Gavyn Davies: Global growth shows clear signs of slowdown

This month, we have identified the first clear evidence that the global economy has slowed down since mid year, with emerging markets and advanced economies both now growing more slowly. A new factor is a clear slowdown in the US economy, though much of this appears to be due to the temporary effects of an inventory shake-out. The dominant contractionary force in the global economy is a commodity shock, which of course is somewhat connected to events in China but it is not exactly the same thing. The commodity shock is redistributing activity away from commodity producers and towards commodity consumers, both within and between countries. Eventually, the commodity shock should be net beneficial to the global economy, but so far global activity growth has dropped to only 2.6 per cent, which is 0.4 per cent below the rate in mid year, and 0.8 percentage points below trend. This means that global spare capacity is currently rising at a worrying rate. Read more (VIEW LINK)