“Asia as a whole does appear to be stuck in a slow-grinding growth mode,” said Aidan Yao, Hong Kong-based senior economist at AXA Investment Managers, which had 666 billion euros ($736 billion) of assets under management at the end of March.
Much of the slowdown can be pinned on China where record low interest rates and a large fiscal stimulus have so far struggled to gain traction. Second-quarter GDP, due July 15, is expected to show the economy expanded by 6.6 percent, comfortably inside the government’s target range of 6.5 percent to 7 percent -- but still its weakest since the global financial crisis.
In Japan, where the economy continues to bump along the bottom, authorities are grappling with the fallout from the yen’s almost 20 percent surge against the dollar this year that has piled pressure on the nation’s exporters.
The Bank of Japan is expected by some analysts to unleash additional stimulus when it meets on July 29 and the government is also planning another round of fiscal stimulus.
Looking across the world economy, Citigroup global chief economist Willem Buiter summed up the so-so situation this way: “Nobody is in a particularly strong, nor as of now, a particularly weak position.”