Nothing is ever certain, and there are admittedly lots of good reasons for thinking much lower interest rates are indeed here to stay, not least another five years of relatively aggressive fiscal tightening. What’s more, the international economy continues to look precarious, to put it mildly.
Yet as Simon Ward of Henderson Global Investors has pointed out, for the interest rate cycle to be as shallow as the Bank of England suggests would be an extraordinarily unusual state of affairs, and not at all in keeping with the likely trajectory of the UK economy.
Rarely do interest rates rise in an orderly fashion to some kind of pre-ordained plateau. What instead tends to happen is that the central bank gets stuck behind the curve, and is then in a panic forced to play catch up.
Además, el problema es que su impacto puede ir mas allá de las fronteras de estos países que van económicamente bien. En el panorama internacional, las aguas bajan turbias en dos sitios: China, cuyo Banco Central ha tenido que echar el resto para parar la caída de la bolsa -pese a lo cual las salidas de fondos privados alcanzan un récord de 800 mm $- y Europa, que ha cerrado en falso la crisis griega.
En suma, ambas países han cerrado en falso sus problemas financieros, y la subida de tipos de EEUU y RU puede desencadenar males mayores. En Europa, puede volverse a un escenario de selección adversa a los países dudosos, lo que inutilizaría en buena parte la política expansiva de Draghi. Para enfrentarse a lo cual no tendría muchos recursos, pues un problema de Europa es la asimetría financiera, no solo la económica: los canales de transmisión de la política monetaria no son igual de eficaces.
Es lo que corrobora Matthew Linn, que desconfía de la solidez de la recuperación de España, y otros países.
Spain is held up as the one example of an economy that had recovered. True, it has put on a growth spurt – it will expand faster than the UK this year, and unemployment has come down. But it looks very flimsy. Consumer spending is rising by almost 4pc annually, and another building boom is getting going, with construction output rising by 14pc year-on-year.
That seems extraordinary given that Spain built on a vast scale in the last bubble, and we kept reading of ghost towns of new homes and new airports with only one flight a day. It is hard to imagine what is possibly being built – but even so the cranes are back in action. In fact, the hot money seems to be flowing back there, which explains why the supposedly mighty Germany is not doing so well. Its industrial production has stalled, and retail sales per capita have been declining for a decade now – ordinary Germans don’t have any more money to spend.
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