With economic growth slowing down in all three of the world’s major economies, investors are best advised to opt for the geographical region with the least messy outlook, leading international economist Mohammed El-Erian has told a Nordic conference. “The cleanest dirty shirt is in the US.”
Speaking in Stockholm at the Skagen Funds 2023 New Year’s Conference, El-Erian, chief economic advisor at Allianz and president of Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge, pointed out that, with the World Bank projecting global growth at a mere 1.7 percent in 2023, this expansion stands to be at its lowest rate in 30 years except 2009 and 2020.
El-Erian said economic growth will become a bigger issue for investors as it increasingly becomes clear that society will have to contend with inflation levels of three to four percent, instead of two percent. “As much as inflation was the big issue, and is a big issue, as we go into the year, growth will become a bigger issue.”
Although the world’s three biggest economies showing less growth, investors are ignoring the different reasons for this slowdown. “What is not being given enough attention is that they’re slowing down for different reasons,” he told the Stockholm conference last Wednesday.
Financial fragilities
“The fact that these three regions are having their own issues complicates the outlook tremendously. First, there was no common solution. This is not 2008-9,” he said, referring to the globally coordinated action during the Great Financial Crisis. “You need a number of things to go well in different parts. And secondly, because the problems are unique to each region, the insularity that comes with that becomes extreme. So that is a world that doesn’t recover quickly. And unfortunately, that is the growth outlook for this year. It makes financial fragilities more threatening, and it makes policy transitions more complicated.”
A closer look at China shows that two things are going on there, he said. First, China is “mishandling” its exit from zero-Covid. “It is a total mess. It is not going to be resolved until there’s a level of immunity that is hard to achieve in an orderly fashion without a complete change in vaccination policy. So this will take time, there will be no quick rebound in China.”
In addition, China has to address a longer-term issue of reorienting its growth model. “China’s growth model was built for a world of ever closer globalisation. That’s not the world we’re looking at. So China would remain a drag on global growth for most of this year.”
Structural headwinds
Europe, meanwhile, is about dealing with energy supply disruptions. ”We should note that there’s been significant improvement in inventory management. There’s been significant reorientation of energy supplies. But that is not enough to lift that cloud from over Europe. And it’s not enough to deal with long standing structural headwinds to Europe. So European growth will be sluggish.”
El-Erian said he believes “the best place” for investors now is the US. “The US is what I call the cleanest dirty shirt. It is not pristine at all. But it’s cleaner than everywhere else,” he said, “The notion of the cleanest dirty shirt is a very important one for investors. And it comes from you being on a business trip. You’re a very efficient traveller. You factor the exact amount of days that you’re on a business trip. And then the trip gets suddenly extended for a day. And you’ve got this dilemma. What do you do? You will go into your cupboard and find your least dirty blouse or shirt. That is what the US is today. it’s the least dirty shirt.”
Structural potential
El Erian believes the US economy, unlike China and the US, has structural growth potential. He is not convinced that the US will fall into recession. “There’s a lot of people that think it will, but it will only happen if the Fed pushes us there.”
Japan is another blind spot in financial markets, according to El-Erian, as “one major policy transition that we don’t talk enough about.” The view that Japan’s problems are peculiar and concentrated is no longer valid. The prospect of Japan exiting from its yield curve control, a measure known as YCC, presents a global risk, he said.
Japan’s YCC not sustainable
“In a world of higher government bond yields, that is unsustainable. It hurts your currency. It hurts the functioning of your market, it destroys the functioning of your market,” he said.
El-Erian said that Japan’s exit from YCC will impact investors worldwide. “Japanese asset holders hold a lot of assets issued by other countries, be they government bonds, be they corporate bonds, or stocks. If you want to get a sense of the downside risk: this is what happened in the UK in October.”
“If YCC is mishandled and the system has to deliver, the Japanese system will become massive sellers of foreign assets,” El-Erian said.
Presenting his perspective, El-Erian pointed out that he did not addres other uncertainties the world faces, such as geopolitics, the climate transition, inequality, debt, the revamp of global growth models and the weaponization of trade and payment systems. “The bottom line is that you don’t just face a very uncertain world, you face a structurally uncertain world.”