Global Economic Perspectives "Global growth nowcast - largest gap betwee..."

Research evidence excerpt

Global Economic Perspectives "Global growth nowcast - largest gap betwee..."

ows) and more recently by surging

shipping costs. Evidence points to fuel shortages in Asia (ships diverting routes, lubricant

shortages) as a driver of recent cost spikes. Even so, hard data remain resilient. Moreover,

recent progress in reopening the Strait of Hormuz could lead soft data to converge back

toward the hard data, rather than hard data converging down toward the surveys.

Weakness is concentrated in consumer-related series

The slowdown is concentrated in services and consumer-related indicators, consistent

with a loss of purchasing power. Figure 3 decomposes the nowcast by activity bucket,

combining hard and soft series and expressing each bucket as a deviation from its long-

run global growth average. The decline in the aggregate nowcast is driven mainly by

services and consumer-related series, partly offset by firmer global production and auto

indicators. Figure 4 shows the distribution of roughly 80 consumer-related series,

including retail sales, consumer confidence, expenditure indices, and real wage and

income measures. The interquartile range has shifted down clearly since the onset of the

Gulf conflict across both hard and soft indicators. This suggests that the consumer

retrenchment is broad-based rather than the result of a few outliers.

Little direction in G3 hard data, but Eurozone confidence falls sharply

Figures 5 and 6 show the underlying hard and soft aggregates for the US, Eurozone, and

China. In the hard data, the choppy upswing in US momentum since last summer

remains an important source of support for global hard-data momentum, with

additional support from EM ex-China. By contrast, China and the Eurozone have moved