The truth is we are not in a business cycle—recovery or otherwise. We are in a mad-cap central bank driven process of exhausting the limits of every nations’ economic balance sheet. Europe and the USA reached peak credit market debt in the 2008 cycle, and now China and its EM raw material and component supplier satellites have met the same fate. Look at the household debt ratio in South Korea: the latter would have to annex all the barren households of the north just to average it down to the still bloated consumer debt ratios in the US.
Perhaps there are some clean balance sheets left in the world—the Cameroons and Bangladesh come to mind. But as for the Reuters’ lament about the 25% drop in heavy machine exports: their Cool-Aid drinking scribes who regurgitate corporate and government press releases all day have not seen nothing yet!
