CoreMacro

Europe is hampered by a lower trend growth rate, but has room to grow faster than the US over the next two years. How can investors profit from this outlook?

Financial markets slumped with the tough talk that followed last week’s FOMC meeting, but investors should recognize that the tone of the Fed’s communications is conditioned upon the inflation backdrop. Once it improves, Chair Powell and his colleagues will be able to relax their rhetoric.

As the FOMC explicitly acknowledged this week, monetary policy operates with substantial lags. We see the risks to stocks as tilted to the upside over the next 6 months but are neutral on global equities over a 12-month horizon.

Provided that US inflation is due to excess demand rather than supply constraints, demand destruction will likely be needed to bring core inflation below 3.5%. Such growth contraction is positive for counter-cyclical currencies like the US dollar. In China, the Party's focus is to alleviate structural inequality and a long-term confrontation with the US; and authorities are not yet panicking about the cyclical state of the economy. Hence, an economic recovery is unlikely in the coming months.

Older workers have deserted the labour force in the US and the UK, but not so in the Euro area and Japan. The result is that wage inflation is red hot in the US and the UK, but not so in the Euro area and Japan. Hence, the Bank of Japan is right to remain a lone dove, the ECB must pivot from its uber-hawkish stance quite soon, but the Fed and the BoE must not pivot from their uber-hawkish stance too soon. We go through the major investment implications.

China's economy is about to experience demand-driven deflation. The lack of an economic recovery and falling producer prices will depress corporate profits and, hence, share prices. Beijing will allow the yuan to depreciate more to prop up its economy.

The ECB increased interest rates and announced the start of its balance sheet wind down; yet, markets took the news as a dovish outcome. Are we really getting close to the end of the ECB’s tightening campaign? How asset prices will react?

We remain constructive on the economy and equities in the near term because consumers show no sign of hunkering down, US homeowners are largely impervious to higher mortgage rates and our latest survey of storefront occupancies on Lower Fifth Avenue highlighted some encouraging developments.

Falling inflation will allow bond yields to decline in the major economies over the next few quarters. As such, we recommend that investors shift their duration stance from underweight to neutral over a 12 month-and-longer horizon and to overweight over a 6-month horizon. Structurally, however, a depletion of the global savings glut could put upward pressure on yields.

It’s time to go overweight Hungarian domestic bonds in an EM and European core bond portfolios. Currency investors should book profits on our long CZK / short HUF trade, which has generated 29.4% gains since its inception in June last year.