Qualche buona notizia dall'Economist e la guerra delle valute

L'Economist uscito ieri sera riporta qualche buona notizia sul fronte delle aspettative di crescita dell'economia mondiale. Secondo il settimanale britannico 

The IMF said that the global economy had grown faster than expected in the first half of 2010 and predicted that it would grow by 4.8% over the year as a whole. The fund forecast that global growth would slow to 4.2% in 2011, and warned that recovery remained fragile. America and other developed economies were set to experience more sluggish growth in the coming year because of budget cuts, it said. Emerging markets would continue to boom. See article

Il Fondo monetario internazionale prevede anche che i costi della crisi finanziaria, almeno per la parte relative alle perdite delle banche, saranno leggermente inferiori al previsto:

The IMF also revised its estimate for the total of bank write-downs and loan provisions related to the financial crisis. It said these would amount to $2.2 trillion between 2007 and 2010, down from $2.3 trillion in April. The fund put the value of write-downs still to be realised at roughly $550 billion.

Molto meno confortante è la situazione dei mercati valutari: non solo continua la manipolazione dei cambi da parte delle banche centrali ma da più parti si fa un gran parlare di guerre valutarie. Persino Martin Wolf, certamente non uso ai toni polemici, qualche giorno fa sul Financial Times non ha usato mezze misure parlando della manipolazione del cambio da parte della Cina. L'Economist riprende la questione riassumendo gli scambi polemici piùà recenti tra Wen Jiabao, Strauss-Kahn e Sarkozy:

FX-rated

Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, told European leaders during a visit to Brussels that an unstable yuan put the global economy in peril. He was responding to continuing criticism that the Chinese currency is artificially undervalued. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the president of the IMF, weighed in, alerting countries to the dangers of manipulating exchange rates to deal with domestic problems and sounding a warning against a “currency war”. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who will be assuming the presidency of the G20 later this year, said he wanted reform of the international monetary system to be at the top of the agenda at the group’s November summit in Seoul.