Ken Wattret
speaker
312 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Jul
Ken Wattret’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
At least so far, anyway.
We'll have to see how they evolve.
And also the PMIs have shown us something that is really important.
The PMIs have been telling us that activity in the manufacturing sector is being boosted by precautionary stock building.
And that's linked to firms' concerns about broader supply disruptions due to the disruption.
related to developments in the Middle East.
Now that's really important because that helps us to avoid misinterpreting strength in manufacturing data as a sign of economic resilience.
I think the essence of it really is how long the conflict continues, the breadth of the disruptions, and then the various transmission channels through to the economies that we're forecasting.
Probably the simplest way to think about the economic effects of conflict escalation is to think about the areas of spending that are affected and then the potential policy levers that could be used.
to mitigate or in the case of central banks aggravate those.
negative effects.
The most important transmission channel is higher consumer price inflation, squeezing household real incomes, in turn reducing consumer spending, because consumer spending accounts for the largest share of GDP.
for most economies.
Now that
rise in inflation that we're talking about has a direct impact on household real incomes, but it also has some indirect effects.
And one of those is that it leads central banks to have tighter monetary policy than otherwise.
And that
tightening of financial conditions leads to a broader weakness in demand, which in turn spills over to business investment along with high uncertainty and reduced corporate profits because margins are likely to be squeezed because input costs are soaring.
And if you combine lower consumer spending and lower business investment, then typically the consequence of that is you have weaker trade flows.
So if you put all of those effects together, you can then try and answer the original question, will the economic expansion continue?
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