Ever since the term, BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India & China) was created in 2002 by Goldman Sachs, the story of global growth has been emerging markets. Russia was driven by oil and Brazil by commodities, China and India were driven by demographic dividends in their immense populations. However, things have changed in the past three years.
In 2008, the Lehman crisis put the developed markets in a precarious condition. Debt soared, liquidity tightened, growth collapsed and the global GDP trend shifted out of the developed markets and into the emerging markets. As the share of emerging markets started rising, the share of developed markets started falling. In 2009, emerging markets accounted for 35% of global GDP, while developed markets accounts for 42%. In 2013, emerging markets accounted for 48% and developed markets accounted for 32%.
While the U.S. grappled with low inflation and the EU was occupied with the problem in Greece, things took a sharp shift in favor of developed markets. There was clearly a lot of pressure on emerging markets. As liquidity dried up in U.S. markets, commodity producers suffered. The oil and commodity slowdown just made it all worse. In 2015, the share of emerging markets in the global GDP was down to 34%, but the share of developed markets finally increased to 43%.
I think that this trend is going to become more pronounced in favor of developed markets in 2016. India, China and Mexico will still be the fastest growing economies. However, other emerging markets are going to pay a price for the fall in China’s growth. The US, Canada, UK, Japan and Germany will most likely grow by 2%.
As the US creates record jobs, the EU gets growth back, Russia and Brazil will probably suffer from the weak commodity prices and bad policy decisions. That means that between the slowing of China and negative growth from Brazil and Russia, the emerging markets are going to have a rough year. 2016 may be the year that developed markets get back on track.
What do you predict will happen?
Advisor Abbate 