Long Term Economic and Investment Themes, Part 2

In Monday's column, I laid out three of six long term economic and investment themes: fiscal stimulus, globalization and aging populations. Here are three more.

4. As I explored in my March 31 column, the long-promised Asian Century of global leadership is unlikely to come to pass due to the completion of globalization, the slow shift from export-led to domestic-spending-driven economies, government and cultural restraints, aging and falling populations, and military threats.

The fascination with Asia started with Japan’s dazzling economic recovery after World War II, which culminated with purchases of U.S. trophy properties such as the Pebble Beach golf course and Rockefeller Center in the 1980s. Rising property and equity prices convinced many in the West that Japan would soon take over the world, but those bubbles burst in late 1989, sending the Nikkei index down 63 percent in less than three years and real estate prices down by 59 percent. Japanese economic growth has averaged just 1.1 percent since then.

With Japan’s decline, Western fascination shifted to the rapidly growing developing economies of the Asian Tigers, but the regional financial crisis that commenced in Thailand in 1997 started a domino-like collapse of neighboring financial markets and economies. With the 2007-2009 recession and financial crisis, export-led Asia suffered along with the economies of the U.S. and Europe. Yet Westerners didn’t abandon Asia, but shifted their admiration to China.

Chinese real economic annual growth rates nosedived from double digits to a recessionary 6.3 percent during the worldwide downturn, but then revived thanks to the huge 2009 stimulus program. Easy credit fueled a property boom and inflation, both of which were unwanted by Chinese authorities. Also, the growth in exports rebounded back to the 20 percent to 30 percent annual rates seen before the recession. As with the Asian Tigers earlier, many thought Chinese growth was self-sustaining and unrelated to ongoing sluggish economic performance in North America and Europe, especially after China’s gross domestic product topped Japan’s in 2009.

But like virtually all developing economies, China’s has been driven by exports that directly or indirectly are sold to North America and Europe. And those imports by the West are fundamentally curtailed by sluggish overall economic growth -- the result of deleveraging, the working off of excess debt built up in the exuberant 1980s and 1990s. Annual Chinese export growth dropped from 20 percent to 30 percent in the 2000s to negative territory in February.

Further, globalization is largely completed, curbing that source of emerging-economy advance. And China’s huge total economic size had covered up its still-underdeveloped status. Even with the explosive growth in the past several decades, Chinese GDP per capita in 2016 was $8,030, or just 14 percent of the U.S.’s. Meanwhile, consumer spending in China amounts to just 37 percent of GDP compared to 68.1 percent in the U.S.

China won’t shrivel up and die, but it will be a much less important actor on the global stage as it shifts from commodity-munching exports, housing and infrastructure to consumer spending and services. The same was true of Japan starting in the early 1990s.

There may well be an “Asian Century,” but don’t hold your breath. It took about a millennium for the West to develop meaningful democracy, the rule of law, large middle classes that support domestic economies, and all the other institutions that are largely lacking in developing Asian lands at present.