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NEY COME
Compared to Nouriel Roubini, who was spreading Dr Doomness all over misty, gloomy Lake Como on Friday, Jim O’Neill, the soon-to-depart chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, seemed positively chipper.
In an interview with CNBC, on the picturesque, but The Fog-ish looking shores of Lake Como, just hours ahead of the release of one of the biggest economic numbers in the world, O’Neill had this to say:
“The momentum behind the U.S. numbers is good. It’s pretty interesting despite the so-called fiscal drag…”
Specifically on those jobs numbers, he said this:
“If we get further follow through on that, I can see people starting to get really excited about the cyclical momentum of the U.S. economy. I think valuation-wise, the U.S. market is nothing like as attractive as it was, but the momemtum from the numbers is there, so what’s going to cause it to top?”
He says as much chaos as Washington is seeing right now, “maybe in some weird way” the U.S. approach to its fiscal problems is superior to the way Europe is handling it.
“Slowly but surely, the U.S. fiscal picture is improving… but maybe that’s the better way to do it. They are suffering from too much focus on austerity across Europe, the U.K. included.”
O’Neill dismissed ideas there was a disconnect between the global economy and the rally in global equities. While there are pockets of turmoil and uncertainty in places such as, well, Italy — the U.S., China and Germany are doing relatively OK. And then there’s Japan, which he notes is aggressively trying to get the world’s third-largest economy moving.
“The fact that Italy has got some issues is obviously a problem…I love the place dearly, but they don’t run the world, and the biggest places are doing pretty well.”
O’Neill, who is credited with coining the acronym, BRIC, to describe emerging-market powerhouses Brazil, Russia, India and China, also appeared pretty sanguine about global equity markets, saying most of them are cheap.
“While I have not quite the same degree of optimism about the US market from here, this is against a background of many markets on quite conservative criteria — cyclically adjusted price to earnings — they’re all cheap. So I don’t think it’s a big deal. I thought we would rally and we are. .. It’s a sort of stealth rally – I’m worried about this today and I know I’m going to be worried about this tomorrow – so that’s kind of what you want really. That’s what causes markets to do well.”
Stepping over in front of Bloomberg’s TV camera, O’Neill apparantly disagreed with Roubini’s bubble view, and said that equities remain the most interesting class for the investment bank.
“It seems Japan is still cheap despite this huge rally, parts of the BRIC world, China, especially are still cheap, peripheral Europe is still cheap. Equity markets look good relative to credit and government bonds.”
It will be interesting to see if anyone manages to get Roubini and O’Neill in the ring together down Como way (#ambrosetti for tweets from Lake Como). Seats to that would be worth something.
