Latest Economic Conditions Snapshot from McKinsey & Company

Global management consultancy firm, McKinsey & Co have released their latest Global Survey of executives opinions on global and domestic economic activity. The findings confirm a neutral increasingly negative expectation has grown representing a shift from positions taken in December 2014 which were more optimistic.

In emerging markets (mainly developing countries) half of the respondent executives report that economic conditions at home have worsened over the past 6 months and this trend is expected to continue. Executives in developed Asia and North America also report waning optimism and are less bullish now about their home economies than earlier this year. Latin America has the most negative views about economic conditions since December 2013. Oddly enough executives in the Eurozone were slightly more upbeat despite fairly stagnant conditions and default concerns. McKinsey have also updated their four possible scenarios for long-term economic growth being:

• "Pockets of growth" representing uneven, volatile but high levels of global growth;
• "Global downshift" being a situation  in which growth is lower but resilient;
• "Global synchronicity" representing a period of globally distributed  growth and broad increases in productivity;
• "Rolling regional crises" which covers volatile and weak global growth.

Executives ranked "pockets of growth" or "global downshift" as the most likely scenarios over the next decade. The primary top threats have been identified as low consumer demand and geopolitical instability at a global level of which geopolitical instability has a staggering 75% support. Other primary risks to global growth are volatile exchange rates and sovereign-debt defaults which run as close seconds.