Business

Saturday November 14, 2009

Coordination needed to unwind stimulus


SINGAPORE: Countries will have to closely coordinate unwinding stimulus packages to keep asset bubbles under control and to avoid derailing a fragile recovery in consumer confidence, business and political leaders said yesterday.

“The moment will have to be coordinated so that countries come out in an orderly sort of way,” Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in reply to a question at a meeting of business executives on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit in Singapore.

World Bank chief Robert Zoellick told the Apec CEO Summit that consumer confidence was the key factor in deciding when to hand back to the private sector the primary role for stimulating growth.

“If you look at the US stimulus programme, and many other stimulus packages, a lot of the money actually comes in late 2009, the start of 2010.

“But the question mark for everybody is whether the private sector will kick in by the middle of 2010 and that is partly an issue of confidence.”

Central bank chiefs from the region also met behind closed doors on the sidelines of the event on Friday, with debate focused on the expansionary policies they put in place when the world economy dived into crisis last year.

The spending part of fiscal stimulus packages an estimated US$2 trillion worth around the Asia-Pacific region alone was easier to unwind, Lee said, “because you can gradually tail off the spending and you can watch whether the economy is growing again.”

More difficult is winding back the expansionary monetary policies now in effect in much of the world.

“If you withdraw the monetary stimulus too late, you risk inflating a bubble,” Lee said.

The risk of an asset bubble may not be there yet in major economies, “but in Asia you have seen stock markets go, we have seen property markets go ... If it becomes a significant and widespread bubble because we defer the monetary tightening for too long, we will have a serious problem.”

Zoellick also cautioned that a recovery could lead to excessive liquidity flowing into commodity and property markets.

Chin Youngwook, CEO of wealth fund Korea Investment Corp (KIC), told Reuters in an interview that hedging against inflation was “very important”, but he saw global financial markets slowing next year because the private sector is not strong enough to make up for waning effects of stimulus measures.

Money traders said they were paying attention to the expressions of uncertainty about economic recovery.

“We continue to keep our ears to the ground for chatter out of the Apec circuit and we don’t think that comments are likely to deviate from the cautious tone witnessed in the last few days,” said Singapore bank OCBC in a treasury note yesterday.

Finance ministers from the Apec forum said at the end of a meeting on Thursday that emergency stimulus measures had prevented “an even deeper global recession” and resolved to “remain vigilant until the economic recovery gains traction”.

They vowed, in a joint statement, to “undertake monetary policies consistent with price stability in the context of market-oriented exchange rates that reflect underlying economic fundamentals”.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key told broadcaster CNBC yesterday that the private sector needed to take over the stimulus role from governments as soon as possible.

“Let’s face it, the United States is borrowing a lot of money. The UK and Europe are borrowing a lot of money.

“Everyone has got big fiscal stimulus programmes going and at some point, that has to stop. There is a limit to how much the government can stimulate global growth,” he said. — Reuters

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