PIMCO: 60% Chance of Recession in Next Five Years

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

cash register, not full

Bond giant PIMCO has forecast that the chance of a global recession sometime in the next five years is greater than 60%. Analyst Saumil Parikh made the remark on behalf of the firm.

In a paper called “A Secular View of Assets: Surfing the Wedge,” Parikh observed:

We expect global economic volatility to rise. Statistically speaking, the global economy experiences a recession every six years or so, and the frequency of global recessions tends to increase when global indebtedness is high and falling as opposed to when indebtedness is low and rising. Given that the last global recession was four years ago and also given that the global economy is significantly more indebted today than it was four years ago, we believe there is now a greater than 60% probability that we will experience another global recession in the next three to five years.

Indebtedness has, among other things, undermined the odds that nations will provide stimulus packages. In some nations, particularly in Europe, troubled nations are forbidden from providing such aid as part of the restrictions of bailout packages set by the European Union, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank. A number of experts, among them Christine LaGarde, head of the IMF, have objected to these provisions, arguing that Europe cannot solve its sovereign debt crisis via forcing countries to sharply reduce government spending, which leaves no options to grant tax incentives to businesses or to give aid to sectors that might lead some of the countries out of recession.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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