Deflationary tides are lapping the shores of countries across the world and financial bubbles are set to burst everywhere, Vikram Mansharamani, a lecturer at Yale University, told CNBC on Thursday.
"I think it all started with the China investment bubble that has burst and that brought with it commodities and that pushed deflation around the world and those ripples are landing on the shore of countries literally everywhere," the high-profile author and academic said at the Global Financial Markets Forum in Abu Dhabi.
Price levels are already falling in parts of Europe. Inflation declined by an annualized 0.2 percent in the euro zone in February, according to an estimate from the European Union's statistical body.
Annualized inflation was flat in Japan in January (the latest month for which there is official data), but rose by a narrow 0.3 percent in the UK.
On Thusday, Mansharamani said that financial bubbles had been fueled by "cheap money" created by highly accommodative monetary policy across developed economies.
"I mean, we've got a bubble bursting, I would argue, in Australian housing markets — that is beginning to crack; South Africa — the whole economy; Canada — housing and the economy; Brazil. We can keep going on and on," the academic told CNBC.
Financial markets have suffered a rocky ride this year, with significant variation across the world. The US benchmark S&P 500 equity index is down 2.8 percent since the start of 2016, while China's Shanghai Composite index has tumbled more than 19 percent.
On Thursday, though, markets were in "risk-on" mode. The CBOE's VIX — a widely used indicator of risk aversion – dipped to its lowest level in 2016 and "safe-haven" US Treasury notes traded at three-week lows.
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