Global growth IMF chief
The world’s economy will grow next year but the pace will be ‘disappointing and uneven’ the head of the International Monetary Fund says.
Writing in German news magazine Handelsblatt on Wednesday, Christine Lagarde says the world’s economy will be held back by U.S. interest rate hikes and slowing growth in China next year. But overall, the international financial body still thinks the economy will grow by about 3.6 per cent.
Global growth IMF chief
China’s slowdown from its torrid recent pace is wreaking havoc in commodity markets and hurting countries that rely heavily on natural resources, such as Canada. And the financial sector in many countries still has weaknesses and financial risks are rising in emerging markets, Lagarde said.
“All of that means global growth will be disappointing and uneven in 2016,” Lagarde wrote, adding that low productivity and an aging population will also slow growth.
Earlier this month, the U.S. central bank hiked its benchmark interest rate for the first time in nine years, a sign the Fed would slowly begin to unwind its unprecedented stimulus policy and get borrowing rates closer to their long term trend line.
Lagarde says a return to normalcy from the Fed is theoretically “necessary and healthy” over the long term but it needs to be carried out as efficiently and smoothly as possible.
There are “potential spillover effects”, with the prospect of increasing interest rates there already having contributed to higher financing costs for some borrowers, including in emerging and developing markets, Lagarde said.
Endless GDP growth which is basically growth in population x consumption is neither possible nor desirable on a finite planet already in overshoot of natural resource depletion and mounting pollution, yet this is the operating system or rather fairy tale religion which the so called economists, politicians and public at large subscribe to. If we don’t transition this system to a sustainable economic system which obviously cannot be growth based but has healthy fluctuations about a steady state within safe operating limits of nature (see steadystate dot org), then nature will do it through the usual suspects of wars and starvation. It is a shame that the whole world is pretty much addicted to growth, future generations will wonder what the hell were we thinking and doing not realizing this addiction, what a shame!
for the first four years Obama bent over backward to throw every unemployment extension he could pull out of his #$%$ at the unemployment rates and blamed George Bush THEN when he had his golden reelection ticket he brought down the hammer everyone gets kicked off unemployment as soon as humanly possible. We have tens of millions who have given up looking for work and Obama calls those EMPLOYED because he is an #$%$hat