Stephen Roach Quotations

If the Schumer-Graham bill closes down U.S. trade with China through the imposition of steep tariffs, a saving-short U.S. economy will simply have to divert a significant portion of its multilateral trade deficit elsewhere.

Mine didn't even rhyme, ... But I loved him. He was a great man. I miss him. Put that in, will you.

When he leaves ... he will take away 18 years of confidence the markets have invested in him.

Greenspan's remarks appear to be more balanced than in the past. He is moving into closer alignment with what has become accepted practice in most central banking circles. Missing, however, is what a central bank should do in order to avoid the pitfalls of excess dependence on overvalued assets.

Growth has been chronically weak when compared with any expansion of the past 40 years.

Global trade is an increasingly large component of the world economy -- now accounting for close to 25 percent of global GDP. So when world trade hits the wall, so should the broader measures of global output.

For the United States, it's the end of labor as we once knew it.

I do not think that China is going to run the risk of accelerating its pace of opening up its capital markets because of adverse consequences in the global economy.

China has been moving -- very slowly, but the speed is very much dependent on their ability to withstand reforms. The idea of forcing China and other countries to move on the currency front is a bad one.

China's senior leadership gets it while many outside the country do not.

We've gone from one bubble, in stocks, to another, in housing.

I am feeling better about the prognosis for the world economy for the first time in ages.

If that's the economic model, China is in trouble.

There is good reason to believe that a sharp weakening in the value of the U.S. currency is essential to the global rebalancing that must begin to take place if the world's current account imbalances are to be corrected,

Like it or not, the experience of the 1980s demonstrates that supply-side tax cuts are not self-financing. In my opinion, similar results can be expected from the multi-year tax cuts now on the table in Washington.

that doesn't mean that there cannot be some adjustments made along the way.

I think there's every reason to believe that another jobless recovery could be in the offing in the years immediately ahead -- one that would take a comparable toll on consumer demand.

Today's German angst has much in common with the experience of the American worker in the early 1980s and again the early 1990s. For both cases in the U.S., there was no gain without pain. Germany is certainly going through the pain phase, but the gains cannot be minimized.

Unfortunately, the SARS effect is concentrated on Asia -- long the fastest-growing region in the world and the one area that essentially had been keeping the global economy afloat. To the extent that this source of global resilience is now being undermined by disease-related panic, an already bruised and battered global economy has little left to lean on.

Unlike the case a decade ago, I view the coming normalization of Fed policy as a much more serous threat to economic recovery in the U.S. and the broader global economy,

Trade liberalization is a plus for global growth, no question about it.

The property bubble is nearing its end. This is the end of the great American spending binge.

The recession is not over. We will probably have a 'double dip,' another downturn, by spring.

There is a dangerous degree of complacency, and out of that comes a surprise that does the most damage to the global economy.

To the extent such a payback is likely after the current spending burst, it could act as a sharp depressant on overall demand growth in subsequent quarters, ... That development, in the context of a lingering jobless recovery, could raise serious questions about the staying power of America's current cyclical resurgence.

To the extent that hiring in high-wage, developed economies continues to lag, the sustainability of any impetus to private consumption can be drawn into serious question.

The United States has long drawn comfort from the quality differential of its educational system. However, in the Internet Age with its ubiquitous diffusion of knowledge, innovation, and technological change, that may turn out to be an increasingly false sense of security.

As the prospects of a full-blown oil shock rise, the prospects of outright global recession in 2005 loom more and more likely.

An extraordinary deflationary shock in tradable goods has coincided with outsize disinflation in services, resulting in the most deflation-prone business cycle of the modern post-World War II era.

The same distortions, in my view, could well be explaining a lot of the recent strength in the remainder of the U.S. data flow. If that's the case, all it will take is for the weather to return to normal and the seasonally adjusted data will fall like a stone.

The risk is that he will be blind-sided, as his predecessors were, very early in his tenure by something he is not all that well prepared for and by something that the markets do not have confidence in him for.

With global trade screeching to such a standstill, so, too, should the external demand contributions of most major economies around the world,

Borrowing from physics, the last thing an unstable system needs is a shock. And yet the risks of just such a disturbance have never seemed higher. Far-fetched as it seems, the possibility of a more perilous endgame is rising.

You've got war, SARS, uncertainty, and imbalances that will prevail after the war is over and until a cure for the disease is found.

That underscores the possibility of yet another shoe to fall in world growth -- all the more reason to stress the protracted nature of this global downturn.

Europe looks at China as more of a strategic partner than a competitive threat so it has stayed more out of the currency debate than the U.S..

Why should the victim who has never received a dime sit back while the civil rights violator gets his job and back pay?

We are shifting to an outright recession scenario in the United States, and, in response, we are slashing our forecast of the global economy for 2001,

The West always seems to expect a hard landing in China. Yet in three instances over the past decade, China has proved the doubters wrong.

I fully expect that the Chinese officials will address these tension points, but will not waver from their steadfast commitment on a medium- to longer-term basis of an open capital account and currency convertibility,

Once viewed as an unparalleled opportunity, the Chinese miracle is now being viewed as a threat by both the U.S. and Japan.

Consumers have stagnant real wages and they are getting hit with the shocks of higher energy prices. This is not a good combination for the overstretched consumer.

The Fed's going to move 25 basis points; the question is what about after that.

It's important to stay focused on the interplay between the consumer and the overextended housing market and sharp increases in energy prices, ... That will be key as to whether or not the US economy will sustain itself in 2006.

It won't be a huge dramatic bursting, but it will be felt this year.

In my view, the perils of another burst asset bubble far outweigh the costs of another recession,

He's the victim. He was beaten, abandoned, betrayed and his medical needs ignored by David Williams.

By staying disciplined with regard to inflationary policy, the Fed nips any inflationary expectations in the bud.

The vulnerability of the over-extended American consumer can hardly be taken lightly. That could well be a big problem for the rest of a US-centric global economy.

The case for a classic U.S. current account adjustment grows more compelling. This could lead to renewed weakening of the dollar and higher long- term real interest rates.

It's time to make it official. The downside risks we have been warning of over the past several months are now coming to pass.

There's a little bit of a sign of rust but no sign of bust in the U.S. property market. The weakest link of the global economy in 2006 is the U.S. consumer.

This is the year to watch out carefully for the end of the great American spending binge.

I continue to find Germany, by far Europe's biggest economy and still the third-largest economy in the world, the most interesting story of all. Germany, despite its bad press, is very much on the move.

For the last three years, we've had a two-engine world: the Chinese producer and the American consumer. Both engines are going to slow down. The debate will be whether this two-engine global 747 is in danger of stalling.

The major risk to the global economy is complacency. We cannot keep thinking that we can shrug off the deficit and the property bubble.