Better Export Climate Forecast by EDC
(Jeremy Torobin — The Globe and Mail)
The global economy and the climate for Canadian exports both stand to be better over the next couple of years than many analysts expect, as long as nervousness and fear don’t get in the way, a new forecast from Canada’s export-financing agency suggests.
Using Depression-era economist John Maynard Keynes’s famous term “animal spirits” to describe how the bumpy recovery of the past two years has made investors, consumers and executives so nervous about the future that their fear and inertia risks undermining the rebound, the forecast by Export Development Canada urges all to focus on the positive.
“Animal spirits pose a huge threat to short-term global growth,” Peter Hall, chief economist at Export Development Canada, says in the forecast, released Monday. “Our research suggests that rising momentum in key leading sectors, and the healing process that is definitely under way, will bring the global economy into a greater state of balance by the latter half of 2012.”
EDC’s forecast is somewhat more optimistic than most, including one released last week by the Bank of Canada, which cut its projections for both years and said Europe’s debt woes, the grinding U.S. rebound and a slowdown in China would limit Canada’s prospects. Read more here.
Date: October 31, 2011
