Rathbone's Smith: Signs of weaker growth are less worrying than they first appear

A broader swathe of economic indicators — of the recent past, present and future — have fallen to indisputably weaker levels than at any time since the 2008 global financial crisis.

That means we have more reasons than at any time over the past decade to be worried about the outlook for the US and global economies over the next 12 months. For example, US industrial production is contracting quarter-on-quarter. The volume of Korean exports is also contracting, as are orders of Japanese machine tools and global sales of microchips. The German manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) — a much-watched measure of business confidence — is below 50 (commonly seen as the threshold between ‘boom' and ‘bust'), as are a number of other manufacturing PMIs around the world...