India's economy likely to surpass $1.5 trillion this year:
India's economy likely to surpass $1.5 trillion this year- Indicators-Economy-News-The Economic Times
Peter Redward, Head of Emerging Asia Research, Barclays Capital, gives his views on growth and market in a chat with
ET Now.
The question really is if equity prices across Asia are reflecting strong growth already and perhaps factoring in much longer.
If you had a $100 and you had to divide it between let's say an India, China and a Thailand, where would you go? I specifically brought up Thailand because some would say valuations in markets like that are almost nothing and may be markets are factoring in too much of the political trouble and perhaps un-valuing and not valuing markets like this at all?
Thailand is a very interesting question and we have been talking about this issue now since 2005, when the political issues arose first and the reality is as you have said, the Thai stock markets has just gone sideways through the last five years.
Valuations have continued to improve substantially. Foreigners are heavily underweight Thai assets and fundamentally if you were to invest over say a 5-10 year horizon, Thailand looks very good. However, there are problems and the key problem is one that's very familiar to most people and that is the political impasse between the Golds and the Reds and until that issue is resolved, it is very difficult to see Thai stocks having more than a temporary rally.
So, our advice to investors from offshore at this stage is stay underweight Thailand because there are better opportunities elsewhere in the near term but once we start getting a resolution of the underlying problems in Thailand to commence, we probably would not allocate anything to Thailand right now.
In terms of India versus China, I would probably weight in favour of India right now. China has some concerns surrounding the monetary policy tightening that's going on there right now and also concerns about balance sheets and the potential risks in the banking system from the rapid credit.
Until that's resolved, Chinese stocks are probably going to struggle a little bit relative to some of the other markets like Korea or Taiwan. India, however, looks pretty good to us. We think the ongoing rise in the savings rate in India and in particular the national savings rates is leading to a very sharp pickup and investment as a share of GDP, this is the same kind of dynamics that we saw in China 10 years ago.
India's economy is likely to surpass $1.5 trillion this year and in nominal space, it is growing extremely fast. We think that balance sheets in India are generally much more transparent than that are in China and we think that the RBI while it needs to cut liquidity and tighten monetary policy. It is going to tentatively behind the curve and that will also provide support for the equity market.