Party like it's 2007 again? Don't hold your breath
The loss of China's low-cost deflationary effect and rapidly ageing populations will ensure that there will be no return to the pre-crisis party of 2008
Five years after the global financial crash, it is perhaps not surprising that so many regional bosses (and economists, who should know better) are clawing for evidence that recovery is close at hand.
Thousands of executives are still holding their breath, hoping that the pre-2008 party will resume soon.
I have bad news: dream on.
The global ageing trend will affect us in Hong Kong sooner than we imagine
Even if there is passing evidence of some "green shoots" (in the United States at least), the grim reality is that none of us will really discover whether the patient on the table is dead or alive until the life support system provided to the global economy by quantitative easing (QE) is turned off. The process of turning off that life support has just begun, and it will be 2016 before we start to discover the condition of the patient.
Let's assume that by then the news, on balance, is good. That the patient is alive, and likely to recover. Let's put to one side the horrid side effects of QE that will have to be dealt with - like colossally inflated property and equity markets underpinned by loans that are as close to free as we will see in any of our lifetimes.
Beyond that, the reality is that whatever party resumes will not be the same. At least two key ingredients of the pre-2008 party will have disappeared, and we have yet to begin thinking about what will happen in their absence.
And what two key ingredients am I talking about? First, the disappearance of what I like to call "China's deflationary gift", and second the awesome demographic shift that is beginning to affect all economies, with Japan in the vanguard.
First, China's "deflationary gift": few of us have ever properly acknowledged the impetus provided to the global economy between China's opening up in 1978 and the early 2000s, and in particular how this leached inflation out of our growth. As thousands upon thousands of mainland-based companies jumped on the bandwagon to sell every imaginable consumer good into global markets, the price of retail goods in our high street shops in the West were kept securely low.