tv Counting the Cost Al Jazeera January 11, 2021 7:30pm-8:00pm +03
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this trial show it's 65 percent effective 7 new large scale back summations centers sample print in england the government is speeding up thanks in delivery and the chief medical officer warns the worst weeks of the pandemic lie ahead they're hoping to offer vaccinations to 15000000 people by mid february. this is al jazeera and these are the headlines the u.s. house democrats put forward a motion urging vice president mike pence invoke the 25th amendment to the constitution removed all trump from office of all it says expects its own cheese steak the u.s. is preparing to designates yemen's hooty rebels as a terror group groups warn the blacklisting will hurts aids deliveries well haiti has reacted to the u.s. actions saying it's the americans who are terrorists they've condemned the move and
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warned they may take action in response to a lot of has more from santa the many observateur believe that this would for the worse in the humanitarian situation of the war torn country especially as according to the united nations over 18 and 80 percent of the country's population now. under the public the line or have been. imposed to the brink of farmer so the many hope that the upcoming administration world would bring a warring sides to to the back to the negotiating table to resolve their differences peacefully. search and rescue teams in indonesia are working to recover the black boxes from the passenger plane that crashed with 62 people on board on saturday the devices are expected to shed light on reasons behind the sudden plunge into the sea 7 large scale vaccination centers have opened in england the government is speeding up vaccine delivery is the chief medical officer warns the
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worst weeks of the pandemic lie ahead the worst thing now would be for us to. allow success in rolling out a vaccine program to breed any kind of complacency about the state of the pandemic malaysia's reimpose in a 2 week coronavirus lockdown as infections surged to 3000 a day it'll apply to kuala lumpur and $560.00 legions and the 1st commercial flight but in qatar and saudi arabia and more than 3 years is taken off from doha bound for riyadh that's after saudi arabia and 3 other countries agreed to restore ties with qatar and that is he up to date stay with this here on out to syria came to the cost is up next.
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sammy's a than this is counting the cost of al-jazeera your look at the world of business and economics this week 2020 a year to forget can the world bounce back from the worst economic contraction. to . rich countries corner of the vaccine market what kind of global recovery will there be without the world's poorest. first into lockdown and 1st out china sets of course to become the biggest economy in this decade. 2020 not that many would like to look back and remember with any fondness shall we
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say hundreds of millions lost their jobs many millions succumbed to poverty and more than 1800000 people died from the pandemic the global economy contracted more than at any time since world war 2 with vaccines being rolled out in many rich nations there's a real sense of hope that they'll be a strong recovery this year with just to keep economies on an even keel governments and central banks spend a staggering 12 trillion dollars as countries stumble from one lock down to another global debt has soared though to $277.00 trillion dollars more than 3 and a half times the size of the global economy. governments that aren't able to turn to international markets for money have turned to the international monetary fund and world bank the i.m.f. has provided about $100000000000.00 to more than 80 countries and development banks
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led by the world bank have issued 75000000000. hope of a fast vaccine rollout could see a sharp bounce back to the global economy after a 4.4 percent contraction the i.m.f. is predicting growth of 5.2 percent this year one of the best performing economies was china it's already begun setting its sights on becoming the world's biggest economy this decade as china becomes more self resilient in the face of a u.s. trade war a new biden presidency is unlikely to relent on tariffs so what can we expect from 2021 well let's bring our guests into the show they've got decades of experience in guiding their clients through the economic and political landscape we have joining us from london macro hive chief executive bilal half fees also from hong kong catherine young investment director for fidelity international and from wilcher in the u.k. paul donovan chief economist of u.b.s.
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global wealth management good to have you with us everyone let's start with catherine in hong kong and so why is china done better than the rest of the world it's one of the few economies that is that's the mated to have grown actually in 2020 when we have been looking at markets especially last year and even this year there are 3 key drivers been focusing on so the flattening of the code because of the pace in sustainability of an economic recovery and finally policy response implementation and really china has got a tick in all 3 areas so in terms of the at break it really has been contained even though we do see the occasional flare ups albeit the board is still generally closed economic recovery wise to see a pick up manufacturing even in the retail sector the services sector exports have done well and then policy wise the pv o.c. really has bucked the trend this is not the central bankers so they've taken a very disciplined less aggressive approach in terms of supportive easing measures
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and it's likely that should we do. not since 121 they still have that skill set to support the economy should they need to or interesting so controlling your borders controlling your manufacturing base controlling the finances poor always saying that control the north or a tarion governments are sometimes better than liberal democracies in managing an economic crisis like this. but i think it depends on the nature of the crisis and of course we've seen liberal democracies handle this crisis extremely well if we look at new zealand for example you know i don't think you would even begin to describe the government of new zealanders authoritarian and they have managed the situation very well in their economy is showing the consequences of science so i think it's more about the prepare the preparation for the crisis the speed of the response and of course a part of the compliance of the local population that's also
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a key factor whether you can get your citizens to agree to restrictions and abide by them or not some of the city united states has had some problems in that regard interesting ballout we've questioned chinese data before are we doing that right now. well i think there's always a big question over the chinese data that said though when you do look at the countries dates in relation to china so for example if you look at a country's exports to china so you use other countries dates in relation to china you do generally see. in a proven in the economic picture as with a coded numbers you know that as you know that the way the carbon numbers are reported in china does bring some questions as to how they are reported nevertheless if you do look at the 11th activity in the economy level movement of people across the economy it does suggest that at least the overall the high level
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picture of the cape situation in china is accurate ok catherine talking about china and economic activity there aiming to double the size of the economy by 2035 that's a big goal is it possible catherine so she i'm doing analysis at the end of nasiriyah and his 5 year plan all the government's money if so achieving that kind of growth we would have to see china grow roughly 4.7 percent per annum which is probably somewhat achievable so to get the structural story behind china remains very much intact and by that i mean high incomes household wealth this is the shift urbanize ation the rise of the chinese consumer and this is why there's such a focus from a government level in terms of ensuring that growth is really underpins on the domestic side of things and this is why we call it the jewel secularization policy so really ensuring that there's a healthy employment market that we can see you see the 7 eyes ation and that we
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alleviate poverty as best we can in china what would happen what would the price of that be will we be looking at that level of something like $90.00 trillion or something you have to do to get in terms of the debt level no still an outstanding debt situation in china that hasn't gone away over the past 2 years even that markets of remain very very buoyant. but a lot of the deaths in some of the depots we're already seeing which again we should be surprised that have been very much managed by the central governments so in terms of how we're going to achieve that growth over the next 10 years 5 years we're going to see some tax the films being introduced and really again this focus on this domestic economy economic growth coming so interestingly though you know we look at the savings rate in in china households and right that is it's gone from at 30 percent which has been hovering over the past in the 5 years so 37 percent so we're not seeing household debt really increase that we are seeing but the nation's poor few doubt that china is on its way to being the world's biggest economy soon
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will it happen this decade according to the traditional g.d.p. measure well i think the bond of china's challenges and one of the reasons i trust a little bit skeptical about sort of narrative is china structurally is very well positioned for the 3rd industrial revolution in the way its economy is is positioned it's going to face all challenges in the 4th industrial revolution because effectively it's got to say well yes this is work very well for the last quarter century but it's not going to work at all in the next quarter century dealing with a world which is called localized. where you can't knowledge actually isn't what's important it's the implementation of technology which is very much about human capital and labor flexibility and so on and so forth so i think china has got some challenges ahead in adapting its economy accepting that the model that has worked extraordinarily well over the last quarter century now has to be entirely thrown
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away but certainly dramatically revised if it's going to deal with some of the fairy very significant structural shifts which lie ahead revised how paul. well i think. we need to see a focus on higher education in particular china has benefited over the last few years by having a relatively high proportion of students who studied overseas returning bring that knowledge and expertise but china that may be more problematic in the future we have we're seeing already restrictions on student visas for example the focus on exports is clearly got to shift i think that localized sation is not going to happen overnight i mean the evidence suggests that something which gradually occurs over a sort of a 4 or 5 year period but we are clearly going to be moving towards localization because it just makes economic sense to do that and with that again china has got to start focusing on producing for its domestic economy and perhaps less about
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producing for international economists interesting that bring this kind of bank to the point catherine was mentioning and catherine i'm wondering do you think talking about restrictions on china and focusing on the domestic market you think a biden presidency is going to remove some of those tasks i guess of you know sony could be pushing china further in that direction of being in with looking right now the status quo is probably not going to shift dramatically in and really when we look at most economies around the world a lot of them are recalibrating or reassessing their trade agreements with each other forgetting that tickles point about the focus that the chinese government has in terms of the structural growth story this is why the government's place in such an end it's on innovation and it's not just in the tech sector there are consumer related names across all segments materials industrials and energy etc they know that they have to really increase their r. and d. from the educations poor so really climb up that band and continue manufacturing enough higher end names all right let's broaden the out to other trade issues not
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just between china and the u.s. what can you think bill our we can expect from a biden presidency on trade issues with all those the you and so on trump has left biden with a lot of leverage you could say. yeah yeah i mean it's there of the trumps have disrupted some your relationships you know and instead moved away from multilateral arrangement with allies and much more towards bilateral arrangement and then the tag in a state relationship with allies i think biden you know at least from what he says you know we'll try to go back to what we had during the a-bomb a error in the sense that there will be or not just a bombing or of the earlier u.s. position which is to support allies so that's the e.u. japan countries like that and try to engage with them to can you know contain more adversarial relationship such as with china so i do think there will be more the multilateral approach you know and which will mean
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a reversion to what we saw before before president trump but the difference this time is i think the antagonism towards china will continue although the form in which that's expressed will be somewhat different to the way president trumping gage with that so i think the key thing for biden will be to try to engage europe to have a united front in relation to china and pull building that united front with europe will the price of that be dropping some of the disputes the tower of switch the u.s. has slapped on european on the european union over things like aircraft subsidies well i think there's an instinct point here of course because the treasury secretary nominee yellen is of course a highly competent economist. and we haven't had a highly competent to call of us just treasury secretary for a while now the whole question of charis i think it's very difficult to see yellen . intellectually as it were supporting terrorists i think she knows they don't work
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i mean trade taxes just don't book and so i think that there may be some shift out how the bite the ministration tries to apply trade policy we know that trade taxes are going to stay for the time being but i think with yellen in charge of the treasury there may be a shift of emphasis on. yes perhaps work in a multilateral way we know for example on digital taxes the bike demonstration is quite likely to reopen the o.e.c.d. move here and try and come to some kind of multilateral agreement which is not the way that the trumpet ministration has been working and so weak we could see some progress there as well i think all right we're kind of looking at things though from the perspective of the u.s. policy towards the e.u. and mending its relationship with the e.u. catherine does the you want to how far does the e.u. i guess want to look towards faith in washington given what we've seen going on in the china investment deal what does that tell us i think that that deal was was
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really telling and that they beneficial for a lot of the european economies so you know again i mention my earlier point a barracks and lot of economies are reassessing next revelations it is another that is that is probably going to be a key thing that 2021 in this regard right bill our looking at biden's new economic team he's got more women people of color minorities does that do you think indicate in terms of the biden economic policy more of a prioritize ation of some of the economic challenges and issues which for want of a better word we could say the minorities face yes i do think that is the case and you know it's perhaps not just about minorities is probably more related to a larger issue of inequality you know which has been the challenge plaguing many many economies and each political parties try to address in different ways a president trump you know followed
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a very you know anti immigrations of stance you know towards that to try to address this and and so by ministration i think will try to tackle this inequality issue in multiple different ways you know one for example will be through you know various government broke programs increase fiscal spending you know the. these checks that we talk about during the pandemic you know $600.00 to $2000.00 those sorts of things there's questions around or whether student debts will be forgiven or not so that's another thing that's been quite onerous is health care reform which is you know a big impediment for for people at the lower rungs of society and then there's kind of a larger issue around climate change as well so while this is not directly related to inequality it does kind of go to a broader issue on the left side of what politics trying to address climate change as well or i pull bring this all together then force what we've been saying so far in this show an attempt or an effort maybe to address inequality global trading
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powers trying to make up to a certain extent multilateralism coming somewhat back on track does this mean we're looking at a bounce back for global economic growth or do you think unemployment is still going to be a challenge so i think we are going to see a bounce back and on employment is going to be a challenge to typical economics also your on hand and on the other you get a bounce back because last year was an aberration. as we move out of the period of restrictions in europe for example in the probably early 2nd quarter we start to see those restrictions softening as consumer confidence comes back you will see i think a far more bracket acceleration of growth than that i believe it around back might lead to precursor economic levels paul well that's so that's where the unemployment problem comes in because all it has happened with the pandemic is in mind you this is accel orating structural change in the economy structural change is going to
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happen anyway the 4th industrial revolution was already underway but it's being accelerated by the pandemic now the issues there is that industries that were a gradual decline are now in rapid decline and you're creating unemployment and so forth and spare capacity so i think it is unlikely that we are. to be getting back to 2019 levels of economic activity until probably 2022. and for me the bigger issue it's not really the cyclical recovery because the parts of the economy that are able to recover i think are going to recover just fine the problem for policymakers now is how do you deal with the structural challenges of your employment in dying industries for example how do you go about retraining how do you go about reaching your economy to make the most of the way the world is going to work the way the world has been working i'm curious to know bill our with this kind of structural shift accelerating that we're talking about was that mean
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for the green economy does it mean we accelerate quicker to a greener economy than pre covert expectations and if so why yes i think it does you know this is probably the one area in which you know if we honor our image of structural change this is the one area in which the government can step in and try to support and grow the segment of the economy related to the green sector and so this could be you know one of the ways where as paul was mentioning there will be people who lose their jobs in this 4th in just revolution and those people could be retrained into the green energy sector i mean at the very basic level you know while we kind of think about technology and green and renewables and so on there will be a an infrastructure build that's required you know to build a green energy system and that will require construction that require building that require that will require manual labor as well so i think this will be
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a big push by you know government sat at all all levels to try to encourage this this part because we need something of a reality check here a lot of countries have borrowed a lot of money during this crisis how they can be paid back as austerity going to cover the bill. that's the biggest question and probably the uncertainty which the markets especially last year were probably not really factoring in given the heart of many equity markets were posting i mean inflation is also going to come back on the table so whilst oil did have a for the 1st time the course of the last year it did rebound and in fact saw commodities so showing some good price movements in terms of strength so i think definitely inflation is something that hasn't been discussed that will come back on the table and as you rightly pointed at questions in solutions about all this outstanding debt and who would have a games where it need to be addressed paul how do we ensure that the poorest nations don't miss out on growth when the reality is it's the richest nations which
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of kind of cornered the vaccine market right now haven't they. that's certainly true. it's a complicated issue because of course the virus itself doesn't actually do the damage to get to growth it's fear of the virus that is is doing the damage so if you create an environment where your fear is all contained. you potentially your growth comes back and you can see this for example in the united states which has far fewer restrictions and therefore has stronger economic activity i mean the case numbers the whole time what she writes in the united states is just as if not worse than europe but because the fear level is different you end up with a different economic response so i think when we're talking about the vaccines that reduce fear in europe and allow mobilization but it may well be that in emerging markets we still continue with the regrettably high caseload but people adapt
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and get on with their lives regardless in which case the same with the united states you would get stronger economic activity coming through catherine do expect central banks then to continue to provide huge amounts of liquidity and if so for how long. probably especially if we didn't see a pickup in an economic recovery from a global perspective but as a set of inflation comes back then we would have to suck thinking about monetary policy means and this is already xstrata by the way so as we highlighted earlier in the show if we are to see improving g.d.p. growth in china whatever level it will probably mark the point where you start seeing the p.v.a. see move towards more of a tightening stunts whether it's about the liquidity situation because again we have is that something debt situation that we need to resolve in china but there is a different point as most of the central bank is now i mentioned the stock that we do believe that the p.b.'s c. has the necessary tools the fiscally monetary should we do see some downside in
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terms of economic global growth but in general we're probably going to see in the foreseeable future central banks around the will ex trying to continue the path that they have been on. and we've seen in china stocks adding almost 5 trillion u.s. dollars that's about the size of the japanese economy is now finishing the year on record highs we've seen that you know with markets around the world is this reality or are they detached from reality. yeah i guess that's that's the big question i mean my might my kind of sense at the moment is that it's a bit of both my bias is to you know say that it is not entirely detached from reality in the sense that the structure of the stock market is different from the structure of the economy number one so what the stock market represents isn't a direct reflection of the real economy and if you look at the components safely look take the u.s. or even china big tech is a big component of these indices and big tech in many ways is kind of capturing all
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the the positive gains and structural changes that we're seeing in economy you know there's a greater adoption of technology there's a greater requirement for so big data networks and those sorts of things and these big companies all kind of capturing those sorts of things so in that sense it's not detached from reality moreover we have kind of the fundamental issue of as you said you know in traits are incredibly low so as results kind of the value of those stocks you know starts to go up you know those dividends that companies can give you you know look more attractive with interest rates so low and as a basic issue of asset allocation investors are trying to you know capture some kind of return any of bonds or communicative rights as they are many cases and then your alternative really is equities or i is sad that point now in the show we've got a minute left so i'm going to ask everybody to get out there crystal ball let's start with paul and asked everyone to give us a prediction of what we think the economic landscape is going to look like for 2021
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you've got your crystal ball ready paul so i think it's going to be a soft. as we still deal with the virus of the rollout of the vaccines probably a stronger bounce back in the 2nd half people always underestimate the ability of humans to adapt in the face of adversity and i think that that will give us a stronger bounce back ok a positive note there is that shared by you catherine in hong kong it is indeed in and just from a market perspective i think that. china's going to outperform those in an absolute well as in a relative sense or b. i do think we're going to start moving away from this very crowded trade the most not just in china but around the world like for example as the internet the big tech names of tesla etc and you will start seeing diversification to be unlocked sectors into names that are still delivering on the earnings but have been ignored because of the crowded trade mentality alright interesting what does your 2021 vision look like then bill our yeah i'm going have to be somewhat boring and agree
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with paul and catherine that i think in the end will have quite a positive but you know you're special as we go towards 2nd half i suppose the one kind of contrary view i do have is i don't really think inflation will be much of an issue to see i think inflation will remain quite low over the course of this year mainly because unemployment's going to be very high but also because one of the largest drives late in the service sector you know doesn't really have much pricing power especially in kind of a post by demick world let's thank our panel then from london macro hive chief executive bill i'll have fees from hong kong we had katherine young and of course from we'll turn the u.k. paul donovan thank you all and that's our show for this week there's more for you online that al-jazeera dot com slash c.d.c. that'll take you straight to our page right chazz entire episodes for you to catch up on. that's it for this edition of counting the cost i'm sammy's
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