Any weak data points will be dismissed as outliers; aberrations, with any hint of a slowdown will be rapidly dismissed by the next scheduled release.
Not only does a fall in nominal incomes make it harder to service debt, but consumers (or businesses) may have taken on debt in the boom years on the assumption their nominal incomes would rise rapidly; the slowdown is thus a confidence shock.Writing about this phenomenon in our debt survey of 2010, I argued that the likely outcomes would be that economies would inflate, stagnate or default.
After years of rampant expansion, it's now in the throes of a long-predicted and feared slowdown and the West is rapidly losing faith in its ability to turn the economy around.
These arguments may be more persuasive amid a global growth slowdown and in countries with rapidly ageing populations like Japan, where the female labour force participation rate lags the OECD average.
Its yet another sign that the dynamics of the sector are changing rapidly, amid a slowdown in spending on sourcing, particularly in the U.S. A representative for BT declined to comment on a report that it was considering selling its 31.0% stake in Pune, India-based Tech Mahindra, a 95.4 billion rupee ($2.2 billion) IT outsourcing joint venture with truck maker Mahindra and Mahindra.
Now, after observing a notoriously choked stretch of autobahn, two German researchers think they understand better why even a minor slowdown on a packed highway can rapidly trigger long-lasting gridlock: Traffic at times appears to act like a substance rapidly changing from, say, a gas to a liquid.
On the demand side, things have been developing even more rapidly, with a serious slowdown in the resource-intensive emerging economies, above all debt-laden China.
Mr Gidwitz predicts that the downturn will be much more V-shaped than before, with companies responding more rapidly both to the slowdown and to any recovery.The most confusing signal of all, though, seems to be the labour market.
Like a stoned jazz musician adding more complexity and beats to a song, time slowdown might allow an athlete to more rapidly evaluate different options, more quickly consider moves and maneuvers against competing players.
But, just next door, China and India have been growing rapidly, albeit with transient slowdowns, in addition to other Asian nations such as South Korea and Vietnam.
