Back in November, Nils Smedegaard Andersen, CEO of Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, gave the world a reality check when it comes to global growth and trade.
“The world’s economy is growing at a slower pace than the International Monetary Fund and other large forecasters are predicting” Andersen told Bloomberg. "We believe that global growth is slowing down [and that] trade is currently significantly weaker than it normally would be under the growth forecasts we see."
That amounted to a harsh indictment of the IMF’s “built in optimism bias” (to quote HSBC), a bias which leads the Fund to perpetually revise down its estimates for global growth once it’s no longer possible to deny reality. “We conduct a string of our own macro-economic forecasts and we see less growth - particularly in developing nations, but perhaps also in Europe,” Andersen added. “Also for 2016, we’re a little bit more pessimistic than most forecasters."
His comments came on the heels of a quarter in which Maersk’s profits fell 61% Y/Y. On Wednesday, we got the latest numbers out of the shipping behemoth and the picture is most assuredly not pretty.
For 2015, profits fell a whopping 84% to $791 million from $5.02 billion in 2014. Analysts were looking for a profit of $3.7 billion.
Credit to Zero Hedge
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