2019 was a challenging year for the global economy. We had accepted that global growth was through the peak in cycle, but the weakness was more extreme than we had anticipated and growth looks to have come in at around 3.0% for the calendar year. The greatest area of weakness was industrial production, a result of the ongoing escalation of trade tensions between the United States and China.

The good news from 2019 was that continued solid consumer spending in the key developed economies prevented a sharper downturn in economic activity. The combination of easier monetary conditions that were implemented in 2019 along with the beginnings of an easing in trade tensions should see some stabilisation in global growth in 2020.

Read more on our outlook for the New Zealand and global economies, and across asset classes, in the January 2020 edition of Quarterly Strategic Outlook.