As China Slows, Australia Feels the Pain

The last time Australia was mired in recession, Boris Yeltsin had yet to stand on a tank in Moscow, and the Clinton era hadn’t begun. In 1991, Australian trade with China was a modest A$3.6 billion (about the same in U.S. dollars). In the preceding decade unemployment had averaged 7.8 percent, as Australia struggled to develop tourism and other services to diversify growth.

The urbanization of hundreds of millions of people in China changed that: Demand in the world’s most populous nation for Australian iron ore and coal spurred a more than 33-fold increase in trade between the two countries to a recent A$121 billion. The Australian jobless rate is down to 5.1 percent.

This prosperity is now threatened. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in March reduced his government’s growth target to 7.5 percent for this year, the lowest since 2004, as policymakers seek to reduce the role of large-scale investments in favor of stimulating greater consumer demand. On Sept. 9, President Hu Jintao told an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Vladivostok, Russia, that China’s “economic growth is facing notable downward pressure” due to a slowdown in exports. The price of iron ore, Australia’s most lucrative export, has tumbled 25 percent since June 30.

Saul Eslake, chief economist at Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch division in Melbourne, says that while he expects China to keep growing, a severe downturn—growth of under 6 percent for a year or more—would hurt. “If China were to have a hard landing, then Australia would arguably be more exposed than any other country in the Western world,” says Eslake. China buys about 28 percent of Australian exports directly and “indirectly sets the price that countries that take another 30 percent or so of our exports pay.”

BHP Billiton’s (BHP) decision last month to delay an estimated $33 billion expansion of the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia has sparked suggestions that the resources boom is over. On Sept. 4, Fortescue Metals Group (FMG), Australia’s biggest iron ore producer after Rio Tinto (RIO) and BHP, cut its full-year capital spending forecast by 26 percent, to $4.6 billion. The shelved mining projects are a blow to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who has called mining “our economy’s strong right arm.” Already, falling prices for iron ore and coking coal have eroded the nation’s terms of trade, a measure of the windfall gains from exports that reached a 140-year high last year.

“If you looked three months ago at commodity forecasts, nobody picked this,” says Mike Young, managing director of BC Iron (BCI), which is developing an iron ore project with Fortescue. “I call it a perfect storm. You’ve got the leadership change going on over in China—decisions are on hold. You’ve got elections in America. Europe? Still Europe. You’ve got mills de-stocking because of the slowdown in China.”

Amplifying these woes is the strength of the Australian dollar. Historically, the currency has lost value quickly in a downturn, which restored competitiveness in fairly short order. Yet the Aussie dollar is up for the year even as Australia’s No. 1 customer, China, sees a deepening slowdown. “The Australian dollar is behaving more like a fixed exchange rate,” says George Tharenou, an economist for UBS in Sydney. The currency looks better than most alternatives. Its 10-year government bonds yield more than 3 percent, compared with well under 2 percent for 10-year bonds in the U.S., Germany, and Britain. Investors fleeing the euro have piled into Australian bonds. Even Switzerland’s central bank is buying Australian dollars. As further quantitative easing looks likely in the U.S. and the euro zone, the result will be even lower interest rates in those areas. That would accelerate the flight to the Australian dollar, further hobbling competitiveness.

Brian Redican, a senior economist in Sydney at Macquarie Group, an investment bank, still predicts the currency will respond in traditional fashion should the fall in iron-ore prices prove long lasting. For now, he says, investors expect iron-ore prices to recover along with China. If that prediction is wrong, there will be what he calls a “Wile E. Coyote moment” for the Australian dollar: The coyote gets tricked by the Road Runner into running straight off a cliff. “Initially at least, he doesn’t fall,” Redican says. “But then he looks down and realizes that there is nothing supporting him.”

Intensifying the pressure is the government’s pledge to post its first budget surplus in five years. That will require spending cuts that in the short term will be a drag on growth, leaving the central bank as the last option to stimulate the economy. Yet Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Glenn Stevens has held the benchmark interest rate at 3.5 percent, the highest level among major developed nations. He wants to keep inflation contained and make sure no spike occurs in already high home prices. Seven of the world’s 25 most expensive cities are in Australia, according to ECA International’s Cost of Living Survey.

The deceleration of the mining industry heightens concern in a nation where consumers are heavily in debt. Consumer borrowing stood at 150 percent of disposable income in the first quarter, says the central bank. That’s higher than the 133 percent Americans accumulated at the peak of the subprime mortgage boom, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The median forecast for Australian growth is 3.6 percent this year. No one is predicting recession, but no one predicted the plunge in iron-ore prices, either. The windfall Australia gets from exports will slump 15 percent in the final three months of 2012 from a year ago, according to Adam Boyton, chief economist in Sydney at Deutsche Bank. A trade drop of that size has preceded a recession three of the five times it happened in the past half century.

The bottom line: With $121 billion in trade with China, Australia needs a swift Chinese recovery to ensure future growth.

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BRIC Decade Ends With Record Fund Outflows as Growth Slows

December 28, 2011, 6:10 AM EST By Michael Patterson and Shiyin Chen

(Updates prices starting from third paragraph.)

Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) -- In the past decade, mutual funds poured almost $70 billion into Brazil, Russia, India and China, stocks more than quadrupled gains in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and the economies grew four times faster than America’s.

Now Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which coined the term BRIC, says the best is over for the largest emerging markets.

BRIC funds recorded $15 billion of outflows this year as the MSCI BRIC Index sank 24 percent, EPFR Global data show. The gauge, which beat the S&P 500 by 390 percentage points from November 2001 through September 2010, has trailed the measure for five straight quarters, the longest stretch since Goldman Sachs forecast the countries would join the U.S. and Japan as the top economies by 2050.

“In emerging markets, we’re waiting for things to get worse before they get better,” said Michael Shaoul, the chairman of Marketfield Asset Management in New York who predicted in February that developing-nation stocks would fall this year. The $845 million Marketfield Fund has topped 97 percent of peers in 2011, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

BRIC indexes may fall another 20 percent next year, buffeted by the liquidity squeeze stemming from Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, Arjuna Mahendran, the Singapore-based head of Asia investment strategy at HSBC Private Bank, which oversees about $499 billion, said in an interview. Nations such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey may overshadow the BRICS in the next five years as they expand from lower levels of growth, he said.

BRICs Slowdown

“The slowdown we’re seeing in the BRICs will continue for most of the first half,” Mahendran said. “Compared to the U.S., corporate profits haven’t been that good as companies face higher wages, higher interest rates and currency volatility, and at best, we’ll only start to see the effects of monetary policy loosening in the second half of 2012.”

Gross domestic product in the four countries rose at the slowest pace in almost two years last quarter and Goldman Sachs said this month that their potential economic growth rates have probably peaked because of a smaller supply of new workers. Even as Brazilian and Russian policy makers start to lower borrowing costs, profit growth in the MSCI index will slow to 5 percent next year from 19 percent in 2011, trailing the S&P 500 by five percentage points, according to more than 12,000 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

Average economic growth in the BRIC countries will decelerate to 6.1 percent next year from a high of 9.7 percent in 2007, according to September estimates by the International Monetary Fund. That would narrow the gap over America’s expansion to 4.3 percentage points, the smallest since 2004, the IMF data show. Global GDP may increase 4 percent next year, restrained by 1.1 percent growth in the euro area, the Washington-based fund said.

‘Meaningfully Slower’

Slowing exports to Europe and government restrictions on real-estate investment are curbing the expansion in China, the biggest emerging economy. India’s growth has been hampered by the fastest interest-rate increases since 1935 and the rupee’s decline to a record low, which fueled inflation and deterred foreign investment. Brazil and Russia, whose growth during the past decade was spurred by surging commodity demand, have been hurt by falling metals prices and the slowdown in China.

“In emerging markets across the board, all the numbers are pointing toward meaningfully slower growth” next year, Rajiv Jain, who oversees about $15 billion as a money manager at Vontobel Asset Management Inc. in New York, said in a Dec. 5 phone interview.

Jain’s emerging-market equity fund beat 98 percent of peers this year, buoyed by holdings of beverage and tobacco companies whose profits are resilient to economic slowdowns.

2011 Losses

The BSE India Sensitive Index led declines among BRIC equity gauges this year, falling 23 percent. China’s Shanghai Composite Index also dropped 23 percent, while Russia’s Micex retreated 18 percent and Brazil’s Bovespa sank 16 percent. The 21-country MSCI Emerging Markets Index lost 20 percent, while the S&P 500 gained 0.6 percent.

The MSCI BRIC Index slid 0.8 percent as of 8:30 a.m. in London and the MSCI Emerging Markets Index dipped 0.6 percent, set for the lowest close in a week. The Shanghai Composite gained 0.2 percent, the Sensex dropped 1.1 percent, while the Micex was little changed.

Egypt’s EGX30 Index tumbled 49 percent this year, the biggest decline in emerging markets, as political turmoil stifled tourism and deterred foreign investment following the popular uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak. The Philippine Stock Exchange Index posted this year’s largest gain, advancing 3.2 percent after higher consumer spending countered the global economic slowdown.

Peak Expansions

Longer-term economic growth rates in the BRIC nations are poised to drop as their working-age populations increase more slowly and then eventually shrink, according to a Goldman Sachs report on Dec. 7 titled “The BRICs 10 Years On: Halfway Through The Great Transformation.”

“We have likely seen the peak in potential growth for the BRICs as a group,” Dominic Wilson, an economist at Goldman Sachs, wrote in the report. Wilson made the New York-based firm’s first detailed long-term forecasts for the BRIC nations in 2003, two years after Jim O’Neill, then head of economic research, coined the term.

O’Neill, now chairman of Goldman Sachs’s asset-management unit, declined an interview request for this story. His latest book, “The Growth Map,” talks of “rosy prospects” for the BRICs as well as the potential of the “Next Eleven” most populous emerging economies.

Fund Flows

Goldman Sachs’s bullish outlook for the BRIC nations proved prescient as the economies expanded at an average pace of 6.6 percent during the past decade, more than four times faster than America, according to IMF data. Investors poured about $67 billion into Brazil, Russia, India, China and BRIC mutual funds from 2001 to 2010, data compiled by Cambridge, Massachusetts- based EPFR Global show.

This year’s fund outflows were the biggest on an annual basis since at least 1996, according to EPFR Global. India equity funds recorded about $4 billion of net withdrawals, while China funds lost $3.6 billion. Investors pulled $2.2 billion from Brazil, $326 million from Russia and $5.3 billion from funds that invest in all four of the BRIC countries. All emerging-market funds tracked by EPFR Global had about $47 billion of outflows, leaving assets under management at $605 billion.

Rate Cuts

Large fund outflows are a contrarian indicator because they may signal pessimistic investors have already sold, setting the stage for a trough in share prices, according to Jonathan Garner, the chief Asia and emerging-market strategist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong. Emerging-market funds recorded about $48 billion of outflows in the five months ended October 2008, when developing-nation stocks began a rally that sent the MSCI emerging-market index up 108 percent in 12 months.

Emerging-market stocks will probably outperform U.S. equities next year as central banks in developing countries cut interest rates to stimulate economic growth, said James Paulsen, the chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis. The MSCI emerging-markets gauge rose an average 35 percent after the BRIC nations began cutting interest rates in 2003, 2005 and 2008.

Brazil has reduced its benchmark Selic interest rate by 1.5 percentage points since August to 11 percent. China lowered banks’ reserve requirements in November for the first time since 2008, while forwards contracts in Russia and India show that traders are betting on interest-rate cuts in the next 12 months.

In the U.S., the Federal Reserve has pledged to hold interest rates near zero until at least mid-2013.

Easing Policies

“I like the emerging markets better than anything right now,” Paulsen said in a Dec. 7 interview on Bloomberg Television. “Most of these emerging-market policy officials are turning to easing policies.”

While the MSCI BRIC index has dropped to 8.4 times estimated profit from 13 times at the start of the year, valuations are still higher than they were a decade ago. The MSCI India Index trades for 15 times profit, up from 13 times in 2001, according to data compiled by MSCI Inc.

India’s price-earnings ratios have climbed to an 8 percent premium over U.S. stocks from a 63 percent discount 10 years ago, data compiled by MSCI show. The discount on Chinese shares narrowed to 35 percent from 59 percent, while it shrank to 29 percent from 76 percent in Brazil and dropped to 60 percent from 87 percent in Russia, based on MSCI indexes.

Relative Valuations

Compared to the U.S., valuations for BRIC markets don’t look cheap enough, said Ok Hye Eun, a Seoul-based fund manager at Woori Asset Management Co., which oversees the equivalent of $15 billion.

“BRIC markets won’t be an attractive destination for a while because there are still ongoing risks,” said Ok, citing the prospects of a potential collapse in China’s real estate market and the outlook for economic reforms in India. “I see more opportunities in the U.S.”

ICICI Bank Ltd., India’s biggest private lender, trades for 14 times profits, a 42 percent premium over San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co., even as analysts predict slower earnings growth at the Mumbai-based bank, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. ICICI Bank profits will increase 10 percent in the current fiscal year, compared with 28 percent at Wells Fargo, the biggest U.S. bank by market value, the estimates show.

Want Want, Redecard

Want Want China Holdings Ltd., a Shanghai-based maker of food and beverages, is valued at 36 times profits and analysts project earnings will increase 7.7 percent this year. The Hong Kong-listed shares are twice as expensive as Northfield, Illinois-based Kraft Foods Inc., which trades for 17 times earnings and may boost profits 13 percent, analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg show.

Redecard SA, Brazil’s second-biggest card-payment processor, trades for 15 times profits, versus 12 times for New York-based American Express Co. Sao Paulo-based Redecard’s earnings will probably slip 3.8 percent this year while American Express posts a 19 percent gain, analyst projections compiled by Bloomberg show.

Outflows from emerging-market funds may continue next year as economic growth and company results disappoint investors, according to John-Paul Smith, the London-based emerging-market strategist at Deutsche Bank AG. Money managers surveyed by Bank of America Corp. from Dec. 2 to Dec. 8 said their emerging- market holdings are still 23 percent higher than benchmark weightings even after they cut positions from last month.

‘Structural Weaknesses’

“There will be a lot of volatility, but as people realize the underlying structural weaknesses of the BRIC economies, you’ll see money coming out,” Deutsche Bank’s Smith said in a telephone interview on Dec. 19.

China’s economic data have trailed estimates for the past two months, based on Citigroup Inc.’s Economic Surprise Index, a gauge of how much reports are missing economist projections in Bloomberg News surveys. Chinese manufacturing contracted by the most since 2009 in November, while new home prices declined in 49 of 70 cities tracked by the government the same month.

By contrast, U.S. data is beating analyst expectations by the most in nine months, according to the country’s Citigroup surprise index. Manufacturing in America expanded at the fastest pace in five months in November, the Institute for Supply Management said. Initial jobless claims fell to the lowest level since 2008 in the week ended Dec. 10, while U.S. housing starts in November climbed the most in 19 months, government data show.

Per-share earnings in the MSCI BRIC index trailed analysts’ estimates by 13 percent last quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. S&P 500 profits beat projections by 4.4 percent, the data show.

Labor Supply

While Goldman Sachs still expects the BRICs to join the U.S. and Japan as the world’s biggest economies by 2050, the bank predicted this month that the four nations’ contribution to the global expansion will diminish during the next few decades. Economic growth in the BRICs may fall to about 4 percent by 2050 as working-age populations dwindle, Goldman Sachs said.

The number of people aged 15 to 64 in Russia has already started to drop, while Chinese workers may peak at around 1 billion and begin falling by 2020, according to estimates by the United Nations. Brazil’s peak may come by 2040, with India’s topping out by 2060, the New York-based United Nations said. The U.S. will keep adding workers through 2100, the forecasts show.

“In the last decade, simply recognizing that the BRICs were the story was largely enough to propel outsized investment returns,” Goldman’s Wilson wrote in this month’s outlook report. “It is much harder to accept that simply believing in their long-term growth dynamics can be a sufficient investment thesis now, if it ever was.”

--With assistance from Saeromi Shin in Seoul. Editors: Darren Boey, Laura Zelenko.

To contact the reporters on this story: Michael Patterson in London at mpatterson10@bloomberg.net; Shiyin Chen in Singapore at schen37@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Laura Zelenko at lzelenko@bloomberg.net

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Indonesia May Extend Interest-Rate Pause as Inflation Slows

May 11, 2011, 4:52 AM EDT By Shamim Adam and Manish Modi

(Updates with comment from central bank in 12th paragraph.)

May 11 (Bloomberg) -- Indonesia’s central bank will probably keep interest rates unchanged for a third consecutive meeting to support the economy, allowing gains in the rupiah to reduce inflationary pressures.

Bank Indonesia will keep its benchmark reference rate at 6.75 percent, according to all 10 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. The central bank is due to release its decision in Jakarta tomorrow.

Indonesia has refrained from boosting borrowing costs since increasing the key rate in February for the first time in more than two years, in contrast with neighbors from Malaysia to India where officials have accelerated monetary tightening. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s policy makers have extended fuel subsidies and let the rupiah climb the most in Asia after Taiwan this year to contain imported inflation.

“There’s no strong reason for Bank Indonesia to raise rates this month and by holding, it will provide an opportunity for banks to give credit and that will boost economic growth for the rest of this year,’ said Eric Alexander Sugandi, a Jakarta- based economist at Standard Chartered Plc. “We’ve adjusted the timing of the next rate increase to August.”

The Indonesian rupiah climbed to its strongest level since 2004 this month and has gained about 5 percent this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The central bank is allowing the rupiah to appreciate, Bambang Brodjonegoro, head of fiscal policy at the nation’s finance ministry, said last week.

Later Move

Bank Indonesia may not raise rates this week after inflation eased for a third month in April, Brodjonegoro said in Jakarta today.

“Maybe not tomorrow but later this year, especially when Bank Indonesia feels that inflationary pressure is high,” he said. “Until now we are able to manage the inflation, but at one point in time BI has to increase interest rates since other central banks in the region have increased interest rates a couple of times.”

Consumer prices in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, rose 6.16 percent last month from a year earlier, slower than the 6.65 percent pace in March. Prices fell in April compared with March. Core inflation accelerated to 4.62 percent from 4.45 percent.

Policy makers from Thailand to the Philippines and Singapore are stepping up the fight against inflation through rate increases or currency appreciation as political unrest in the Middle East boosts crude oil prices.

Malaysian Rates

Malaysia raised rates last week for the first time this year and asked banks to set aside more cash as reserves, while India boosted borrowing costs on May 3 for the ninth time since the middle of March 2010.

The pressure for Bank Indonesia to adjust interest rates is “not too high” even after core inflation accelerated in April, Governor Darmin Nasution said May 6.

The central bank sees a “probability” of “slight deflation” in May and even if consumer prices rise, the gains may be small, the governor said in Jakarta today. Bank Indonesia will maintain its “tight” monetary policy stance because of “inflation pressure” in the third and fourth quarter, he said.

Indonesia’s economic growth slowed to 6.5 percent last quarter as investment eased. Gross domestic product rose 6.9 percent in the previous three months.

Chance ‘Squandered’

The growth slowdown may not be enough to keep inflation from quickening in coming quarters as food and oil costs rise, straining the budgets of Asian governments that subsidize fuel and putting pressure on countries including Indonesia to raise prices for gasoline and diesel.

Oil traded at above $100 a barrel today, and has climbed about 13 percent this year.

PT Mandiri Sekuritas predicts April was probably the last time this year that consumer prices would fall month-on-month, according to head of research Ari Pitoyo.

“The chance for the government to raise fuel prices during ‘deflation’ months has been squandered, hence should the government have no option but to raise fuel prices, we might see inflation momentarily spike up,” Jakarta-based Pitoyo said.

He is recommending investors trim stocks of financial companies, which were hurt when the government raised fuel prices in 2005. Earnings at companies such as PT Mayora Indah, which makes biscuits and candies, and PT Unilever Indonesia, the unit of the world’s second-biggest consumer-goods company, may be affected should the government raise fuel prices, threatening discretionary spending, he said.

Bank Indonesia may face an “upside surprise” in inflation in July, with the beginning of the school year occurring close to the start of the Muslim fasting month, Wellian Wiranto, an economist at HSBC Holdings Plc in Singapore, said in a research note today.

“The dependence thus far on currency appreciation to curb inflation has had limited effectiveness given the predominance of domestic consumption in the economy,” he said. “Although Indonesia’s economy continues to hum on rather uneventfully, this does not mean there is room for complacency.”

--With assistance from Novrida Manurung and Suryani Omar in Jakarta. Editors: Stephanie Phang, Greg Ahlstrand

To contact the reporter on this story: Shamim Adam in Singapore at sadam2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephanie Phang at sphang@bloomberg.net

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