Janet Henry (economist)

On 17 October 2018 Henry published an article named "Diverging fortunes for world economies" on HSBC's News and Insights section of their website. She discusses economic growth trend of several states, mentioning that the United States are benefiting off of personal tax cuts and low unemployment and have contributed to their high rate of consumer confidence.[11] Henry continues on to state that after raising their 2018 growth forecast for the United States to 3%, their estimate for global growth for 2018 to be 3%, followed by 2.7% in 2019 and 2.5% in 2020.[11]

Henry states that emerging economies have long-run potential in growth compared to pre-existing developed countries. Emerging economies have advantages in demographics and will to grow rapidly if they continue to improve social infrastructures and programs such as education, health care, and technological advances.[11] According to Henry's model projections, China will outgrow the United States as the largest economy by 2030, in addition to India growing ahead of Germany and Japan as the third largest economy.[11]

On 25 March 2019 Henry appeared in a HSBC Insights video "The world slows down—Central banks pivot on interest rates in case downturn worsens". In the video, Henry discusses the reasons behind the central bank pivots due to a slowdown in global economic growth and inflation. She forecasts that by the midyear of 2019, China will stabilise and the United States growth will revive after the recent government shutdown. She mentions that two sectors are particularly impactful to the economic downturn, the auto and electronic industries, both of which account for a majority of production in countries like South Korea and Germany. Henry predicts that economic growth will not rapidly grow globally solely from a US-China trade deal because of rising tensions arising between US and European countries.[12] She concludes that federal interest rate setters will cut in 2020, but that will be dependent on the expectations of the effects of a rising inflation rate to prevent the dollar from rising.

On 7 August 2018 Lucy Meakin and Jeanna Smialek from Bloomberg Markets interviewed three women who are now Chief Economists in the world's few largest banks. The article "These Three Women Made It to Chief Economist at Big Banks. Here's How They Got There" included Henry as one of the three women. Through this interview, Henry discussed some of the difficulties and experiences of being a woman in her occupation. She mentioned that when she joined HSBC back in 1996, she was the only woman on her global economics team and now 13 out of 39 of her global group are women.[5] Bloomberg highlights Henry's recent accomplishments, such as forecasting that the European Central bank will undergo quantitative easing or warning that the U.S. tightening of finances along rising oil prices and President Trump's "aggressive trade policies" will harm the global economy.[5]

Henry laughs while describing her career, saying that "A lot of the progress in my career happened as a consequence of the euro crisis. You’re always going to have a higher profile as an economist when things are not going well."[5]