UBS Calls It: “The Global Credit Impulse Suddenly Collapsed To Negative”
One month ago, a skeptical Deutsche Bank warned that just as global macro surprises and economic momentum had hit 6 year highs, the bullish story was set to rollover from its current elevated levels…
… primarily as a result of a series of disappointing data points out of China…
While it may not have known at the time, what Deutsche Bank was really saying is that the primary driver behind global growth in the past decade – China’s credit creation, or rather its first derivative, the credit Impulse out of Beijing – was about to turn negative.
One month later, that is what UBS’ Arend Kapteyn discovered when in a report published overnight, the Swiss bank economist reported that the most important variable when it comes to global economic expansion (and alternatively, contraction) has just turned negative for the first time in three years.
In the note, UBS writes that “Our global credit impulse (covering 77% of global GDP) has suddenly collapsed” and explains that “as the chart below shows the ‘global’ credit impulse over the last 18 months is essentially mainly China (the green shaded bit), which even now is still creating new credit at an annualized rate of around 30pp of (Chinese) GDP. But the credit impulse is the ‘change in the change’ in credit and even the Chinese banks could not sustain the recent extraordinary pace of credit acceleration. As a result: whereas back in Jan ’16 the global credit impulse was positive to the tune of 3.8% of global GDP (of which China comprised 3.5% of global GDP) it has now fallen back to -0.1% of global GDP (China’s contribution is -0.3% of global GDP).
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