assembles one of my favourite data series: the State Coincident Indexes. These give us an idea of how individual US states are performing economically. I’ll let the Philly Fed do the talking here:

‘The coincident indexes combine four state-level indicators to summarize current economic conditions in a single statistic. The [Read more...]

On June 25, my colleagues at Business Monitor International (BMI) hosted another Country Risk roundtable, dedicating 90 minutes to discussing the outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and whether the region will be able to decouple from the global economy. For those interested, the BMI Africa team kindly provided the presentation slides for the event.

As [Read more...]

Further to my musings on whether ‘decoupling’ is fact or fiction, I’d like to briefly point out two of the curiosities of the current global equity rally.

The first curiosity is how out of touch the rally seems to be with the fundamentals. My overall view is that this rally is simply a correction in [Read more...]

There’s been some talk (again) lately that ‘decoupling’ is taking place – that is, emerging economies are growing or recovering despite the ongoing recession in the developed states. An article in today’s Financial Times shows what I mean. I am skeptical.

Lest you forget, decoupling was all the rage in 2007, when the Western world first [Read more...]

Markus Schneider and Lisa Lewin from BMI’s Africa desk introduce next month’s theme of Business Monitor’s ‘Roundtable Discussion’. With the global recession in full swing, why will Sub-Saharan Africa outperform most EM regions?

 

 African Decoupling [13:28m]
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The long-heralded ‘Asian growth story’ is rapidly becoming an ‘Asian collapse story’ in 2009. Perhaps ‘collapse’ is too strong a word, but Business Monitor International (BMI) has recently revised or is currently in the process of revising down its GDP growth forecasts for several Asian economies, including South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. [Read more...]