Thursday, February 4, 2010

ASEAN MacroScope Outlining The Themes & Realigning Our Views




In this week’s MacroScope, we reiterate the overarching themes guiding our assessment in terms of the relative performance of ASEAN economies. We think the kind of global recovery, the rise of inflationary pressures and whether an economy offers an inflation hedge, and the policy exit roadmaps
are factors influencing relative performance. In this context, our preference rankings within ASEAN (in terms of the growth prospects and the certainty of such growth prospects) are Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia then Thailand. We have also realigned some of our 2010 GDP assessment for Malaysia and Thailand alongside the upward GDP revisions by our other colleagues in Asia. Specifically, the GDP upgrades are to take into account the upside from external demand and the concomitant spillover onto domestic demand. The GDP revisions, coupled with the tonal shifts seen in the latest monetary policy statements by BOT and BNM, led us to also bring forward the start of monetary policy normalization by 1Q from 3Q10 to 2Q10.

READ THE FULL REPORT HERE

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