Stephen Roach Quotes (50 Quotes)


    It's time to make it official. The downside risks we have been warning of over the past several months are now coming to pass.

    The West always seems to expect a hard landing in China. Yet in three instances over the past decade, China has proved the doubters wrong.

    Borrowing from physics, the last thing an unstable system needs is a shock. And yet the risks of just such a disturbance have never seemed higher. Far-fetched as it seems, the possibility of a more perilous endgame is rising.

    China's senior leadership gets it while many outside the country do not.

    This is just another nail in the coffin for the world economy.


    He's the victim. He was beaten, abandoned, betrayed and his medical needs ignored by David Williams.

    For the last three years, we've had a two-engine world the Chinese producer and the American consumer. Both engines are going to slow down. The debate will be whether this two-engine global 747 is in danger of stalling.

    Why should the victim who has never received a dime sit back while the civil rights violator gets his job and back pay

    With global trade screeching to such a standstill, so, too, should the external demand contributions of most major economies around the world,

    The major risk to the global economy is complacency. We cannot keep thinking that we can shrug off the deficit and the property bubble.

    There is good reason to believe that a sharp weakening in the value of the U. S. currency is essential to the global rebalancing that must begin to take place if the world's current account imbalances are to be corrected,

    Growth has been chronically weak when compared with any expansion of the past 40 years.

    To the extent such a payback is likely after the current spending burst, it could act as a sharp depressant on overall demand growth in subsequent quarters. That development, in the context of a lingering jobless recovery, could raise serious questions about the staying power of America's current cyclical resurgence.

    I honestly believe that if China were to revalue its currency upward by 10 percent -- a change I do not expect nor advise -- its exports would suffer minimal loss of market share,

    If the Schumer-Graham bill closes down U.S. trade with China through the imposition of steep tariffs, a saving-short U.S. economy will simply have to divert a significant portion of its multilateral trade deficit elsewhere.

    An extraordinary deflationary shock in tradable goods has coincided with outsize disinflation in services, resulting in the most deflation-prone business cycle of the modern post-World War II era,

    I fully expect that the Chinese officials will address these tension points, but will not waver from their steadfast commitment on a medium- to longer-term basis of an open capital account and currency convertibility,

    Mine didn't even rhyme, ... But I loved him. He was a great man. I miss him. Put that in, will you.

    Never in modern history has the world's leading economic power tried to do so much with so little. Now Washington is upping the ante as it opens the fiscal spigot to cope with post-Katrina reconstruction at the same time it is funding the ongoing war in Iraq. Could this be a tipping point for America's shoestring economy

    I continue to find Germany, by far Europe's biggest economy and still the third-largest economy in the world, the most interesting story of all. Germany, despite its bad press, is very much on the move.

    That underscores the possibility of yet another shoe to fall in world growth -- all the more reason to stress the protracted nature of this global downturn.

    China has been moving -- very slowly, but the speed is very much dependent on their ability to withstand reforms. The idea of forcing China and other countries to move on the currency front is a bad one.

    Unlike the case a decade ago, I view the coming normalization of Fed policy as a much more serous threat to economic recovery in the U.S. and the broader global economy,

    You've got war, SARS, uncertainty, and imbalances that will prevail after the war is over and until a cure for the disease is found.

    The risk is that he will be blind-sided, as his predecessors were, very early in his tenure by something he is not all that well prepared for and by something that the markets do not have confidence in him for.

    Conventional wisdom has it that globalization is a win-win but that is increasingly looking like a pipe dream. There is no escaping the concerns that workers in high-wage countries have.

    Like it or not, the experience of the 1980s demonstrates that supply-side tax cuts are not self-financing. In my opinion, similar results can be expected from the multi-year tax cuts now on the table in Washington.

    Unfortunately, the SARS effect is concentrated on Asia -- long the fastest-growing region in the world and the one area that essentially had been keeping the global economy afloat. To the extent that this source of global resilience is now being undermine

    There is a dangerous degree of complacency, and out of that comes a surprise that does the most damage to the global economy.

    By staying disciplined with regard to inflationary policy, the Fed nips any inflationary expectations in the bud.

    For the United States, it's the end of labor as we once knew it.

    The same distortions, in my view, could well be explaining a lot of the recent strength in the remainder of the U.S. data flow. If that's the case, all it will take is for the weather to return to normal and the seasonally adjusted data will fall like a stone.

    Once viewed as an unparalleled opportunity, the Chinese miracle is now being viewed as a threat by both the U.S. and Japan.

    Europe looks at China as more of a strategic partner than a competitive threat so it has stayed more out of the currency debate than the U.S..

    Inflation is starting to broaden out it's starting to move up a little bit, ... The Fed certainly has to be concerned about that.

    Global trade is an increasingly large component of the world economy -- now accounting for close to 25 percent of global GDP. So when world trade hits the wall, so should the broader measures of global output.

    I am feeling better about the prognosis for the world economy for the first time in ages.

    Without the consumer, revival remains all too dependent on tenuous support from China and business investment.

    Today's German angst has much in common with the experience of the American worker in the early 1980s and again the early 1990s. For both cases in the U.S., there was no gain without pain. Germany is certainly going through the pain phase, but the gains cannot be minimized.

    I think there's every reason to believe that another jobless recovery could be in the offing in the years immediately ahead -- one that would take a comparable toll on consumer demand.

    This is the year to watch out carefully for the end of the great American spending binge.

    When he leaves ... he will take away 18 years of confidence the markets have invested in him.

    Trade liberalization is a plus for global growth, no question about it.

    If that's the economic model, China is in trouble.

    Greenspan's remarks appear to be more balanced than in the past. He is moving into closer alignment with what has become accepted practice in most central banking circles. Missing, however, is what a central bank should do in order to avoid the pitfalls of excess dependence on overvalued assets.

    For all of China's efforts to create a vibrant domestic market, its economy is highly dependent on exports. China's economic model these days is very much a levered play on the staying power of the overly extended American consumer, ... That's a tough place to be for any economy in an energy shock - even China.

    Consumers have stagnant real wages and they are getting hit with the shocks of higher energy prices. This is not a good combination for the overstretched consumer.

    The United States has long drawn comfort from the quality differential of its educational system. However, in the Internet Age with its ubiquitous diffusion of knowledge, innovation, and technological change, that may turn out to be an increasingly false sense of security.

    The case for a classic U.S. current account adjustment grows more compelling. This could lead to renewed weakening of the dollar and higher long- term real interest rates.

    I do not think that China is going to run the risk of accelerating its pace of opening up its capital markets because of adverse consequences in the global economy.


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