Back in July 2010, in introducing a blog post with the title “Is There Global Economic Slowdown In The Works?” I couldn’t help posing the following question:
“According to Ralph Atkins writing in the Financial Times last week, “the pace of Germany’s recovery is helping dispel fears of a “double dip†recession across the continent as a result of the crisis over public finances in southern European countries”. Coincidentally, however, on the very same day, Alan Beattie writing from Washington informed us that the IMF feel “the risk of a slowdown in the global economic recovery has risen sharply”. This left me asking myself which is it: is the global recovery a question of up up and away, or are we at the start of a renewed slowdown (whether or not you wish to term this a “double-dip”)? So I thought I would take a look through some of the most recent data (both hard and soft) to see if I could make any sense of the situation”.
Strangely, just this week, and nearly 12 months later, I now find myself asking almost the very same question. Naturally I am not alone in this. Here’s a link to ECRI’s Lakshman Achuthan talking with MSNBC’s Tom Roberts about the US May jobs report and the reality of a global industrial slowdown. As Achuthan emphasises, in the US context this is still all about growth, about less growth rather than more growth, since we are not talking about recession, merely slower growth, but at the same time it isn’t simply a “soft-patch” either, since the many “exceptional factors” which are lined up (like supply chain problems following the Japan tsunami, or bad weather in the US) aren’t sufficient on their own to explain the scale of the phenomenon. Continue reading