Slowdown coming, regardless of trade war

Global GDP growth should remain strong over the rest of this year, due to healthy growth in household consumption and business investment. Inflation is likely to trend towards 2% in most advanced economies, but will do so at different rates. So while the ECB probably won’t raise interest rates until September 2019, the Fed is likely to hike rates a further four times by the middle of next year. We expect this to cause the US economy to slow during 2019-20. With China’s economy also losing momentum, global growth should ease over the next couple of years, regardless of how far the trade war escalates.