‘Titanic’ Global Economy May “Collapse” Warn HSBC – Gold Is Lifeboat
-“The world economy is like an ocean liner without lifeboats …” – HSBC
– Four areas of high risk identified by HSBC
– Risk of stock market crash
– Pension funds and insurers may not meet obligations
– Chinese recession may drag U.S. into recession or depression
– Premature rate rise would expose very fragile global economy
– “There aren’t enough lifeboats to go round”
– Gold vital lifeboat when global ship strikes iceberg
The chief economist of the world’s third largest bank, HSBC’s Stephen King, has compared the global economy to the Titanic.
In a note to clients on Wednesday he wrote “We may not know what will cause the next downswing but, at this stage, we can categorically state that, in the event we hit an iceberg, there aren’t enough lifeboats to go round.”
“The world economy is like an ocean liner without lifeboats.” As we have been warning in recent months, when another recession arrives, governments do not have the ability or the reserves to prop up the economy like they did in 2008.
Global debt has soared by 40 percent since the Great Recession. We now have a staggering $200 trillion of debt globally, or almost three times the size of the global economy. It would be a “truly titanic struggle” for policymakers to right the economy, King said.
He believes that we are now nearer to the next global recession than we are to the last one which ended six years ago. In that time, however, the world has amassed mountains of new unpayable debt – expanding 25% in the last six years – and the U.S. economy has been sluggish despite an unprecedented wave of money printing which was intended to boost the economy. Indeed, post recession growth has never been so anaemic in recent history.
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