Is Laurence Fink Trying to Be Bill Gross?

Laurence Fink was on Bloomberg Television making the same comments Bill Gross was making just a few months ago. Here’s a rundown of what he said:

“BlackRock Inc. (BLK)’s Laurence D. Fink, chief executive officer of the world’s biggest asset manager, said the U.S. will trail the global economy for much of the next decade.

The U.S. economy will grow 2 percent to 3 percent for the next five to 10 years, lagging behind global growth of 3 percent to 5 percent, Fink said today in a Bloomberg Television interview with Erik Schatzker from the Morningstar conference in Chicago.

“We will have modest growth for five to 10 years,” Fink, who heads the world’s largest asset manager, said in the interview. “If we cut our deficits, I may be wrong, and they might be lower,” he said, referring to the U.S. growth numbers.”

First of all, it is obvious that U.S. will trail the global economy. We were trailing the world economy when we didn’t have huge budget deficits. We were trailing the world economy even when our growth was artificially high because of Greenspan’s and Bush’s macro experiments. If you are a developed country, you will probably grow slowly because you are already developed. You don’t have to build empty cities the way China does.

The striking prediction here is that America’s growth rate will be as low as 2 percent for the next 5-10 years. For one second I thought Bloomberg was talking to El-Erian or Bill Gross. This is the “new normal” nonsense Pimco publicized in 2009. Fink was bashing Pimco’s new normal predictions just 4 months ago. Now he is making the same predictions. Is Laurence Fink trying to be Bill Gross?