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Highlights Despite cooperating to reduce oil production and drain global oil inventories, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and Iran still compete at every level for dominance of the Gulf region's economic and geopolitical order. We have maintained that KSA's aggressive push to privatize (or de-nationalize) its state oil company - ARAMCO - is an extension of this battle. Now that a state-led Chinese consortium has emerged as a potential cornerstone investor in the $100 billion Saudi Armco initial public offering (IPO) expected next year, we believe a key element of KSA's strategy in the Persian Gulf's "security dilemma" is falling into place.1 Energy: Overweight. We are long the Dec/17 Brent $65/bbl calls vs. short the Dec/17 Brent $45/bbl puts at a net premium of -$0.47/bbl. This new recommendation was down 46.8%, which we initiated last week following our assessment of OPEC 2.0's strategy to reduce global oil inventories. We remain long the Dec/17 Brent vs. short Dec/18 Brent, which is up 94.7%. Our long GSCI position is down 4.5%; we have a 10% stop on this position. Base Metals: Neutral. Copper registered a 51k metric ton physical surplus in January, according to estimates from the International Copper Study Group. Precious Metals: Neutral. Gold retreated going into French elections over the weekend, indicating investors were not as fearful as some pundits. Our long volatility position is down 43.8%. Ags/Softs: Underweight: Reuters reported the Brazilian government will provide up to 500 million reals (~$159mm) to market this year's corn crop. An expected record harvest and weak export volumes prompted the action.2 Feature By aggressively courting Chinese investors for its potential record-breaking Aramco IPO next year, KSA doesn't just secure funding to pursue its goal of becoming the largest publicly traded vertically integrated oil company in the world. It tangibly expands the number of powerful interests in the world with a deep economic stake in its execution of Vision 2030, the grand plan to diversify away from its near-total dependence on oil revenues. China, too, benefits from this arrangement: By expanding its financial and economic commitments to KSA, it pursues its global investment and technology strategy, and gradually its standing as a "Great Power" with a vested interest in protecting those investments. These states jointly benefit from Aramco's expansion of its refining business into the Asian refined-product markets, which will remain the most heavily contested space in the oil market. It also does not hurt China, where crude oil production has been falling since June 2015 (Chart 1), to be financially invested in a petro-super-state like KSA, which has been supplying on average 14% of its imports over the same period (Chart 2). China's product demand will breach 12mm b/d this year, with gasoline demand growing some 300k b/d, according to the IEA. Overall product demand will grow close to 345k b/d, keeping China the premier growth market in the world for refined products. Investing in the refining system meeting this consumption - and Asia's other growing markets - therefore is attractive to Chinese companies on numerous fronts. Chart 1Chinese Oil Production Falling ... Chart 2... And Imports From KSA Steady Iran has yet to execute on its apparent strategy to attract FDI to its oil and gas sector, where the resource potential is of the same order of magnitude as KSA's. When combined with the development potential of Iraq, a neighboring petro-state, the potential of OPEC's "Shia Bloc" is enormous. Iran has the largest natural gas reserves in the world, and Iraq's oil endowment is second only to KSA's in terms of the vast low-cost, high-quality resource available for development. Yet Iran's success in lining up the investment and technical expertise required to develop its resource endowment as it approaches critical post-sanctions elections next month has been halting at best.3 Aside, that is, from deepening its relationship with Russia, which also is seeking desperately needed FDI in the wake of the oil-price collapse brought about by OPEC's market-share was during 2015 - 16. The KSA-Iran Security Dilemma In Context Chart 3Saudi Profligacy Has Continued In 2017 Before we get into the intricacies of energy geopolitics, a brief recap is in order.4 Prior to the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions against Iran beginning in 2015, KSA and OPEC benefited from an undersupplied oil market that kept oil prices above $100/bbl which allowed these states to increase domestic and military spending massively while experiencing few problems in oil exports or development. This can be seen in the evolution of KSA's fiscal breakeven oil prices, which increased dramatically in the lead-up to the 2014 price collapse (Chart 3), as production grew more slowly than spending. As the Saudi Manifa field came online in early 2014, global production expanded from various quarters, and it became apparent that sanctions against Iran would be lifted, KSA led OPEC into a market-share war. Oil prices fell from $100/bbl before OPEC's November 2014 meeting to below $30/bbl by the beginning of 2016. This strategy turned out to be a complete failure.5 We correctly predicted the failed market-share strategy would force an alliance between OPEC and non-OPEC petro-states - led by KSA and Russia, respectively - to cut production in the face of considerable market skepticism in the lead-up to OPEC's November 2016 Vienna meeting and in consultations with the Russian-led non-OPEC petro-states shortly thereafter.6 We remain convinced that this coalition, which we've dubbed OPEC 2.0, will extend its production cuts to the end of this year.7 As a result, OECD commercial inventories will decline by 10% or so, despite rising in Q1.8 Petro-State Balance Sheets Still Under Pressure The oil-price evolution described above buffeted petro-state budgets, particularly KSA's and Russia's. The pressures generated by this evolution hold the key to understanding where oil prices will go next. Finances: While both Saudi Arabia and Russia have managed to weather the decline in oil prices, the pain has been palpable. BCA's Frontier Market Strategy has detailed Saudi fiscal woes in detail.9 Based on their estimates, Saudi authorities will have enough reserves to defend the country's all-important currency peg for the next 18-24 months (Table 1). Without the peg, prices of imports would skyrocket. Table 1Saudi Arabia: Projected Debt Levels And Foreign Reserves Given that Saudi Arabia imports almost all of its consumer staples, such a price shock could lead to social unrest. Beyond the next two years, the government will have to rely on debt issuance to fund its deficits and focus its remaining foreign exchange resources on maintaining the peg. The problem is that this strategy will leave the country with just $350 billion in reserves by the end of 2018, lower than local currency broad money (Chart 4). At that point, confidence among locals and foreigners in the currency peg could shatter, leading to even greater capital flight than is already underway (Chart 5). Chart 4KSA: Forex Reserves Depleting Chart 5KSA: Capital Outflows Persist While Russia has weathered the storm much better, largely by allowing the ruble to depreciate, its foreign exchange reserves are down to 330 billion, the lowest figure since 2007 (Chart 6). OPEC 2.0's shale-focused strategy: The market strategy behind the OPEC 2.0 agreement is complex. The roughly 1.8 mm b/d of coordinated production cuts is supposed to draw down global storage by ~ 300 mm bbls by the end of 2017. This should lead to forward curves backwardating - a process that is clearly under way (Chart 7). According to BCA's Commodity & Energy Strategy, a backwardated forward curve is critical in slowing down the pace of tight oil production in the U.S. given the reliance of shale producers on hedging future production prices to lock in minimum revenue.10 Geopolitics: Countries with an unlimited resource like oil tend to be authoritarian regimes (Chart 8). This phenomenon is referred to as the "resource curse," and is well documented in political science. Chart 6Russia: Forex Reserves Depleting Chart 7Backwardation Under Way What does it have to do with geopolitics? Basically, it suggests that the main national security risk to energy-producing regimes is not each other but their own populations. In countries where the political leadership generates its wealth from the sale of natural resources, the citizenry becomes a de facto "cost center" requiring social benefits and security expenditures to ensure the unemployed remain peaceful. By contrast, manufacturing nations benefit from an industrious citizenry that is a "profit center" for government coffers. In this paradigm, energy-producing states face a primary security risk that is not external, but rather derives from their own under-utilized or restless populations. Thus, when the "unlimited resource" is re-priced for lower demand or greater global supply, the real risk becomes domestic unrest. At that moment, expensive geopolitical imperatives take a back seat to domestic stability. This explains the current détente between, on one side, Russia and the OPEC "Shia Bloc" (Iran and Iraq), and on the other, Saudi Arabia and its OPEC allies. Even with this détente, Saudi Arabia, its allies, and the "Shia Bloc" are finding it difficult to maintain fiscal spending that funds their still-massive social programs with prices trading in the low- to mid-$50/bbl range (Chart 9). Saudi's fiscal breakeven oil price is estimated to be $77.70/bbl this year by the IMF. Iran and Iraq require $60.70/bbl and $54/bbl, respectively, putting them in slightly better shape than their Gulf rival, but still in need of higher prices to sustain the spending required to quell social unrest.11 Chart 8Unlimited Resources Undermine Democracy Chart 9Oil Prices Too Low For National Budgets Chart 10Support For Putin Holding Up Given Russia's relatively superior domestic economic situation and political stability (Chart 10), we suspect that Moscow cares a little less about oil market rebalancing than Saudi Arabia. President Vladimir Putin will face reelection in less than a year, but he is unlikely to face a serious challenger. Even so, Russia still feels the pain of lower energy prices. Oil and gas revenues constituted 36% of state revenues last year, down from 50% in 2014, when prices were trading above $100/bbl. This pushed Russia's budget deficit out to more than 3% of GDP in 2016. According to The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, "even with planned spending cuts (the deficit) will still be more than 1% of GDP by 2019 ... Russia's Reserve Fund could be exhausted by the end of 2017, on the government's original forecast of an oil price of $40/barrel in 2017."12 Oil-Market Rebalancing Critical For KSA's Aramco IPO For Saudi Arabia, however, rebalancing is critical, which explains why it has over-delivered on the promised production cuts, while Russia and the "Shia Bloc" have dragged their feet (Chart 11 and Chart 12). Not only is the currency peg non-negotiable, but Riyadh's clear interest is oil-price stability in the lead-up to its Aramco IPO. It is not enough to attract a mega investor from China; the entire oil-investment community has to be convinced they are not pouring money into an enterprise that could lose value close on the heels of the IPO. Chart 11Saudis Cut Production More Than Russians ... Chart 12... Or The "Shia Bloc" To attract foreign capital at reasonable prices for Aramco's massive privatization, KSA must prove it can exert some control over the oil price "floor." As such, the Kingdom's motivation to stick to the OPEC 2.0 agreement is serious. In a joint report done by BCA's Geopolitical Strategy and Commodity & Energy Strategy last January, we argued that three factors are critical to this IPO:13 Moving downstream: Saudi Arabia intends to become a major global refiner with up to 10 million b/d of refining capacity (an addition of about 5 mm b/d of capacity). If realized, this volume of refining capacity would rival that of ExxonMobil's 6 mm+ b/d, the largest in the world. Because OPEC does not set quotas for refined-product exports, Saudi Arabia's shift downstream would allow it to capture higher revenues from international sales of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and other refined products. This could eventually mean that Saudi Arabia would fly above ongoing crude oil market-share wars. Instead, it could rely on its access to short-haul domestic supplies and state-of-the-art technology - Aramco's principal endowments - to command massive crack spreads, or the difference between the price of input, crude oil, and output, refined product. FDI wars: With estimates of its value hovering ~ $100 billion, the Aramco IPO expected next year will be the largest ever executed. It is likely to divert FDI that Iraq and Iran desperately need to revitalize their production, transportation, and refining infrastructure. This is a crucial long-term goal for Saudi Arabia. At the moment, its oil production dwarfs that of its "Shia Bloc" OPEC rivals. However, Iran and Iraq are projected to close the gap and potentially export even more oil than the Kingdom in future (Chart 13). Bringing China into the region: The U.S. deleveraging from the Middle East continues. President Donald Trump may have ordered cruise missile strikes against Syria, but he is not interested in getting bogged down in another land war in the region. Chart 14 speaks for itself. As such, Saudi Arabia is largely on its own when facing off against Iran, its regional rival. Appeals to Chinese state energy companies are therefore designed to give Beijing a stake in Saudi energy infrastructure. This would force China to start caring more about what happens to Saudi Arabia, as with Iraq, where it is heavily invested, and Iran, where it has long flirted with investing more. Chart 13"Shia Bloc" Gaining On KSA Chart 14U.S. Has Deleveraged From Middle East When we first penned our report, we were speculating on the China link. Since then, Beijing has created a consortium consisting of state-owned energy giants Sinopec and PetroChina and banks, led by the country's sovereign wealth fund, to compete in the expected $100 billion equity sale.14 Given the financial, economic, and geopolitical importance of the Aramco IPO, we continue to expect that Saudi Arabia will push to extend the OPEC 2.0 production cut when the group meets in Vienna on May 25. Judging by the commitments to the cuts thus far, the deal appears to be an agreement for Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies to continue to cut and for Russia and the "Shia Bloc" (Iran and Iraq) not to increase production.15 (Both of the latter states still have a lot of "skin in the game," so to speak.) As such, an extension of the deal is in the interests of KSA, Russia, and their respective allies. And, importantly, it will continue to provide a floor to oil prices. Meanwhile, downside and upside risks to supply continue. In terms of supply increase, the usual suspects -Libya and Nigeria - are working to increase production. In terms of supply decrease, we continue to worry about the dissolution of Venezuela as a functioning state and the potential that supply disruptions may occur. Bottom Line: Geopolitical drivers still support the continuation of OPEC 2.0's efforts to restrain production and draw down global oil stockpiles. As such, our positioning recommendations for an expected backwardation - i.e., long Dec/17 Brent vs. short Dec/18 Brent - and our fade of the option-market skew favoring put - the long Dec/17 $65/bbl Brent calls vs. short Dec/17 $45/bbl Brent puts - remain intact. Robert P. Ryan, Senior Vice President Commodity & Energy Strategy rryan@bcaresearch.com Marko Papic, Senior Vice President Geopolitical Strategy marko@bcaresearch.com 1 A "security dilemma" refers to a situation in which a state's pursuit of "security" through military strength and alliances leads its neighbors to respond in kind, triggering a spiral of distrust and tensions. Please see BCA Commodity & Energy Strategy and Geopolitical Strategy Special Report, "Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: Aramco And The Saudi Security Dilemma," dated January 14, 2016, available at ces.bcaresearch.com and gps.bcaresearch.com. NB: The $100-billion figure often attached to the estimated size of the IPO, which will seek to float 5% of Aramco, is a placeholder for the moment. There is considerable disagreement over the level at which the market will value Aramco, which some estimates significantly below the value assumed by the $100-billion estimate. We will be examining this in future research. 2 Please see "Brazil readies $159 million in corn subsidies amid record crop," Reuters, April 19, 2017, available at Reuters.com. 3 The New York Times provided an excellent summary of post-sanctions development recently in "Even Bold Foreign Investors Tiptoe in Iran," March 31, 2017. 4 For a summary of BCA Commodity & Energy Strategy recommendation performance, please contact your relationship manager. 5 Please see "The Game's Afoot, But Which One," for the consequences of OPEC's market-share war. It was published April 6, 2017, in BCA Research's Commodity & Energy Strategy, and is available at ces.bcaresearch.com. 6 Please see BCA Commodity & Energy Strategy Weekly Report, "Raising The Odds Of A KSA-Russia Oil-Production Cut," dated November 3, 2016, available at ces.bcaresearch.com. 7 Please see BCA Commodity & Energy Strategy Weekly Report, "OPEC-Russia Oil Deal On Track To Deliver," dated February 9, 2017, available at ces.bcaresearch.com. 8 Please see BCA Commodity & Energy Strategy Weekly Report, "OPEC 2.0 Cuts Will Be Extended Into 2017H2; Fade The Skew And Get Long Calls Vs. Short Puts," dated April 20, 2017, available at ces.bcaresearch.com. 9 Please see BCA Frontier Market Strategy Special Report, "Saudi Arabia: Short-Term Gain, Long-Term Pain," dated February 1, 2017, available at fms.bcaresearch.com. 10 Contango markets - where prices for prompt delivery are less than prices for deferred delivery - favor shale producers when the front of the WTI forward curve is ~ $50/bbl, and - all else equal - incentivizes them to hedge forward so as to lock in future revenues and maximize the number of rigs they deploy. In backwardated markets, however, the number of rigs a shale operator is able to deploy is lower, all else equal, which means the revenue they can lock in by hedging forward is lower. Please see BCA Commodity & Energy Strategy Weekly Report, "North American Oil Pipeline Buildout Complicates Price And Storage Expectations," dated February 16, 2017, available at ces.bcaresearch.com. 11 Please see the IMF, Regional Economic Outlook: Middle East and Central Asia, October 2016, Table 5. 12 Please see "Russia Oil Production Outlook to 2020," Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, February 2017. 13 Please see BCA Geopolitical Strategy and Commodity & Energy Strategy Special Report, "Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: Aramco And The Saudi Security Dilemma," dated January 14, 2016, available at ces.bcaresearch.com. 14 Please see "Exclusive: China gathers state-led consortium for Aramco IPO - sources," Reuters, dated April 19, 2017, availableat reuters.com. 15 In "OPEC 2.0 Cuts Will Be Extended Into 2017H2; Fade The Skew And Get Long Calls Vs. Short Puts," dated April 20, 2017, we noted, "Without pulling storage down to more normal levels, inventories remain too close to topping out, which puts markets at higher risk of the sort of price collapse seen in 2015-16. At the beginning of 2016, global oil markets were close to pricing in the approach of a full-storage event. In such an event, as global inventories approach capacity, prices trade below the cash-operating costs of the most expensive producers, until enough supply is forcibly knocked off line to drain excess stocks. This is an extremely high-risk scenario for states like KSA, Russia and their allies, which are heavily dependent on oil-export revenues to fund government budgets and much of the private sector. After the last such event at the beginning of 2016, these states were left reeling, as fiscal spending was slashed, projects were canceled and governments burned through foreign reserves in an effort to make up for lost revenue." This report is available at ces.bcaresearch.com. Investment Views and Themes Recommendations Strategic Recommendations Tactical Trades Commodity Prices and Plays Reference Table Trades Closed In 2017 Summary of Trades Closed in 2016
Highlights Financial markets have returned to 'risk on' in late April, after becoming overly gloomy on the growth, political and policy outlooks in recent months. There are also some worrying signs in our global forward-looking growth indicators for 2018, and Chinese policy is tightening. Nonetheless, investors read too much into the distorted U.S. first-quarter economic data. They also went too far in pricing out U.S. fiscal action. It is positive for risk assets that centrist candidate Macron is poised to win the French election and we do not see much risk for markets lurking in the German election. Italian elections could be troublesome, but that is a story for next year. The fact that China finally appears willing to apply pressure to Pyongyang is good news. North Korea might be persuaded to freeze its nuclear and missile programs in exchange for a non-aggression pact from the U.S. and a lifting of sanctions. Disappointing U.S. Q1 real GDP growth largely reflects weather and seasonal adjustment factors. The deceleration in bank credit growth is also temporary. The window for reflation trades will remain open for most of this year because the underlying economic and profit fundamentals remain constructive. Importantly, signs of improving pricing power in the U.S. corporate sector are finally emerging, which should allow margins to expand somewhat in the coming quarters. The bond rally has depressed yields to a level that makes fixed-income instruments highly vulnerable to a reversal of the factors that sparked the rally. Market expectations for the fed funds rate are far too benign. The ECB will announce the next tapering step later this year, and may remove the negative deposit rate. But the central bank will not be in a position to lift the refi rate for some time. Yield spreads will shift in a way that allows one last upleg in the U.S. dollar. The recent pullback in oil prices will not last, as OPEC and Russia manage global stockpiles lower this year. Feature Chart I-1Reflation Trades Returning? Traders and investors gave up on the global reflation story in early April, sending the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield below the year's trading range. Missile strikes, European elections and U.S. saber rattling regarding North Korea lifted the allure of safe havens such as government bonds (Chart I-1). At the same time, the Fed was unwilling to revise up the 'dot plot', doubts grew over the ability of the Trump Administration to deliver any stimulus and U.S. data releases disappointed. The major equity indexes held up well against the onslaught of bad news, but looked increasingly vulnerable as April wore on. The market gloom was overdone in our view, and it appears that financial markets have now returned to a 'risk on' phase. It is difficult to forecast the ebb and flow of geopolitical news so we cannot rule out another bout of risk aversion. Nonetheless, the global economic backdrop remains upbeat and tensions regarding North Korea have eased. President Trump also unveiled his Administration's tax reform plan, raising hopes of a fiscal boost to the economy. Moreover, investors have read too much into the distorted U.S. first quarter data, and our corporate pricing power indicators support our constructive earnings view in 2017. There are clouds hanging over the outlook for 2018, but the backdrop will favor risk assets for most of this year. Investors should remain overweight equities versus bonds and cash, and bullish the dollar. Geopolitics Weigh On Risk Tolerance President Trump's military show of force in Asia and comments about "losing patience" with North Korea have the world on edge. The U.S. has acted tough with the regime before, but nothing beyond economic sanctions ever materialized. The balance of power vis-à-vis China and the military threat to South Korea made North Korea a stalemate. Nonetheless, our geopolitical team argues that the calculus of the standoff is changing. Most importantly, the rogue regime is getting closer to being capable of hitting the U.S. with long-range missiles. Second, China is unhappy with the increased U.S. military presence in its backyard that North Korea is inviting. China also sees North Korea's missile tests as a threat to its own security. Third, the U.S. is prepared to use the threat of trade sanctions as leverage with Beijing. It is demanding that China use its own economic leverage to convince North Korea to freeze its nuclear and missile programs. We do not believe that an attack on North Korea is imminent. But doing nothing is not an option either. Our base case is that the U.S. military's muscle-flexing is designed to force North Korea to the negotiating table. The fact that China finally appears willing to apply pressure to Pyongyang is good news. Over the next four years, the North might be persuaded to freeze its nuclear and missile programs in exchange for a non-aggression pact from the U.S. and a lifting of sanctions. The safe-haven bid in the Treasury market will moderate if Kim Jong-un agrees to negotiations. That said, this is probably North Korea's last chance to show it can be pragmatic. A failure of negotiations would induce a real crisis in which the U.S. contemplates unilateral action. It would be a bad sign if North Korea's long-range missile tests continue, are successful, and show greater distances. Chart I-2Macron Appears Set For Victory Turning to Europe, investors breathed a sigh of relief following the first round of the French Presidential election. The pre-election polls turned out to be correct, and our Geopolitical Team has no reason to doubt the polls regarding the second round (Chart I-2). We expect Macron to sweep to victory on May 7 because Le Pen will struggle to get any voters from the candidates exiting the race. What should investors expect of a Macron presidency? A combination of President Macron and a right-leaning National Assembly should be able to accomplish some reforms. Several prominent center-right figures have already come out in support of Macron, perhaps to throw their name in the ring for the next prime minister. This is positive for the markets as it means that French economic policy will be run by the center-right, with an ultra-Europhile as president. Over in the U.K., the big news in April was Prime Minister Theresa May's decision to hold a snap election, which reduces the risk of a "hard Brexit". The current slim 12-seat majority that the Conservatives hold in Parliament has made May highly dependent on a small band of hardline Tories who would rather see negotiations break down than acquiesce to any of the EU's demands, including that the U.K. pay the remaining £60 billion portion of its contribution to the EU's 2014-20 budget. If the Conservatives are able to increase their seats in Parliament - as current opinion polls suggest is likely - May will have greater flexibility in reaching an agreement with Brussels and will face less of a risk that Parliament shoots down the final deal. U.S. Fiscal Policy: Positive For 2017, But Long-Term Negative Chart I-3Long-Term U.S. Budget Pressures The drama will be no less interesting in Washington in the coming weeks. As we go to press, Congress is struggling to pass a bill to keep the U.S. government running through the end of fiscal year 2017 (the deadline is the end of April). We expect a deal will get done, but a partial government shutdown lasting a few weeks could occur. Separately, Congress will need to approve an increase in the debt ceiling by July-September in order for the Treasury to avoid defaulting on payments. Both events could see temporary safe-haven flows into Treasurys. However, markets may have gone too far in pricing-out tax cuts or fiscal stimulus. For example, high tax-rate companies have given back all of their post-election equity gains. Even if Republicans are unable to overhaul the tax code, this will not prevent them from simply cutting corporate and personal taxes. "Dynamic scoring" will be used to support the argument that the tax cuts will self-funding through faster growth. We also expect that Trump will get his way on at least a modest amount of infrastructure spending. The so-called Trump trades may wither again in 2018, but we see a window this year in which the stock-to-bond total return ratio lifts as growth expectations rebound. Looking further ahead, it seems likely that the U.S. budget deficit is headed significantly higher. Health care and pension cost pressures related to population aging are well known (Chart I-3). A recent Special Report by BCA's Martin Barnes highlighted that "it is not reasonable to believe that there can be tax cuts and increases in defense spending and domestic security, while protecting entitlement programs and preventing a massive rise in the budget deficit."1 There is simply not enough non-defense discretionary spending to cut. Larger U.S. Federal budget deficits could lead to a widening fiscal risk premium in Treasury yields, although that may take years to show up. Perhaps more importantly, the U.S. government sector will be a larger drain on the global pool of available savings in the coming years. We highlight in this month's Special Report, beginning on page 20, that there are several key macro inflection points under way that will temper the "global savings glut" and begin to place upward pressure on global bond yields. A Temporary Soft Patch Or Something Worse? The first quarter GDP report for the U.S. is due out as we go to press, and growth is widely expected to be quite weak. The retail sales and PCE consumer spending data have fed concerns that the U.S. economy is running out of gas, despite the surge in the survey data such as the ISM. We believe that growth fears are overdone. Financial markets should be accustomed to weak readings on first quarter GDP. Over the past 22 years, the first quarter has been the weakest of the four on 12 occasions, or 55% of the time. Second quarter GDP growth has been faster than Q1 growth 70% of the time. A large part of the depressed Q1 GDP growth rate and lackluster "hard data" readings likely reflect poor seasonal adjustment and weather distortions. The "soft" survey data are more consistent with the labor market. Aggregate hours worked managed to increase by 1.5% at an annualized rate in Q1. If GDP growth really was barely above zero, this would imply an outright decline in the level of labor productivity. Even in a world where structural productivity growth is lower than it was in the past, this strikes us as rather implausible. The March reading of the Conference Board's Leading Economic Indicator provided no warning that underlying growth is about to trail off, although a couple of the regional Fed surveys have pulled back from their recent highs. With April shaping up to be warmer than usual across the U.S., we expect a bounce back in the weather-impacted "hard" data in May and June. What about the slowdown in commercial and industrial loan growth and corporate bond issuance late in 2016 and into early 2017? This is a worry, but it partly reflects the lagged effects of the contraction in capital spending in the energy patch. C&I loan growth is still responding to the surge in defaults that resulted from the energy sector's 2014 collapse. Now that the defaults have waned, this process will soon go into reverse. Higher profits more recently have permitted these firms to pay back old bank loans, while also enabling them to finance new capital expenditures using internally-generated funds. In addition, the rising appetite for corporate debt has allowed more companies to access the bond market. According to Bloomberg, the U.S. leveraged-loan market saw $434 bn in issuance in Q1, the highest level on record (Chart I-4). The rest we chalk up to uncertainty surrounding the U.S. election. The recent spikes in the political uncertainty index correspond with the U.K.'s vote to leave the European Union as well as the U.S. election in November. There has been a close correlation between these spikes and the deceleration in C&I loan growth. CEOs are also holding back on capex in anticipation of new tax breaks from Congress. The good news is that bond issuance has rebounded strongly in January and February of this year (Chart I-5). The soft March U.S. CPI release also appeared to be quirky, showing a rare decline in the core price level in March (Chart I-6). However, the March reading followed two months of extremely strong gains and it still appears as though measures of core inflation put in a cyclical bottom in early 2015. While our CPI diffusion index is still below zero, signaling that inflation is likely to remain soft during the next couple of months, it would be premature to suggest that the gradual uptrend in core inflation has reversed. Chart I-4U.S. Bank Credit Slowdown Is Temporary Chart I-5U.S. Corporate Bond Issuance Is Rebounding Chart I-6U.S. Inflation: Sogginess Won't Last Global Economic Data Still Upbeat For the major industrialized economies as a group, the so-called "hard" data are moving in line with the "soft" survey data for the most part. For example, retail sales growth continues to accelerate, reaching 4½% in February on a year-over-year basis (Chart I-7). This follows the sharp improvement in consumer confidence. Manufacturing production growth is also accelerating to the upside, in line with the PMIs. The global manufacturing sector is rebounding smartly after last year's recession that was driven by the collapse in oil prices and a global inventory correction. Readers may be excused for jumping to the conclusion that the rebound is largely in the energy space, but this is not true. Production growth in the energy sector is close to zero on a year-over-year basis, and is negative on a 3-month rate of change basis (Chart I-8). The growth pickup has been in the other major sectors, including consumer-related goods, capital goods and technology. In the U.S., non-energy production has boomed over the six months to March (Chart I-9). Chart I-7Global Pick-Up On Track Chart I-8Manufacturing Rebound Is Not About Energy Chart I-9U.S.: Non-Energy Production Surging The weak spot on the global data front has been capital goods orders (Chart I-7). We only have data for the big three economies - the U.S., Japan and the Eurozone - but growth is near zero or slightly negative for all three. These data are perplexing because they are at odds with an acceleration in the production of capital goods (noted above) and a pickup in capital goods imports for 20 economies (Chart I-7, third panel). Improving CEO sentiment, accelerating profit growth and activity surveys all suggest that capital goods orders will catch up in the coming months. That said, one risk to our positive capex outlook in the U.S. is that the Republicans fail to deliver on their promises. This is not our base case, but current capex plans could be cancelled or put on indefinite hold were there to be no corporate tax cuts or immediate expensing of capital spending. As for China, the economic data are holding up well and deflationary pressures have eased. Fears of a debt crisis have also ebbed somewhat. That said, fiscal and monetary stimulus is fading and it is a worrying sign that money and credit growth have decelerated because they tend to lead production. Our China experts believe that growth will be solid in the first half of the year, but they would not be surprised to see a deceleration in real GDP growth in the second half that would weigh on commodity prices. Bond Market Vulnerable To Fed Re-Rating A rebound in the U.S. activity data in the coming months should keep the Fed on track to raise rates at least two more times in 2017. A May rate hike is unlikely, but we would not rule out June. The bond market is vulnerable to a re-rating of the path for the fed funds rate because only 45 basis points of tightening is priced for the next 12 months. This is far too low if growth rebounds as we expect. The FOMC also announced that it intends to start shrinking its balance sheet later this year by ceasing to reinvest both its MBS and Treasury holdings. Our bond strategists do not think this by itself will have much of an impact on Treasurys because yields will continue to be closely tied to realized inflation and the expected number of rate hikes during the next 12 months (Chart I-10). Fed policymakers are trying to de-emphasize the size of the balance sheet and would rather investors focus on the fed funds rate to assess the stance of monetary policy. It is a different story for mortgage-backed securities, however, where spreads will be pressured wider by the lack of Fed purchases. All four of our main forward-looking global economic indicators appear to have topped out, except the Global Leading Economic Indicator (GLEI), suggesting that the period of maximum growth acceleration has past (Chart I-11). Nonetheless, all four are still consistent with robust growth. They would have to weaken significantly before they warned of a sustained bond bull market. Chart I-10Shrinking Fed Balance Sheet: ##br##Bearish For Bonds? Chart I-11Leading Indicators: ##br##Some Worrying Signs The rapid decline in the diffusion index, based on the 22 countries that comprise our GLEI, is the most concerning at the moment. The LEIs for two major economies and two emerging economies dipped slightly in February, such that roughly half of the country LEIs rose and half fell in the month. While it is too early to hit the panic button, the diffusion index is worth watching closely; a decline below 50 for several months would indicate that a peak in the GLEI is approaching. The bottom line is that global bond yields have overshot on the downside: underlying U.S. growth is not as weak as the Q1 figures suggest; market expectations for the fed funds rate are too benign; the Republicans will push ahead with tax cuts and infrastructure spending; the global economy has healthy momentum, and the majority of the items on our Duration Checklist suggest that the bond bear market will resume; the ECB will announce another tapering of its asset purchase program this autumn, placing upward pressure on the term premium in bond yields across the major markets; and the Treasury and bund markets no longer appear as oversold as they did after the rapid run-up in yields following last November's U.S. elections. Large short positions have largely unwound. For the U.S., we expect that the 10-year yield to rise to the upper end of the recent 2.3%-2.6% trading range in the next couple of months, before eventually breaking out on the way to the 2.8%-3% area by year-end. We recommend keeping duration short of benchmarks within fixed-income portfolios. One Last Leg In The Dollar Bull Market Chart I-12ECB In No Hurry To Lift Rates While we see upside for the money market curve in the U.S., the same cannot be said in the Eurozone. The economic data have undoubtedly been robust. The composite PMI is booming and capital goods orders are in a clear uptrend. Led by gains in both manufacturing and services, the composite PMI rose from 56.4 in March to 56.7 in April, a six-year high. The current PMI reading is easily consistent with over 2.0% real GDP growth (Chart I-12). This compares favorably to the sub-1% estimates of trend growth in the euro area. Private sector credit growth reached 2½% earlier this year, the fastest pace since July 2009. Despite this good news, the ECB is in no rush to lift interest rates. The central bank will taper its asset purchase program further in 2018, but ECB President Draghi has made it clear that he will not raise the refi rate until well after all asset purchases have been completed, which probably will not be until late 2019 at the earliest (although the ECB could eliminate the negative deposit rate to ease the pressure on banks). Unemployment is still a problem in Spain and Italy, while core CPI inflation fell back to just 0.7% in March. The euro could strengthen further in the near term if Macron wins the second round of the French elections, easing euro break-up fears. Nonetheless, we expect the euro to trend lower on a medium-term horizon versus the dollar as rate expectations move further in favor of the greenback. Some real rate divergence is already priced into money and currency markets, but there is room for forward real spreads to widen further, possibly pushing the euro to parity versus the dollar before this cycle is over. We are also bullish the dollar versus the yen for similar reasons. On a broad trade-weighted basis, we still expect the dollar to rally by another 10%. Positive Signs For U.S. Corporate Pricing Power Chart I-13U.S. Corporations Gaining Pricing Power Turning to the equity market, it is still early days for Q1 U.S. earnings, but the results so far are positive for a pro-risk asset allocation. After a disappointing Q4, positive Q1 earnings surprises for the S&P 500 are on track to match their highest level in two years, with revenue surprises also materially higher than previous quarters. At the industry level, banks and capital goods companies stand out: the former registered an earnings beat of nearly 8%, and it was nearly 12% for the latter. We highlighted the positive 2017 outlook for U.S. corporate profits in our March 2017 Monthly Report. Earnings growth is in a catch-up phase following last year's profit recession, which was related to energy prices and a temporary slowdown in nominal GDP growth relative to aggregate labor costs. Proprietary indicators from our sister publication, the U.S. Equity Sectors Strategy service, confirm our thesis. First, deflation pressures appear to be abating. A modest revival in corporate pricing power is underway according to our Pricing Power Proxy (Chart I-13). It is constructed from proxies for selling prices in almost 50 industries. Importantly, the rise in the Proxy is broadly-based across industries (as shown by the diffusion index in the chart). As a side note, the Profit Proxy provides some evidence that recent softness in core CPI inflation will not last. Second, the upward march of wage growth appears to be taking a breather (Chart I-13). Average hourly earnings growth has softened in recent months. Broader measures, such as the Atlanta Fed Wage Tracker, tell a similar story. We do not expect wage growth to decelerate much given tightness in the labor market. Nonetheless, the combination of firming pricing power and contained wage growth (for now) suggests that margins will continue to expand modestly in the first half of the year. Our model even suggests that U.S. EPS growth has a very good shot at matching perpetually-optimistic bottom-up estimates for 2017 (Chart I-14). Many companies have supported per share profits in this expansion via share buybacks, often funded through debt issuance. This has generated some angst that companies are sacrificing long-term earnings growth potential for short-term EPS growth. This appeared to be the case early in the expansion, but the story is less compelling today. Chart I-15 compares the cumulative dollar value of equity buybacks and dividends in this expansion with the previous three expansion phases. The cumulative dollar values are divided by cumulative nominal GDP to make the data comparable across cycles. By this metric, capital spending has lagged previous expansion, but not by much. While capital spending growth has been weak, the same is true for GDP. Chart I-14U.S. Profit Model Is Very Upbeat Chart I-15U.S. Corporate Finance Cycle Comparison Dividend payments have been stronger than the three previous expansions. Buyback activity was also more aggressive compared with the 1990s and 2000s, although repurchase activity has been roughly in line with the expansion that ended in 2007. Net equity issuance since 2009, which includes the impact of IPOs, share buybacks and M&A activity, has not been out of line with previous expansions (positive values shown in Chart I-15 represent net equity withdrawals). CFOs have not been radically different in this cycle in terms of apportioning funds between capital spending and returning cash to shareholders. Nonetheless, buybacks have boosted EPS growth by almost 2% over the past year according to our proxy (Chart I-16). We expect this tailwind to continue given the positive reading from our Capital Structure Preference Indicator (third panel). Firms have a financial incentive to issue debt and buy back shares when the indicator is above zero. Stronger global growth should continue to power an acceleration in corporate earnings outside the U.S. over the remainder of the year. Chart I-17 shows that the global earnings revision ratio has turned positive for the first time in six years, implying that analysts have been behind the curve in revising up profit projections. Our profit indicators remain constructive for the U.S., Eurozone and Japan. Chart I-16Incentive To Buy Back ##br##Stock Remains Strong Chart I-17Global Profit ##br##Growth On The Upswing It is disconcerting that the rally in oil prices has faltered in recent days as investors worry that increased U.S. shale production will thwart OPEC's plans to trim bloated inventories. A breakdown in oil prices could spark a major correction in the broader equity market. Indeed, commercial oil inventories finished the first quarter with a minimal draw. The aim of last year's agreement between OPEC and Russia to remove some 1.8mn b/d of oil production from the market in 2017 H1 was to get visible inventories down to five-year average levels. They are well short of that goal. Without trimming stockpiles to more normal levels, storage capacity remains too close to topping out, which raises the risk of another price collapse. This is an extremely high-risk scenario for states like Saudi Arabia, Russia and their allies, which are heavily dependent on oil-export revenues to fund government budgets and much of the private sector. This is the reason why our commodity strategists expect the OPEC/Russia production cuts to be extended when OPEC meets on May 25. This will significantly raise the odds that OECD commercial oil stocks will be drawn down to more normal levels. We expect WTI and Brent to trade on either side of $60/bbl by December, and to average $55/bbl to 2020. Investment Conclusions Financial markets have returned to 'risk on' in late April, after becoming overly gloomy on the growth, political and policy outlooks in recent months. Admittedly, some of the U.S. data have been disappointing given the extremely upbeat survey numbers. There are also some worrying signs in our global forward-looking growth indicators, and Chinese policy is tightening. Nonetheless, investors read too much into the distorted U.S. economic data in the first quarter. They also went too far in pricing out U.S. fiscal action. As for European political risk, centrist candidate Macron is poised to win the French election and we do not see much risk for markets lurking in the German election. There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the economic and profit outlook in 2018. Nonetheless, we believe that the window for reflation trades will remain open for most of this year because the underlying economic and profit fundamentals are constructive. The passage of market-friendly fiscal policies in the U.S. later in 2017 will be icing on the cake. Perhaps more importantly, we are finally seeing signs that pricing power in the U.S. corporate sector is improving, allowing margins to expand somewhat in the coming quarters. Our profit models remain upbeat for the major advanced economies and for China. It has been frustrating for those investors looking for an equity buying opportunity. Despite the surge in defensive assets such as gold and Treasurys, the major equity bourses did not correct by much. Value remains stretched in all of the risk asset classes. Nonetheless, investors should stay positioned for another upleg in the stock-to-bond total return ratio in the coming months. Perhaps the largest risk lies in the bond market. The rally has depressed yields to a level that makes bonds highly vulnerable to a reversal of the factors that sparked the rally. Within an underweight allocation to fixed-income in balanced portfolios, investors should overweight investment- and speculative-grade corporate bonds in the U.S. and U.K. We are more cautious on Eurozone corporates as the ECB's support for that sector will moderate. Looking ahead to next year, our bond strategists foresee a shift to underweight credit given the advanced nature of the releveraging cycle in the U.S. corporate sector. Our other recommendations include: Within global government bond portfolios, overweight JGBs and underweight Treasurys. Gilts and core Eurozone bonds are at benchmark. Underweight the periphery of Europe. Overweight European and Japanese equities versus the U.S. in currency-hedged terms. Continue to favor defensive over cyclical equity sectors in the U.S. for now, but a shift may be required later this year. Overweight the dollar versus the other major currencies. Stay cautious on EM bonds, stocks and currencies. Overweight small cap stocks versus large in the U.S. market. Recent underperformance is a buying opportunity. Value has improved and cyclical conditions favor small caps. Stay exposed to oil-related assets, and favor oil to base metals within commodity portfolios. Mark McClellan Senior Vice President The Bank Credit Analyst April 27, 2017 Next Report: May 25, 2017 1 Please see BCA Special Report, "U.S. Fiscal Policy: Facts, Fallacies and Fantasies," dated April 5, 207, available at bca.bcaresearch.com II. Beware Inflection Points In The Secular Drivers Of Global Bonds The fundamental drivers of the low rate world are considered by many to be structural, and thus likely to keep global equilibrium bond yields quite depressed by historical standards for years to come. However, some of the factors behind ultra-low interest rates have waned, while others have reached an inflection point. The age structure of world population is transitioning from a period in which aging added to the global pool of savings to one in which aging will begin to drain that pool. Global investment needs will wane along with population aging, but the majority of the effect on equilibrium interest rates is in the past. In contrast, the demographic effects that will depress desired savings are still to come. The net impact will be bond-bearish. Moreover, the massive positive labor supply shock, following the integration of China and Eastern Europe into the world's effective labor force, is over. Indeed, this shock is heading into reverse as the global working-age population ratio falls. This may improve labor's bargaining power, sparking a shift toward using more capital in the production process and thereby placing upward pressure on global real bond yields. It is too early to declare globalization dead, but the neo-liberal trading world order that has been in place for decades is under attack. This could be inflationary if it disrupts global supply chains. Anti-globalization policies could paradoxically be positive for capital spending, at least for a few years. As for China, the fundamental drivers of its savings capacity appear to rule out a return to the days when the country was generating a substantial amount of excess savings. Technological advance will remain a headwind for real wage gains, but at least the transition to a world that is less labor-abundant will boost workers' ability to negotiate a larger share of the income pie. We are not making the case that real global bond yields are going to quickly revert to pre-Lehman averages. Global yields could even drop back to previous lows in the event of another recession. Nonetheless, from a long-term perspective, current market expectations for bond yields are too low. Investors should have a bond-bearish bias on a medium- and long-term horizon. In the September 2016 The Bank Credit Analyst, we summarized the key drivers behind the major global macroeconomic disequilibria that have resulted in deflationary pressure, policy extremism, dismal productivity, and the lowest bond yields in recorded history (Chart II-1). The disequilibria include income inequality, the depressed wage share of GDP, lackluster capital spending, and excessive savings. Chart II-1Global Disequilibria The fundamental drivers of the low bond yield world are now well documented and understood by investors. These drivers generally are considered to be structural, and thus likely to keep global equilibrium bond yields and interest rates at historically low levels for years to come according to the consensus. Based on discussions with BCA clients, it appears that many have either "bought into" the secular stagnation thesis or, at a minimum, have adopted the view that growth headwinds preclude any meaningful rise in bond yields. However, bond investors might have been lulled into a false sense of security. Yields will not return to pre-Lehman norms anytime soon, but some of the factors behind the low-yield world have waned, while others have reached an inflection point. Most importantly, the age structure of world population is transitioning from a period in which aging added to the global pool of savings to one in which aging will begin to drain that pool. We have reached the tipping point. Equilibrium real bond yields will gradually move higher as a result. But before we discuss what is changing, it is important to review the drivers of today's macro disequilibria. Several of them predate the Great Financial Crisis, including demographic trends, technological advances, and the integration of China's massive workforce and excess savings into the global economy. Ultra-Low Rates: How Did We Get Here? (A) Demographics And Global Savings Chart II-2Global Shifts In The Saving ##br##And Investment Curves The so-called Global Savings Glut has been a bullish structural force for bonds for the past couple of decades. We won't go through all of the forces behind the glut, but a key factor is population aging in the advanced economies. Ex-ante desired savings rose as baby boomers entered their high-income years. The Great Financial Crisis only served to reinforce the desire to save, given the setback in the value of boomers' retirement nest eggs.1 The corporate sector also began to save more following the crisis. Even more importantly, the surge in China's trade surplus since the 1990s had to be recycled into the global pool of savings. While China's rate of investment was very high, its propensity to save increased even faster, resulting in a swollen external surplus and a massive net outflow of capital. Other emerging economies also made the adjustment from net importers of capital to net exporters following the Asian crisis in the late 1990s. By leaning into currency appreciation, these countries built up huge foreign exchange reserves that had to be recycled abroad. In theory, savings must equal investment at the global level and real interest rates shift to ensure this equilibrium (Chart II-2). China's excess savings, together with a greater desire to save in the developed countries, represented a shift in the saving schedule to the right. The result was downward pressure on global interest rates. (B) Demographics And Global Capital Spending Demographics and China's integration also affected the investment side of the equation. A slower pace of labor force growth in the developed countries resulted in a permanently lower level of capital spending relative to GDP. Slower consumer spending growth, as a result of a more moderate expansion in the working-age population, meant a reduced appetite for new factories, malls, and apartment buildings. Chart II-3 shows that the growth rate of global capital spending that is required to maintain a given capital-to-output ratio has dropped substantially, due to the dramatic slowdown in the growth of the world's working-age population.2 Keep in mind that this estimate refers only to the demographic component of investment spending. Actual capital expenditure growth will not be as weak as Chart II-3 suggests because firms will want to adopt new technologies for competitive or environmental reasons. Nonetheless, the point is that the structural tailwind for global capex from the post-war baby boom has disappeared. Chart II-3Demographics Are A Structural Headwind For Global Capex (C) Labor Supply Shock And Global Capital Spending While the working-age population ratio peaked in the developed countries years ago, it is a different story at the global level (Chart II-4). The integration of the Chinese and Eastern European workforces into the global labor pool during the 1990s and 2000s resulted in an effective doubling of global labor supply in a short period of time. Relative prices must adjust in the face of such a large boost in the supply of labor relative to capital. The sudden abundance of cheap labor depressed real wages from what they otherwise would have been, thus incentivizing firms to use more labor and less capital at the margin. The combination of slower working-age population growth in the advanced economies and a surge in the global labor force resulted in a decline in desired global capital spending. In terms of Chart II-2, the leftward shift of the investment schedule reinforced the impact of the savings impulse in placing downward pressure on global interest rates. (D) Labor Supply Shock And Income Inequality The wave of cheap labor also aggravated the trend toward greater inequality in the advanced economies and the downward trend in labor's share of the income pie (Chart II-5). In theory, a surge in the supply of labor is a positive "supply shock" that benefits both developed and developing countries. However, a recent report by David Autor and Gordon Hanson3 highlighted that trade agreements in the past were incremental and largely involved countries with similar income levels. The sudden entry of China to the global trade arena, involving a massive addition to the effective global stock of labor, was altogether different. The report does not argue that trade has become a "bad" thing. Rather, it points out that the adjustment costs imposed on the advanced economies were huge and long-lasting, as Chinese firms destroyed entire industries in developed countries. The lingering adjustment phase contributed to greater inequality in the major countries. Management was able to use the threat of outsourcing to gain the upper hand in wage negotiations. The result has been a rise in the share of income going to high-income earners in the Advanced Economies, at the expense of low- and middle-income earners (Chart II-6). The same is true, although to a lesser extent, in the emerging world. Chart II-4Working-Age Population Ratios Have Peaked Chart II-5Labor Share Of Income Has Dropped Chart II-6Hollowing Out Greater inequality, in turn, has weighed on aggregate demand and equilibrium interest rates because a larger share of total income flowed to the "rich" who tend to save more than the low- and middle-income classes. (E) The Dark Side Of Technology Advances in technology also contributed to rising inequality. In theory, new technologies hurt some workers in the short term, but benefit most workers in the long run because they raise national income. However, there is evidence that past major technological shocks were associated with a "hollowing out" or U-shaped pattern of employment. Low- and high-skilled employment increased, but the proportion of mid-skilled workers tended to shrink. Wages for both low- and mid-skilled labor did not keep up with those that were highly-skilled, leading to wider income disparity. Today, technology appears to be resulting in faster, wider and deeper degrees of hollowing-out than in previous periods of massive technological change. This may be because machines are not just replacing manual human tasks, but cognitive ones too. A recent IMF report made the case that technology and global integration played a dominant role in labor's declining fortunes. Technology alone explains about half of the drop in the labor share of income in the developed countries since 1980.4 Falling prices for capital goods, information and communications technology in particular, have facilitated the expansion of global value chains as firms unbundled production into many tasks that were distributed around the world in a way that minimized production costs. Chart II-7 highlights that the falling price of capital goods in the advanced economies went hand-in-hand with rising participation in global supply chains since 1990. Falling capital goods prices also accelerated the automation of routine tasks, contributing especially to job destruction in the developed (high-wage) economies. In other words, firms in the developed world either replaced workers with machinery in areas where technology permitted, or outsourced jobs to lower-wage countries in areas that remained labor-intensive. Both trends undermined labor's bargaining power, depressed labor's share of income, and contributed to inequality. The effects of technology, global integration, population aging and China's economic integration are demonstrated in Chart II-8. The world working-age-to-total population ratio rose sharply beginning in the late 1990s. This resulted in an upward trend in China's investment/GDP ratio, and a downward trend in the G7. The upward trend in the G7 capital stock-per-capita ratio began to slow as a result, before experiencing an unprecedented contraction after the Great Recession and Financial Crisis. Chart II-7Economic Integration And ##br##Falling Capital Goods Prices Chart II-8Macro Impact Of ##br##Labor Supply Shock The result has been a deflationary global backdrop characterized by demand deficiency and poor potential real GDP growth, both of which have depressed equilibrium global interest rates over the past 20 to 25 years. Transition Phase Chart II-9Working-Age Population ##br##To Shrink In G7 And China It would appear easy to conclude that these trends will be with us for another few decades because the demographic trends will not change anytime soon. Nonetheless, on closer inspection the global economy is transitioning from a period when cyclical economic pressures and all of the structural trends were pushing equilibrium interest rates in the same direction, to a period in which the economic cycle is becoming less bond-friendly and some of the secular drivers of low interest rates are gradually changing direction. First, the massive labor supply shock of the past few decades is over. The world working-age population ratio has peaked according to United Nations estimates. This ratio is already declining in the major advanced economies and is in the process of topping out in China. The absolute number of working-age people will shrink in China and the G7 countries over the next five years, although it will continue to grow at a low rate for the world as a whole (Chart II-9). Unions are unlikely to make a major comeback, but a backdrop that is less labor-abundant should gradually restore some worker bargaining power, especially as economies regain full employment. The resulting upward pressure on real wages will support capital spending as firms substitute toward capital and away from (increasingly expensive) labor. Consumer demand will also receive a boost if inequality moderates and the labor share of income begins to rise. Globalization On The Back Foot Chart II-10Globalization Peaking? Second, it is too early to declare globalization dead, but the neo-liberal trading world order that has been in place for decades is under attack. Global exports appear to have peaked relative to GDP and average tariffs have ticked higher (Chart II-10). The World Trade Organization has announced that the number of new trade restrictions or impediments outweighed the number of trade liberalizing initiatives in 2016. The U.K. appears willing to sacrifice trade for limits to the free movement of people. The new U.S. Administration has ditched the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and is threatening to impose punitive tariffs on some trading partners. Anti-globalization policies could paradoxically be positive for capital spending, at least for a few years. If the U.S. were to impose high tariffs on China, for example, it would make a part of the Chinese capital stock redundant overnight. In order for the global economy to produce the same amount of goods and services as before, the U.S. and other countries would need to invest more. Any unwinding of globalization would also be inflationary as it would disrupt international supply chains. Demographics And Saving: From Tailwind To Headwind... Third, the impact of savings in the major advanced economies and China on global interest rates will change direction as well. In the developed world, aggregate household savings will come under downward pressure as boomers increasingly shift into retirement. Economists are fond of employing the so-called life-cycle theory of consumer spending. According to this theory, consumers tend to smooth out lifetime spending by accumulating assets during the working years in order to maintain a certain living standard after retirement. The U.N. National Transfer Accounts Project has gathered data on spending and labor income by age cohort at a point in time. Chart II-11 presents the data for China and three of the major advanced economies. Chart II-11Income And Consumption By Age Cohort The data for the advanced economies suggest that spending tends to rise sharply from a low level between birth and about 15 years of age. It continues to rise, albeit at a more modest pace, through the working years. Other studies have found that consumer spending falls during retirement. Nonetheless, these studies generally include only private spending and therefore do not include health care that is provided by the government. The data presented in Chart II-11 show that, if government-provided health care is included, personal spending rises sharply toward the end of life. The profile is somewhat different in China. Spending rises quickly from birth to about 20 years of age, and is roughly flat thereafter. Indeed, consumption edges lower after 75-80 years of age. These data allow us to project the impact of changing demographics on the average household saving rate in the coming years, assuming that the income and spending profiles shown in Chart II-11 are unchanged. We start by calculating the average saving rate across age cohorts given today's age structure. We then recalculate the average saving rate each year moving forward in time. The resulting saving rate changes along with the age structure of the population. The results are shown in Chart II-12. The saving rates for all four economies have been indexed at zero in 2016 for comparison purposes. The aggregate saving rate declines in all cases, falling between 4 and 8 percentage points between 2016 and 2030. Germany sees the largest drop of the four countries. Chart II-12Aging Will Undermine Aggregate Saving The simulations are meant to be suggestive, rather than a precise forecast, because the savings profile across age cohorts will adjust over time. Moreover, governments will no doubt raise taxes to cover the rising cost of health care, providing a partial offset in terms of the national saving rate.5 Nonetheless, the simulations highlight that the major economies are past the point where the baby boom generation is adding to the global savings pool at a faster pace than retirees are drawing from it. The age structure in the major advanced economies is far enough advanced that the rapid increase in the retirement rate will place substantial downward pressure on aggregate household savings in the coming years. It is well known that population aging will also undermine government budgets. Rising health care costs are already captured in our household saving rate projection because the data for household spending includes health care even if it is provided by the public sector. However, public pension schemes will also be a problem. To the extent that politicians are slow to trim pension benefits and/or raise taxes, public pension plans will be a growing drain on national savings. Could younger, less developed economies offset some of the demographic trends in China and the Advanced Economies? Numerically speaking, a more effective use of underutilized populations in Africa and India could go a long way. Nevertheless, deep-seated structural problems would have to be addressed and, even then, it is difficult to see either of these regions turning into the next "China story" given the current backlash against globalization and immigration. ...And The Capex Story Is Largely Behind Us Demographic trends also imply less capital spending relative to GDP, as discussed above. In terms of the impact on global equilibrium interest rates, it then becomes a race between falling saving and investment rates. Chart II-13Demographics And Capex Requirements Some analysts point to the Japanese experience because it is the leading edge in terms of global aging. Bond yields have been extremely low for many years even as the household saving rate collapsed, suggesting that ex-ante investment spending shifted by more than ex-ante savings. Nonetheless, Japan may not be a good example because the deterioration in the country's demographics coincided with burst bubbles in both real estate and stocks that hamstrung Japanese banks for decades. A series of policy mistakes made things worse. Economic theory is not clear on the net effect of demographics on savings and investment. The academic empirical evidence is inconclusive as well. However, a detailed IMF study of 30 OECD countries analyzed the demographic impact on a number of macroeconomic variables, including savings and investment.6 They estimated separate demographic effects for the old-age dependency ratio and the working-age population ratio. Applying the IMF's estimated model coefficients to projected changes in both of these ratios over the next decade suggests that the decline in ex-ante savings will exceed the ex-ante drop in capex requirements by about 1 percentage point of GDP. This is a non-trivial shift. Moreover, our simulations highlight that timing is important. The outlook for the household saving rate depends on the changing age structure of the population and the distribution of saving rates across age cohorts. Thus, the average saving rate will trend down as populations continue to age over the coming decades. In contrast, the impact of demographics on capital spending requirements is related to the change in the growth rate of the working-age population. Chart II-13 once again presents our estimates for the demographic component of capital spending. The top panel presents the world capex/GDP ratio that is necessary to maintain a constant capital/output ratio, and the bottom panel shows the change in that ratio. The important point is that the downward adjustment in world capex/GDP related to aging is now largely behind us because most of the deceleration in the growth rate of the working-age population is done. This is in contrast to the household saving rate adjustment where all of the adjustment is still to come. China Is Transitioning Too Chart II-14China's Savings Rates Have Peaked... China must be treated separately from the developed countries because of its unique structural issues. As discussed above, household savings increased dramatically beginning in the mid-1990s (Chart II-14). This trend reflected a number of factors, including: the rising share of the working-age population; a drop in the fertility rate, following the introduction of the one-child policy in the late 1970s that allowed households to spend less on raising children and save more for retirement; health care reform in the early 1990s required households to bear a larger share of health care spending; and job security was also undermined by reform of the state-owned enterprises (SOE) in the late 1990s, leading to increased precautionary savings to cover possible bouts of unemployment. These savings tailwinds have turned around in recent years and the household saving rate appears to have peaked. China's contribution to the global pool of savings has already moderated significantly, as measured by the current account surplus. The surplus has withered from about 9% in 2008 to 2½% in 2016. A recent IMF study makes the case that China's national saving rate will continue to decline. The IMF estimates that for every one percentage-point rise in the old-age dependency ratio, the aggregate household saving rate will fall by 0.4-1 percentage points. In addition, the need for precautionary savings is expected to ease along with improvements in the social safety net, achieved through higher government spending on health care. The household saving rate will fall by three percentage points by 2021 according to the IMF (Chart II-15). Competitive pressure and an aging population will also reduce the saving rates of the corporate and government sectors. Chart II-15...Suggesting That External Surplus Will Shrink Of course, investment as a share of GDP is projected to moderate too, reflecting a rebalancing of the economy away from exports and capital spending toward household consumption. The IMF expects that savings will moderate slightly faster than investment, leading to a narrowing in the current account surplus to almost zero by 2021. A lot of assumptions go into this type of forecast such that we must take it with a large grain of salt. Nonetheless, the fundamental drivers of China's savings capacity appear to rule out a return to the days when the country was generating a substantial amount of excess savings. Moreover, a return to large current account surpluses would likely require significant currency depreciation, which is a political non-starter given U.S. angst over trade. The risk is that China's excess savings will be less, not more, in five year's time. Tech Is A Wildcard It is extremely difficult to forecast the impact of technological advancement on the global economy. We cannot say with any conviction that the tech-related effects of "hollowing out", "winner-take-all" and the "skills premium" will moderate in the coming years. Nonetheless, these effects have occurred alongside a surge in the world's labor force and rapid globalization of supply chains, both of which reinforced the erosion of employee bargaining power. Looking ahead, technology will still be a headwind for some employees, but at least the transition from a world of excess labor to one that is more labor-scarce will boost workers' ability to negotiate a larger share of the income pie. We will explore the impact of technology on productivity, inflation, growth, and bond yields in a companion report to be published in the next issue. Conclusion: The main points we made in this report are summarized in Table II-1. All of the structural factors driving real bond yields were working in the same (bullish) direction over the past 30-40 years. Looking ahead, it is uncertain how technological improvement will affect bond prices, but we expect that the others will shift (or have already shifted) to either neutral or outright bond-bearish. Table II-1Key Secular Drivers No doubt, our views that globalization and inequality have peaked, and that the labor share of income has bottomed, are speculative. These factors may not place much upward pressure on equilibrium yields. Nonetheless, it seems likely that the demographic effect that has depressed capital spending demand is well advanced. We see it shifting from a positive factor for bond prices to a neutral factor in the coming years. It is also clear that the massive positive labor supply shock is over, and is heading into reverse as the global working-age population ratio falls. This may improve labor's bargaining power and the resulting boost consumer spending will be negative for bonds. This may also spark a shift toward using more capital in the production process and thereby place additional upward pressure on global real bond yields. Admittedly, however, this last point requires more research because theory and empirical evidence on it are not clear. Perhaps most importantly, the aging of the population in the advanced economies has reached a tipping point; retirees will drain more from the pool of savings than the working-age population will add to it in the coming years. We have concentrated on real equilibrium bond yields in this report because it is the part of nominal yields that is the most depressed relative to historical norms. The inflation component is only a little below a level that is consistent with central banks meeting their 2% inflation targets in the medium term. There is a risk that inflation will overshoot these targets, leading to a possible surge in long-term inflation expectations that turbocharges the bond bear market. This is certainly possible, as highlighted by a recent Global Investment Strategy Quarterly Strategy Outlook.7 Pain in bond markets would be magnified in this case, especially if central banks are forced to aggressively defend their targets. Please note that we are not making the case that real global bond yields will quickly revert to pre-Lehman averages. It will take time for the bond-bullish structural factors to unwind. It will also take time for inflation to gain any momentum, even in the United States. Global yields could even drop back to previous lows in the event of another recession. Nonetheless, from a long-term perspective, current market expectations suggest that investors have adopted an overly benign view on the outlook for yields. For example, implied real short-term rates remain negative until 2021 in the U.S. and 2026 in the Eurozone, while they stay negative out to 2030 in the U.K. (Chart II-16). We doubt that short-term rates will be negative for that long, given the structural factors discussed above. Chart II-16Market Expects Negative Short-Term Rates For A Long Time Another way of looking at this is presented in Chart II-17. The market expects the 10-year Treasury yield in ten years to be only slightly above today's spot yield, which itself is not far above the lowest levels ever recorded. Market expectations are equally depressed for the 5-year forward rate for the U.S. and the other major economies. Chart II-17Forward Rates Very Low Vs. History The implication is that investors should have a bond-bearish bias on a medium- and long-term horizon. Mark McClellan Senior Vice President The Bank Credit Analyst 1 It is true that observed household savings rates fell in some of the advanced economies, such as the United States, at a time when aging should have boosted savings from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. This argues against a strong demographic effect on savings. However, keep in mind that we are discussing desired (or ex-ante) savings. Ex-post, savings can go in the opposite direction because of other influencing factors. As discussed below, global savings must equal investment, which means that shifts in desired capital spending demand matter for the ex-post level of savings. 2 Arithmetically, if world trend GDP growth slows by one percentage point, then investment spending would need to drop by about 3½ percentage points of GDP to keep the capital/output ratio stable. 3 David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson, "The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade," Annual Review of Economics, Vol. 8, pp. 205-240 (October 2016). 4 Please see "Understanding The Downward Trend In Labor Income Shares," Chapter 3 in the IMF World Economic Outlook (April 2017). 5 In other words, while the household savings rate, as defined here to include health care spending by governments on behalf of households, will decline, any associated tax increases will blunt the impact on national savings (i.e. savings across the household, government and business sectors). 6 Jong-Won Yoon, Jinill Kim, and Jungjin Lee, "Impact Of Demographic Changes On Inflation And The Macroeconomy," IMF Working Paper no. 14/210 (November 2014). 7 Please see Global Investment Strategy, "Strategy Outlook: Second Quarter 2017: A Three-Act Play," dated March 31, 2017, available at gis.bcaresearch.com. III. Indicators And Reference Charts The modest correction in April did not improve equity valuation by much in any of the major markets. Our U.S. valuation metric is still hovering just below the +1 sigma mark, above which would signal extreme overvaluation. Measures such as the Shiller P/E ratio are flashing red on valuation, but our indicator takes into consideration 11 different valuation measures. Technically, the U.S. equity market still has upward momentum, while our Monetary indicator is neutral for stocks. The Speculation index indicates some froth, although our Composite Sentiment indicator has cooled off, suggesting that fewer investors are bullish. The U.S. net revisions ratio is hovering near zero, but it is bullish that the earnings surprise index jumped over the past month. First-quarter earnings season in the U.S. has got off to a good start, while the global earnings revisions ratio has moved into positive territory for the first time in six years (see the Overview section). Our U.S. Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) indicator continues to send a positive message for the S&P 500, although it is now so elevated that it suggests that there could be little 'dry power' left to buy the market. This indicator tracks flows, and thus provides information on what investors are actually doing, as opposed to sentiment indexes that track how investors are feeling. Investors often say they are bullish but remain conservative in their asset allocation. In contrast to the U.S., the WTP indicators for both the Eurozone and Japan are rising from a low level. This suggests that a rotation into these equity markets is underway and has some ways to go. We remain overweight both the Eurozone and Japanese markets relative to the U.S. on a currency-hedged basis. April's rally in the U.S. bond market dragged valuation close to neutral. However, we believe that the market is underestimating the amount of Fed rate hikes that are likely over the next year. Now that oversold technical conditions have been absorbed, this opens the door the next upleg in yields. Bonds typically move into 'inexpensive' territory before the monetary cycle is over. The trade-weighted dollar remains quite overvalued on a PPP basis, although less so by other measures. Technically, the dollar has shifted down this year to meet support at the 200-day moving average and overbought conditions have largely, but not totally, been worked off. We still believe there is more upside for the dollar, despite lofty valuation readings, due to macro divergences. EQUITIES: Chart III-1U.S. Equity Indicators Chart III-2Willingness To Pay For Risk Chart III-3U.S. Equity Sentiment Indicators Chart III-4U.S. Stock Market Valuation Chart III-5U.S. Earnings Chart III-6Global Stock Market And ##br##Earnings: Relative Performance Chart III-7Global Stock Market And ##br##Earnings: Relative Performance FIXED INCOME: Chart III-8U.S. Treasurys And Valuations Chart III-9U.S. Treasury Indicators Chart III-10Selected U.S. Bond Yields Chart III-1110-Year Treasury Yield ComponentsChart III-12U.S. Corporate Bonds And Health Monitor Chart III-13Global Bonds: Developed Markets Chart III-14Global Bonds: Emerging Markets CURRENCIES: Chart III-15U.S. Dollar And PPP Chart III-16U.S. Dollar And Indicator Chart III-17U.S. Dollar Fundamentals Chart III-18Japanese Yen TechnicalsChart III-20Euro/Yen Technicals Chart III-19Euro TechnicalsChart III-21Euro/Pound Technicals COMMODITIES: Chart III-22Broad Commodity Indicators Chart III-23Commodity Prices Chart III-24Commodity Prices Chart III-25Commodity Sentiment Chart III-26Speculative Positioning ECONOMY Chart III-27U.S. And Global Macro Backdrop Chart III-28U.S. Macro Snapshot Chart III-29U.S. Growth Outlook Chart III-30U.S. Cyclical Spending Chart III-31U.S. Labor Market Chart III-32U.S. Consumption Chart III-33U.S. Housing Chart III-34U.S. Debt And Deleveraging Chart III-35U.S. Financial Conditions Chart III-36Global Economic Snapshot: Europe Chart III-37Global Economic Snapshot: China
Highlights China/EM growth will decouple (to the downside) from the business cycle in developed markets (DM). Continued demand strength in DM will not prevent a relapse in EM/China growth. EM is much more leveraged to China than to DM. Higher bond yields in DM, a stronger U.S. dollar and weak China/EM domestic demand are bearish for commodities and EM risk assets. A new equity trade: short KOSPI / long Nikkei. Feature In our recent reports1 we have argued that China's growth is likely to relapse again in the second half of this year based on its aggregate credit and fiscal impulse. Chart I-1 illustrates that this impulse leads Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, German and U.S. aggregate exports to China by six months, and this indicator is reinforcing the message that shipments from these economies to the mainland have peaked and will stumble. Consistently, the bottom panel of Chart I-1 reveals that Chinese imports of capital goods are set to decelerate significantly and probably contract anew by the end of this year or early 2018. If markets are forward looking, they should begin discounting a potential growth slump very soon. Chart I-2 demonstrates that there is a tight correlation between each of these countries' shipments to China and the mainland's credit and fiscal impulse. Chart I-1Chinese Imports To Relapse Chart I-2Exports To China To Weaken In this context, a relevant question is whether the expansion of U.S. and European imports will be sufficient to safeguard the recovery in EM and global trade as China's imports tumble. Our analysis substantiates that domestic demand strength in the U.S. and Europe will boost these economies but will likely not preclude another downturn in EM/Chinese growth and global trade. In brief, China/EM growth will decouple (to the downside) from the business cycle in developed markets (DM). Our basis is that EM and China trade much more with one another, and as such the DM business cycle has become a less important driver. If DM demand holds up as China's imports tumble anew, EM share prices and currencies will underperform their DM counterparts. In this context, our negative view on EM is contingent on a deceleration in China's business cycle rather than a major relapse in DM domestic demand. In the near term, higher bond yields in DM due to strong domestic demand combined with weakness in EM/Chinese growth will reverse the EM rally. EM Is Much More Leveraged To China Than To DM Chart I-3EM Is Leveraged To China Much More Than DM Chart I-3 shows that the relative performance of EM versus DM stocks typically fluctuates with the relative import volume trend between China and DM. This supports our thesis that the EM world is much more leveraged to China than DM. The following considerations certify China's greater importance for EM economies compared to the U.S. and Europe: Table I-1 shows the share of exports going to China and to the U.S. for individual EM countries. The mean for exports to China is 14.6% of total, and 11.3% for shipments to the U.S. These numbers corroborate the fact that developing countries sell more to China than to the U.S. Chart I-4 is constructed using the numbers from Table I-1. It demonstrates that Korea, Taiwan, Chile and Peru are more exposed to China while India, Turkey, and the Philippines are more leveraged to the U.S. We did not include Mexico and central Europe in this chart because the former trades with the U.S. and the latter predominantly with European countries due to their geographical proximity. Table I-1Export To China And U.S. Chart I-4Exposure To China And Exposure To The U.S. Chinese demand is critical for commodities, particularly for industrial metals prices. China consumes 6-7-fold more industrial metals than the U.S. Unsurprisingly, the mainland's credit and fiscal impulse leads industrial metals prices (Chart I-5). At this moment, we are negative on both metals and oil prices, as we view the 2016 rally as a mean-reverting rally in a structural bear market. As commodities prices drop again, commodities-producing nations will suffer from a negative terms-of-trade shock. This is regardless of which countries they export commodities to. There is one global price for each commodity, and when it deflates commodity producing nations are the ones that get hurt - irrespective of whether they sell that commodity to China, the U.S., Europe or the rest of the world. Countries like Korea and Taiwan do not sell commodities, but their largest export destination is still China (Chart I-6). The latter accounts for 25% of Korean and 27% of Taiwanese exports Chart I-5China's Credit And Fiscal##br## Impulse And Industrial Metals Chart I-6Korea And Taiwan: The ##br##Composition Of Exports. Even if we assume that 30% of goods exported to China by Korea and Taiwan are assembled and then re-exported to other countries, the mainland's domestic absorption of Korean and Taiwanese goods is still considerable. Notably, the recovery in Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese exports has been driven more by China than the rest of the world (Chart I-7). Therefore, China's business cycle is also important for some non-commodity producing countries like Korea, Taiwan and others in Asia. China itself has become much more reliant on its credit origination and fiscal spending than on exports in general and exports to DM in particular (Chart I-8). Chart I-7Asia's Exports Recovery Has Largely ##br##Been Driven By China's Demand Chart I-8China Has Become Reliant ##br##On Stimulus Not Exports Finally, Table I-2 exhibits the product structure of Chinese imports. By and large, China imports three categories of goods: various commodities, capital goods and some luxury goods. All three are at risk of a slowdown because they are leveraged to the nation's credit cycle. Table I-2Composition Of Chinese Imports Bottom Line: China's imports are critical not only for commodity producers (Latin America, Russia, Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia) but also for non-commodity economies in Asia. Altogether this comprises most of the EM universe. EM/China's Importance In Global Trade EM/China account for much larger global trade flows than advanced economies. In short, global trade will relapse again if global shipments to China and the rest of the EM universe slump. EM including Chinese imports (but excluding the mainland's imports for re-exports) in U.S. dollars are equal to imports by the U.S., EU and Japan combined (Chart I-9). Chinese imports for processing - imports that are used to manufacture goods for exports - are excluded from the calculation of this chart. Only Chinese imports for domestic consumption are accounted for. Also, this EM aggregate excludes Mexico and central European countries because their manufacturing is intertwined with the ones in the U.S. and EU. Exports to EM countries account for 25%, 28% and 17% of German, Japanese and U.S. exports, respectively. As a share of GDP, exports to vulnerable EM economies stand at 2%, 5% and 5% of U.S., German and Japanese GDP, respectively (Chart I-10). Chart I-9EM Imports Are Equal To Combined##br## Imports Of U.S., EU And Japan Chart I-10Japan And Germany Are More ##br##Exposed To EM Than The U.S. Japan and Germany are much more vulnerable to an EM/China slowdown than the U.S. and the rest of Europe (Europe ex-Germany). China's exports are exposed more to EM than DM. Chart I-11 shows that 45% of Chinese exports are shipped to Asia ex-Japan, 18% to Latin America, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Australia and Canada and only 18% to the U.S. and 16% to the EU. Capital spending in China and EM ex-China makes up 5% and 5% (together 10%) of global GDP in real terms (Chart I-12). By comparison, EU and U.S. capital expenditures are 5% and 4.5% of world GDP in real terms. Hence, EM and especially China's investment outlays are big enough to matter for the global economy. Chart I-11China Sells More To EM Than DM Chart I-12EM/China Capex Is Large As Chart I-1 indicates, China's imports of industrial goods will soon tumble. Capital goods imports for EM ex-China have revived, but as their bank loan growth slumps the recovery in capital goods imports is likely to be short lived. Bottom Line: Two-pronged trade flows between EM and China are considerable for their own economies as well as global trade flows. Continued demand strength in DM countries will not prevent a relapse in EM/China growth. Market Observations And Conclusions Our conviction is that China's imports are set to dwindle in the second half of this year. This is bearish for commodities producers and Asian economies selling to China. If markets are forward looking, they should begin discounting this now. Moreover, bank deleveraging in EM/China has further to run. Altogether, this leads us to maintain the strategy of underweighting EM risk assets relative to their DM counterparts, and maintaining a negative stance on EM in absolute terms. Furthermore, it appears the U.S. dollar and U.S. bond yields have recently bounced from their technical support levels, and odds are they will rise further (Chart I-13). DM bond yields will move higher for now before the EM/China slowdown becomes visible later this year. For the time being, rising U.S. bond yields and a stronger greenback (versus EM, Asian and commodities currencies) will weigh on EM risk assets. Remarkably, Chinese interest rates are rising and corporate bond prices are plunging as the People's Bank of China continues along a gradual tightening path (Chart I-14). Chart I-13The U.S. Dollar And U.S. Bond Yields To Rise Chart I-14China: Borrowing Costs Are Rising As long as economic data from China and DM remain positive, financial regulators in Beijing are determined to curb leverage and speculative activities in China's credit system. Higher interest rates and regulatory tightening amid the lingering credit bubble are bound to cause meaningful stress in China's financial system and lead to a deceleration in credit growth. EM risk assets are very complacent about this risk. Interestingly, the commodities currencies index - an equal-weighted average of the Australian, New Zealand and Canadian dollars - has already halted its rally and begun depreciating even versus safe-haven currencies like the Swiss franc (Chart I-15). Such poor showing by commodities currencies should be taken seriously because it has occurred at a time when the U.S. dollar has been soft and global share prices have been well bid. As such, we read this message from the commodities currencies as a harbinger of a major top in commodities prices and EM risk assets. There is no reason why EM ex-China currencies should diverge from the commodities currency index this time around (Chart I-16). Chart I-15Commodities Currencies Versus ##br##Safe-Haven Currency Chart I-16EM Currencies ##br##To Tumble In short, we are reiterating our bearish strategy on EM currencies and recommend shorting a basket of the following currencies: ZAR, TRY, BRL, CLP, COP, MYR and IDR versus the U.S. dollar or a basket of the U.S. dollar and the euro. The main risk to our downbeat view on EM risk assets is not EM/China fundamentals but the rally in DM share prices. That said, DM stocks and credit markets were well bid in 2012-2014 yet EM stocks and currencies did very poorly during that period. This could be repeated again in the next couple of months before fundamental problems/weaker growth in China/EM become evident and stem the rally in DM equities too, as occurred in 2015. A New Equity Trade: Short KOSPI / Long Nikkei We have identified a tactical opportunity for a relative equity trade: short Korean / long Japanese stocks, currency unhedged. The Korean won is overvalued versus the Japanese yen, according to the relative real effective exchange rate based on unit labor costs (Chart I-17). This will provide a competitive advantage to Japanese manufacturers and will dent performance of the KOSPI versus the Nikkei. Even though the won could still appreciate versus the yen, equity prices in Japan will still fare better than their Korean counterparts in common currency terms. Japan's more competitive positioning is also reflected in its manufacturing PMI, which is much stronger than Korea's (Chart I-18). This should lead to outperformance of Japanese manufacturers versus their Korean peers. Chart I-17The Korean Won Is Expensive ##br##Versus The Yen Chart I-18Manufacturing PMI: ##br##Korea And Japan Korea is much more exposed to China than Japan. Exports destined to China make up 25% and 18% of Korean and Japanese exports, respectively. In the meantime, combined exports to the U.S. and EU account for 22% of Korea's total exports and 31% of Japan's total exports (Chart I-19). Provided our view that China's growth will disappoint relative to U.S. and EU growth pans out, Japan is in better position than Korea. Japanese policymakers continue to be much more aggressive in reflating their economy than Korean policymakers. Bank loan growth is accelerating in Japan but is slowing in Korea, albeit from a higher level (Chart I-20). Finally, the technical profile of relative performance between Korean and Japanese share prices favors the latter (Chart I-21). Chart I-19Japan And Korea: Structure Of Exports Chart I-20Bank Loan Growth Is Stronger In Japan Than Korea Chart I-21Short KOSPI / Long Nikkei Bottom Line: Short KOSPI / long Nikkei, currency unhedged. Arthur Budaghyan, Senior Vice President Emerging Markets Strategy arthurb@bcaresearch.com 1 Please refer to the Emerging Markets Strategy Weekly Reports titled, "A Time To Be Contrarian", dated April 5, 2017, "Signs Of An EM/China Growth Reversal", dated April 12, 2017 and "EM: The Beginning Of The End", dated April 19, 2017, available at ems.bcaresearch.com Equity Recommendations Fixed-Income, Credit And Currency Recommendations
Highlights The sequential improvement in global trade is less pronounced than the annual growth rates in the Asian trade data imply. China has been instrumental to the recovery in global trade but mainland's credit and fiscal spending impulse has rolled over decisively pointing to a relapse its growth in general and imports in particular. This will hurt meaningfully countries and sectors selling to China. Commodities prices are set to tumble. In Turkey, reinstate the short TRY versus U.S. dollar and short bank stocks trades. Feature Economic data from China and Asian trade data have been strong of late. However, when one looks ahead, China's growth and imports are set to roll over decisively in the second half of the year, based on the credit and fiscal spending impulse (Chart I-1). This will hurt countries and industries that sell to China. This is why we believe commodities prices are in a broad topping-out phase. Commodities producers and Asian economies will again suffer materially. Any possible strength in U.S. and European growth will not offset the drag on EM growth emanating from China and lower commodities prices. As a result, having priced in a lot of good news, EM risk assets are at major risk of a selloff in absolute terms and are poised to underperform their DM counterparts over the next six months. Beware Of The Low Base Effect Asian trade data have been strong, but the magnitude of recovery has not been as large as implied by annual growth rates: Annual growth rates of export values in U.S. dollar terms have surged everywhere - in Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China (Chart I-2A). Chart I-1China's Growth To Decelerate Again Chart I-2AHigh Annual Growth Rates Are Due To... Chart I-2B...Low Base In Early 2016 Chart I-2B depicts the level of export values in U.S. dollar terms. It is clear that dollar values of shipments remain well below their peak of several years ago. Looking at the annual rate of change is reasonable since it removes seasonality from the series. However, investors should be aware of the low base effect of late 2015 and early 2016 that has made these annual growth rates extraordinarily elevated in recent months. As for export volumes, Chart I-3 illustrates that volumes held up better than U.S. dollar values in late 2015, which is why they are now expanding at a moderate rate (i.e. they are not surging). In short, in the past 12 months there has been a major discrepancy between dollar values and volumes of Asian exports. Indeed, the V-shaped profile of Asian export growth rates has been partially due to price swings in tradable goods. Prices for steel and other metals as well as for petrochemical products and semiconductors dropped substantially in late 2015 and early 2016, and have rebounded materially from that low base since. Correspondingly, Asian export prices have rebounded considerably in percentage terms (Chart I-4). Chart I-3Export Volume Recovery Has Been Moderate Chart I-4Export Values Are Inflated By Rising Prices In the U.S., the low base effect from a year ago is also present in manufacturing and railroad shipments. Both intermodal (container) and carload shipment volumes excluding petroleum and coal plunged in early 2016 and recovered considerably on an annual rate-of-change basis, from a low base (Chart I-5). Chart I-5U.S. Railroad Shipments ##br##Also Had Low Base In Early 2016 All told, the skyrocketing annual rate of change of Asian export values and other global trade series is exaggerated by the fact that global trade volume was sluggish and various tradable goods/commodities prices fell precipitously in the last quarter of 2015 and first quarter of 2016, thereby creating a base effect. We are not implying that there has been no genuine recovery in global trade. Indeed, there has been reasonable sequential recovery in global demand and trade. The point is that the sequential improvement in global trade is less pronounced than the annual growth rates in the trade data imply. Importantly, China has been instrumental to the recovery in global trade and the rebound in commodities prices. Hence, the outlook for China holds the key. Looking Ahead Looking forward, there are few reasons to worry about U.S. growth. Consumer spending is robust and core capital goods orders are recovering following a multi-year slump (Chart I-6). Nevertheless, BCA's Emerging Markets Strategy team's view is that global trade growth will decelerate again because China's one-off stimulus-driven recovery will soon reverse, causing the rest of EM to also suffer: In particular, the credit and fiscal spending impulse has rolled over decisively; the indicator typically leads nominal GDP growth and mainland imports by six months, as exhibited in Chart I-1 on page 1. As Chinese import volume relapses again, economies and sectors selling to China will suffer. Chart I-7 demonstrates China's credit and fiscal spending impulses separately. Chart I-6U.S. Final Demand: No Major Risk Chart I-7China: Fiscal And Credit Impulses The credit impulse is the second derivative of outstanding corporate and household credit.1 It does not take much of a slowdown in credit growth for the second derivative, credit impulse, to roll over and then turn negative. Remarkably, narrow (M1) and broad (M2) money as well as banks' RMB loan growth have all slowed in recent months (Chart I-8). Non-bank (shadow banking) credit growth remains stable (Chart I-8, bottom panel). Yet given that the PBoC's recent tightening has targeted shadow banking activities, it is a matter of time before shadow banking credit also decelerates meaningfully. To assess real-time strength in China's economic activity, we monitor prices of various commodities trading in China. Chart I-9 demonstrates that these commodities prices have lately plunged. Chart I-8China: Money/Credit Growth Is Slowing Chart I-9Plunging Commodities Prices To be sure, commodities prices are influenced not only by final demand but also by other factors such as supply, inventory swings and investor/trader positioning. We use these data as one among many inputs in our analysis. Bottom Line: Money/credit growth has rolled over and will continue to downshift, causing the current recovery underway in China to falter. This will hurt meaningfully countries and sectors selling to China. Commodities prices are set to tumble. Market-Based Indicators Financial asset prices often lead economic data. Therefore, one cannot rely on economic data releases to time turning points in financial markets. We watch and bring to investors' attention price signals from various segments of financial markets to corroborate our investment themes and economic analysis. Presently, there are several indicators flashing warning signals for EM risk assets: The plunge in iron ore prices warrants attention as it has historically correlated with EM equities and industrial metals prices (the LMEX index) (Chart I-10). The commodities currencies index - an equal-weighted average of CAD, AUD and NZD - also points to an end of the rally in EM share prices (Chart I-11). Chart I-10Is Iron Ore A Canary In A Coal Mine? Chart I-11EM Stocks Have Defied ##br##Rollover In Commodities Currencies It appears these long-term correlations have broken down in the past several weeks. We suspect this is due to hefty fund flows into EM. In the short term, the flows could overwhelm fundamentals and prompt financial variables that have historically been correlated to temporarily diverge. However, flows can refute fundamentals for a time, but not forever. It is impossible to time a reversal or magnitude of flows as there is no comprehensive set of data on global investor positioning across various financial markets. The message of a potential relapse in Chinese imports is being reinforced by commodities currencies that lead global export volume growth, and are pointing to weakness in global trade in the second half of this year (Chart I-12). The latest erosion in the commodities currencies has occurred even though the U.S. dollar has been soft and U.S. TIPS yields have not risen at all. This makes this price signal even more important. Oil prices have recovered to their recent highs, but share prices of global oil companies have not confirmed the rebound (Chart I-13). When such a divergence occurs between spot commodities prices and respective equity sectors, the spot prices typically converge toward the equity market. This leads us to argue that oil prices will head south pretty soon. Chart I-12Commodities Currencies ##br##Lead Global Trade Cycles Chart I-13Oil Stocks Have Not Confirmed ##br##The Latest Rebound In Oil Prices The average stock (an equally-weighted equity index) is underperforming the market cap-weighted index in both the EM universe and the U.S. equity market (Chart I-14). Chart I-14Narrowing Breadth Of Equity Rally This usually occurs in two instances: (1) the rally is losing steam and narrowing to large market-cap stocks; and/or (2) the rally is being fueled by flows into ETFs that must allocate money based on market cap. Narrowing breadth of the rally is a warning signal of a top, albeit the precise timing is tricky. Bottom Line: There are several market-based indicators that herald an imminent top in EM share prices, commodities prices and other risk assets. Stay put. Arthur Budaghyan, Senior Vice President Emerging Markets Strategy arthurb@bcaresearch.com Turkey: Deceitful Stability Turkey held a constitutional referendum that dramatically expands the powers of the presidency on April 16. The proposed 18 amendments passed with a 51.41% majority and a high turnout of 85%. As with all recent Turkish referenda and elections, the results reveal a sharply divided country between the Aegean coastal regions and the Anatolian heartland, the latter being a stronghold of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Is Turkey Now A Dictatorship? First, some facts. Turkey has not become a dictatorship, as some Western press alleged. Yes, presidential powers have expanded. In particular, we note that: The president is now both a head of state and government and has the power to appoint government ministers; The president can issue decrees, however, the parliament has the ability to abrogate them through the legislative process; The president can call for new elections, however, they need three-fifths of the parliament to agree to the new election; The president has wide powers to appoint judges. What the media is not reporting is that the parliament can remove or modify any state of emergency enacted by the president. In addition, removing a presidential veto appears to be exceedingly easy, with only an absolute majority (not a super-majority) of votes needed. As such, our review of the constitutional changes is that Turkey is most definitely not a dictatorship. Yes, President Erdogan has bestowed upon the presidency much wider powers than the current ceremonial position possesses. However, the amendments also create a trap for future presidents. If the president should face a parliament ruled by an opposition party, they would lose much of their ability to govern. The changes therefore approximate the current French constitution, which is a semi-presidential system. Under the French system, the president has to cohabitate with the parliament. This appears to be the case with the Turkish constitution as well. Bottom Line: Turkish constitutional referendum has expanded the powers of the presidency, but considerable checks remain. If the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) were ever to lose parliamentary control, President Erdogan would become entrapped by the very constitution he just passed. Is Turkey Now Stable? The market reacted to the results of the referendum with a muted cheer. First, we disagree with the market consensus that President Erdogan will feel empowered and confident following the constitutional referendum. This is for several reasons. For one, the referendum passed with a slim majority. Even if we assume (generously) that it was a clean win for the government, the fact remains that the AKP has struggled to win over 50% of the vote in any election it has contested since coming to power in 2002 (Chart II-1). Turkey is a deeply divided country and a narrow win in a constitutional referendum is not going to change this. Chart II-1AKP Versus Other Parties In Turkish Elections Second, Erdogan is making a strategic mistake by giving himself more power. It will also focus the criticism of the public on the presidency and himself if the economy and geopolitical situation surrounding Turkey gets worse. If the buck now stops with Erdogan, it also means that all the blame will go to him as well. We therefore do not expect Erdogan to push away from populist economic and monetary policies. In fact, we could see him double down on unorthodox fiscal and monetary policies as protests mount against his rule. While he has expanded control over the army, judiciary, and police, he has not won over support of the major cities on the Aegean coast, which not only voted against his constitutional referendum but also consistently vote against AKP rule. That said, opposition to AKP remains in disarray. As such, there is no political avenue for opposition to Erdogan. The problem is that such an arrangement raises the probability that the opposition takes the form of a social movement and protest. We would therefore caution investors that a repeat of the Gezi Park protests from 2013 could be likely, especially if the economy takes a stumble. Bottom Line: The referendum has not changed the facts on the ground. Turkey remains a deeply divided country. Erdogan will continue to feel threatened by the general sentiment on the ground and thus continue to avoid taking any painful structural reforms. We believe that economic populism will remain the name of the game. What To Watch? We would first and foremost watch for any sign of protest over the next several weeks. Gezi Park style unrest would hurt Erdogan's credibility. Given his penchant to equate any dissent with terrorism, President Erdogan is very likely to overreact to any sign of a social movement rising in Turkey to oppose him. It is not our baseline case that the constitutional referendum will motivate protests, but it is a risk investors should be concerned with. Next election is set for November 2019 and the constitutional changes will only become effective at that point (save for provisions on the judiciary). Investors should watch for any sign that Erdogan or AKP's popularity is waning in the interim. A failure to secure a majority in parliament could entrap Erdogan in an institutional fight with the legislature that creates a constitutional crisis. Chart II-2Turkey Depends On Europe Turkey ##br##Is Very Reliant On Europe Economically Relations with the EU remain an issue as well. Erdogan will likely further deepen divisions in the country if he goes ahead and makes a formal break with the EU, either by reinstituting the death penalty or holding a referendum on EU accession process. Erdogan's hostile position towards the EU should be seen from the perspective of his own insecurity as a leader: he needs an external enemy in order to rally support around his leadership. We would recommend that clients ignore the rhetoric. Turkey depends on Europe far more than any other trade or investment partner (Chart II-2). If Turkey were to lash out at the EU by encouraging migration into Europe, for example, the subsequent economic sanctions would devastate the Turkish economy and collapse its currency. Nonetheless, Ankara's brinkmanship and anti-EU rhetoric will likely continue. It is further evidence of the regime's insecurity at home. Bottom Line: The more that Erdogan captures power within the institutions he controls, the greater his insecurities will become. This is for two reasons. First, he will increase the risk of a return of social movement protests like the Gezi Park event in 2013. Second, he will become solely responsible for everything that happens in Turkey, closing off the possibility to "pass the buck" to the parliament or the opposition when the economy slows down or a geopolitical crisis emerges. As such, we see no opening for genuine structural reform or orthodox policymaking. Turkey will continue to be run along a populist paradigm. Investment Strategy On January 25th 2017, we recommended that clients take profits on the short positions in Turkish financial assets. Today, we recommend re-instating these short positions, specifically going short TRY versus the U.S. dollar and shorting Turkish bank stocks. The central bank's net liquidity injections into the banking system have recently been expanded again (Chart II-3). As we have argued in past,2 this is a form of quantitative easing and warrants a weaker currency. To be more specific, even though the overnight liquidity injections have tumbled, the use of the late liquidity money market window has gone vertical. This is largely attributed to the fact that the late liquidity window is the only money market facility that has not been capped by the authorities in their attempt to tighten liquidity when the lira was collapsing in January. The fact remains that Turkish commercial banks are requiring continuous liquidity and the Central Bank of Turkey (CBT) is supplying it. Commercial banks demand liquidity because they continue growing their loan books rapidly. Bank loan and money growth remains very strong at 18-20% (Chart II-4). Such extremely strong loan growth means that credit excesses continue to be built. Chart II-3Turkey: Central Bank ##br##Renewed Liquidity Injections Chart II-4Turkey: Money/Credit ##br##Growth Is Too Strong Besides, wages are growing briskly - wages in manufacturing and service sector are rising at 18-20% from a year ago (Chart II-5, top panel). Meanwhile, productivity growth has been very muted. This entails that unit labor costs are mushrooming and inflationary pressures are more entrenched than suggested by headline and core consumer price inflation. It seems Turkey is suffering from outright stagflation: rampant inflationary pressures with a skyrocketing unemployment rate (Chart II-5, bottom panel) The upshot of strong credit/money and wage growth as well as higher inflationary pressures is currency depreciation. Excessive credit and income/wage growth are supporting import demand at a time when the current account deficit is already wide. This will maintain downward pressure on the exchange rate. The currency has been mostly flat year-to-date despite the CBT intervening in the market to support the lira by selling U.S. dollars (Chart II-6). Without this support from the CBT, the lira would be much weaker than it currently is. Chart II-5Turkey: Stagflation? Chart II-6Turkey: Central Bank's Net FX ##br##Reserves Are Being Depleted That said, the CBT's net foreign exchange rates (excluding commercial banks' foreign currency deposits at the CBT) are very low - they stand at US$ 12 billion and are equal to 1 month of imports. Therefore, the central bank has little capacity to defend the lira by selling its own U.S. dollar. Chart II-7Short Turkish Bank Stocks We also believe there is an opportunity to short Turkish banks outright. The currency depreciation will force interbank rates higher (Chart II-7, top panel). Historically, this has always been negative for banks' stock prices as net interest margins will shrink (Chart II-7, bottom panel). Surprisingly, bank share prices in local currency terms have lately rallied despite the headwinds from higher interbank rates and the rollover in net interest rate margin. This creates an attractive opportunity to go short again. Bottom Line: Re-instate a short position in the currency. In addition, short Turkish bank stocks. Dedicated EM equity as well as fixed-income and credit portfolios should continue underweighting Turkish assets within their respective EM universes. Marko Papic, Senior Vice President Geopolitical Strategy marko@bcaresearch.com Stephan Gabillard, Senior Analyst stephang@bcaresearch.com 1 Please refer to the Emerging Markets Strategy Special Report titled, "Gauging EM/China Credit Impulses", dated August 30, 2016, link available on page 19. 2 Please refer to the Emerging Markets Strategy Special Report titled, "Turkey's Monetary Demagoguery", dated June 1, 2016, link available on page 19. Equity Recommendations Fixed-Income, Credit And Currency Recommendations
Highlights The Trump-Xi summit offers hopeful signs that the two sides are mending once-severely tested bilateral relations. The risk of escalation in trade tensions has declined. President Trump and President Xi have different time horizons in setting policy priorities. Trump needs immediate success on trade and job creation to show to his working-class electorates, while Xi's primary objective is to avoid the "Thucydides trap". This offers space for compromises. Unless the Trump administration addresses America's "savings shortage," the country's external deficit will not change materially. Any serious negotiations on bilateral trade imbalances between China and the U.S. must deal with the root causes. Feature The summit between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping in Mar-a-Lago last week was hailed by both sides as an "ice breaking" success. Even though no substantive details have been offered, the two countries have formulated a new mechanism for senior-level dialogue, and established a 100-day process for addressing bilateral trade frictions. The risk still exists that Trump could unilaterally impose punitive measures against Chinese goods with his administrative powers, and it is overly simplistic to draw too much information from one particular event. However, the Trump-Xi summit confirms a developing trend: that some of President Trump's highly controversial remarks on his campaign trail are being quickly rolled back. The risk of escalating trade tensions between the world's two largest economies has on margin abated. Trump Goes Mainstream? America's China policy under recent administrations can best be described as "congagement" - an ambiguous mixture of containment and engagement by varying degrees. Trump's remarks on the campaign trail and in his early days in office suggested he was mainly interested in confrontation. But the Trump-Xi summit, along with some recent developments, implies that Trump's China policy is coming back to the middle ground, at least for now. After setting off a fierce firestorm on the Taiwan issue late last year, Trump reaffirmed the "One China" policy in a February phone call with President Xi, re-stating long-standing U.S. policy and easing a key source of diplomatic tensions. Taiwan is still re-emerging as a source of risk.1 But it is unquestionably positive in the short-term that Trump backed away from his initial, highly provocative approach. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin stated in February that the Trump administration will stick to the existing statutory process in judging whether China manipulates its currency, a marked departure from Trump's repeated campaign pledges. It is almost certain that China will not be named a currency manipulator in the U.S. Treasury's upcoming semi-annual assessment due later this week.2 In his visit to Beijing last month, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson used Chinese verbiage to characterize the U.S.-China relationship. This verbiage was not repeated by other officials during Xi's visit to Florida, so it is unclear whether it signals the Trump administration's adoption of China's idea of a "new model of great power relations." Nonetheless, it is a drastic change from Tillerson's aggressive remarks at his congressional confirmation hearings, when he suggested blockading Chinese-built islands in the South China Sea. Separately, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, on his first trip abroad to Japan and South Korea, said he did not anticipate any "dramatic military moves" in the South China Sea. More recently, Steve Bannon, White House Chief Strategist, was removed from the National Security Council. It is futile to try to understand all the internal power struggles within the new administration. Nevertheless, Bannon's departure from the NSC is probably a positive development, viewed through the Chinese lens. Bannon not long ago openly identified China as a major threat to the U.S. and predicted a war in the South China Sea as inevitable. In short, President Trump's summit with President Xi marked continued "mainstreaming" of his China policy. Some strong anti-China rhetoric from him and his inner circle has apparently been sanded off, setting the stage for constructive negotiations with Beijing. Can China Accommodate? The restructuring of the Sino-U.S. comprehensive dialogue and the declaration of a 100-day process for addressing economic frictions are probably the most tangible outcomes from the discussions between the two leaders during the summit. Further detail deserve close attention in order to map out how relations between the world's two largest economies will evolve in the near future. In our view, China is likely to make concessions and avoid confrontations. First, trade appears to be front and center in President Trump's grand dealings with China, an important change compared with previous U.S. administrations that also focused heavily on values and ideological issues, such as democracy, freedom of speech and human rights. From China's perspective, the government has a lot more flexibility in making concessions on trade and economic fronts than in dealing with ideological differences. In the past, China has almost always yielded to U.S. pressure on trade-related issues. For instance, China depegged the RMB from the dollar in 2005 and allowed the RMB to continue to appreciate after the global economic recovery began, all under American political pressure. Chinese senior officials routinely led massive commercial delegations touring the U.S. with big procurement orders for everything from aircraft to agricultural goods in order to address American complaints. Both the U.S. and China understand that bilateral trade imbalances favor the U.S. in the event of an all-out trade war, which China will try its best to avoid. Strategically, President Trump and President Xi have different time horizons in setting policy priorities. Trump needs immediate success on trade and job creation to deliver on promises to his working-class electorate, while Xi is more interested in establishing a cooperative and productive strategic standing with the world's sole superpower. Xi's primary objective is to avoid the "Thucydides trap" - the likelihood of conflict between a rising power and a currently dominant one - by convincing the U.S. to grant China greater global sway. In this vein, Trump's withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been viewed as an important positive development from Xi's perspective, and it is likely that Beijing will offer incentives to further discourage President Trump to "pivot to Asia". It is already rumored that Beijing has drafted investment plans in the U.S. that could create 700,000 jobs, as well as further opening up agricultural goods imports and financial market access. We suspect these deals will be announced during the 100-day negotiation period, which should give Trump a much-needed boost in his approval ratings. Economically, Trump's resentment of China's trade practices is based on the old growth model that the country no longer adheres to. Trump's version of Chinese manufacturers - "sweat shops" operating in "pollution heaven" heavily dependent on state subsidies and a cheap currency - is increasingly out of touch with today's reality, as discussed in detail in a previous report.3 In a nutshell, Chinese manufacturers have quickly climbed up the value-add ladder due to rapidly rising labor costs, and pollution control has become an urgent social issue. Meanwhile, the RMB has been under constant downward pressure in recent years, and the Chinese authorities may welcome coordinated efforts to weaken the dollar and support the yuan. In short, China will not find it too painful to accept Trump's terms and conditions, as the "sick parts" of the Chinese economy will inevitably be cleansed regardless of pressure from the U.S. The risk to this view is that Trump finds China's progress too slow and grows impatient. Previous American presidents have come to accept China's gradualism and have demurred from punitive measures. Trump, with his populist base and promises, may at some point find it politically expedient to exact a price on China for failing to deliver the desired results on his electoral timeline. Across the board tariffs on Chinese imports are unlikely, but highly symbolic sanctions and anti-dumping measures remain distinct possibility. The End Game Of Sino-U.S. Trade Imbalances However, any immediate concessions from China on trade will do little to fundamentally change the U.S.'s external imbalances. It is well known that a country's current account balance is the residual of its national savings and domestic capital spending. Therefore, it is unrealistic to expect a meaningful reduction in the country's current account deficit without lifting America's domestic savings rate. Chart 1 shows the chronic nature of America's external deficit. It is worth noting that the "Nixon shock" in 1971 - the policy package of closing the gold window and imposing across-the-board tariffs on imports - was triggered when the U.S. was on track to have its first annual trade deficit since the 19th century. Fast forward 46 years later, various attempts by American administrations have failed to rescue the deteriorating trend. Many countries over the years such as Germany, Japan and newly-industrialized economies in Asia were all singled out as conducting unfair trade practices with the U.S., but none of the bilateral and multi-lateral efforts were effective with lasting impact. A fundamental change in global trade over the past four decades has been the rapid industrialization of China. In essence, China has become the final point of an increasingly integrated global assembly line, and therefore America's chronic deficit has been transferred from other countries to China. Chart 2 shows China's surplus with the U.S. has ballooned, while other countries' surpluses have dwindled. This has put China squarely under the spotlight, replacing previous scapegoats. Chart 1America's Secular Deficit... Chart 2... From Changing Sources From China's perspective, the country will continue to run a surplus with the U.S. so long as it remains in the most manufacturing-intensive phase of its development curve, though the product mix will continue to shift from lower-value-added goods to higher-value-added ones. Meanwhile, the Chinese corporate sector will shift production capacity to even lower cost countries, similar to what Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan have done in relation to China since the early 1980s when China began to open up. Already, China's direct investment to Vietnam has surged in recent years, which partially explains the sharp increase in Vietnam's trade surpluses with the U.S. (Chart 3). In fact, Vietnamese trade surplus with the U.S. account for 15% of the country's GDP, even though its overall trade balance is barely positive. This means that America's demand for cheap consumer goods is the main driving forces for its deficit, rather than any particular country's unfair trade practices. The fact is that the U.S. has moved beyond industrialization and become a post-industrial society, where the service sector generates more wealth than the manufacturing sector. China's shrinking share of imports from the U.S. is the mirror image of America's shrinking share of the manufacturing sector in the overall economy (Chart 4). Furthermore, the self-imposed restrictions on some high-tech goods exports to China further limits American firms growth potential, as this is the most competitive segment of America's manufacturing sector in the global market. Without removing these restrictions, it is unrealistic to expect a material increase in sales to China. Chart 3The "China Factor" In Vietnam's##br## Growing Trade Surpluses Chart 4America's Deindustrialization And ##br##Shrinking Market Share In China For now, the Trump-Xi summit offers hopeful signs that the two sides are mending severely tested bilateral relations and that the risk of escalation in trade tensions has declined. Trump may adopt a "good cop / bad cop" strategy that creates greater volatility. Longer term, unless the Trump administration addresses America's "savings shortage," the country's external deficit will not change materially. Imposing tariffs on Chinese imports only pushes Chinese surpluses to other less-competitive countries; it does not bring jobs back to the U.S. Any serious negotiations on bilateral trade imbalances between China and the U.S. must deal with the root causes. Yan Wang, Senior Vice President China Investment Strategy yanw@bcaresearch.com 1 Please see BCA Geopolitical Strategy and China Investment Strategy Special Report, "Taiwan's Election: How Dire Will The Straits Get?" dated January 13, 2016, available at cis.bcaresearch.com. 2 Please see China Investment Strategy Weekly Report, "The RMB: Back In The Spotlight," dated March 16, 2017, available at cis.bcaresearch.com. 3 Please see China Investment Strategy Special Report, "Dealing With The Trump Wildcard," dated January 26, 2017, available at cis.bcaresearch.com. Cyclical Investment Stance Equity Sector Recommendations
Highlights Global political risks are understated in 2018; U.S. policy will favor the USD, as will global macro trends; Trump's trade protectionism will re-emerge; China will slow, and may intensify structural reforms; Italian elections will reignite Euro Area breakup risk. Feature In our last report, we detailed why political risks are overstated in 2017.1 First, markets are underestimating President Trump's political capital when it comes to passing his growth agenda. Second, risks of populist revolt remain overstated in Europe. Third, political risks associated with Brexit probably peaked earlier this year. Next year, however, the geopolitical calendar is beset with potential systemic risks. First, we fear that President Trump will elevate trade to the top of his list of priorities, putting fears of protectionism and trade wars back onto the front burner. In turn, this could precipitate a serious crisis in the U.S.-China relationship and potentially inspire Chinese policymakers to redouble their economic reforms - so as not to "let a good crisis go to waste." That, in turn, would create short-term deflationary effects. Meanwhile, we fear that investors will have been lulled to sleep by the pro-market outcomes in Europe this year. The series of elections that go against populists may number seven by January 2018 (two Spanish elections, the Austrian presidential election, the Dutch general election, the French presidential and legislative elections, and the German general election in September). However, the Italian election looms as a risk in early 2018 and investors should not ignore it. Investors should remain overweight risk assets for the next 12 months. Our conviction level, however, declines in 2018 due to mounting geopolitical risks. Mercantilism Makes A Comeback Fears of a trade war appear distant and alarmist following the conclusion of the Mar-a-Lago summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. We do not expect the reset in relations to last beyond this year. Trump has issued a "shot across the bow" and now the two sides are settling down to business - but investors should avoid a false sense of complacency.2 Investors should remember that candidate Trump's rhetoric on China and globalization was why he stood out from the crowd of bland, establishment Republican candidates. Despite the establishment's tenacious support for globalization, Americans no longer believe in the benefits of free trade, at least not as defined by the neoliberal "Washington Consensus" of the past two decades (Chart 1). We take Trump's views on trade seriously. They certainly helped him outperform expectations in the manufacturing-heavy Midwest states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (Chart 2). And yet, Trump's combined margin of victory in the three states was just 77,744 votes -- less than 0.5% of the electorate of the three states! That should be enough to keep him focused on fulfilling his campaign promises to Midwest voters, at least if he wants to win in 2020.3 Chart 1America Belongs To The Anti-Globalization Bloc Chart 2Protectionism Boosted Trump In The Rust Belt In 2017, Trump's domestic agenda has taken precedent over international trade. The president is dealing with several key pieces of legislation, including the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, comprehensive tax reform, the repeal of Obama-era regulations, and infrastructure spending. However, there is considerable evidence that trade will eventually come back up: President Trump's appointments have favored proponents of protectionism (Table 1) whose statements have included some true mercantilist gems (Table 2). Table 1Government Appointments Certifying That Trump Is A Protectionist Table 2Protectionist Statements From The Trump Administration Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin, who is not known as a vociferous proponent of protectionism, prevented the G20 communique from reaffirming a commitment to free trade at the March meeting of finance officials in Baden-Baden, Germany.4 Such statements were staples of the summits over the past decade. The Commerce Department - under notable trade hawk Wilbur Ross - looks to be playing a much more active role in setting the trade agenda under President Trump. Ross has already imposed a penalty on Chinese chemical companies in a toughly worded ruling that declares, "this is not the last that bad actors in global trade will hear from us - the games are over." He is overseeing a three-month review of the causes of U.S. deficits, planning to add "national security" considerations to trade and investment assessments, proposing a new means of collecting duties in disputes, and encouraging U.S. firms to bring cases against unfair competition. Ross is likely to be joined by a tougher U.S. Trade Representative (who has historically been the most important driver of trade policy in the executive branch). In addition, we believe that Trump's success on the domestic policy front, in combination with the global macro environment, will lead to higher risk of protectionism in 2018. There are three overarching reasons: Domestic Policy Is Bullish USD: We do not know what path the White House and Congress will take on tax reform. We think tax reform is on the way, but the path of least resistance may be to leave reform for later and focus entirely on tax cuts in 2017. Whatever the outcome, we are almost certain that it will involve greater budget deficits than the current budget law augurs (Chart 3). Even a modest boost to government spending will motivate the Fed to accelerate its tightening cycle at a time when the output gap is nearly closed and unemployment is plumbing decade lows (Chart 4). This will perpetuate the dollar bull market. Chart 3Come What May, Trump Will Increase The Budget Deficit Chart 4A Fiscal Boost Will Accelerate Inflation Chinese Growth Scare Is Bullish USD: At some point later this year, Chinese data is likely to decelerate and induce a growth scare. Our colleague Yan Wang of BCA's China Investment Strategy believes that the Chinese economy is on much better footing than in early 2016, but that the year-on-year macro indicators will begin to moderate.5 This could rekindle investors' fears of another China-led global slowdown. Meanwhile, Chinese policymakers have gone forward with property market curbs and begun to tighten liquidity marginally on the interbank system. The seven-day repo rate, a key benchmark for Chinese lending terms, has surged to its highest level in two years, according to BCA's Foreign Exchange Strategy. It could surge again, dissuading small and medium-sized banks from bond issuance (Chart 5). Falling commodity demand and fear of another slowdown in China will weigh on EM assets and boost the USD. European Political Risks Are Bullish USD: Finally, any rerun of political risks in Europe in 2018 will force the ECB to be a lot more dovish than the market expects. With Italian elections to be held some time in Q1 or Q2 2018 - more on that risk below - we think the market is getting way ahead of itself with expectations of tighter monetary policy in Europe. The expected number of months till an ECB rate hike has collapsed from nearly 60 months in July 2016 to just 20 months in March, before recovering to 28 months as various ECB policymakers sought to dampen expectations of rate hikes (Chart 6).6 In addition, our colleague Mathieu Savary of BCA's Foreign Exchange Strategy has noted that a relationship exists between EM growth and European monetary policy (Chart 7), which suggests that any Chinese growth scares would similarly be euro-bearish and USD-bullish.7 Chart 5Interbank Volatility Will ##br##Dampen Chinese Credit Growth Chart 6Market Is Way Ahead Of ##br## Itself On ECB Hawkishness Chart 7EM Spreads, ECB Months-To-Hike: ##br##Same Battle The combination of Trump's domestic policy agenda and these global macro-economic factors will drive the dollar up. At some point in 2018, we assume that USD strength will begin to irk Donald Trump and his cabinet, particularly as it prevents them from delivering on their promise of shrinking trade deficits. We suspect that President Trump will eventually reach for the "currency manipulation" playbook of the 1970s-80s. There are two parallels that investors should be aware of: 1971 Smithsonian Agreement - President Richard Nixon famously closed the gold window on August 15, 1971 in what came to be known as the "Nixon shock."8 Less understood, but also part of the "shock," was a 10% surcharge on all imported goods, the purpose of which was to force U.S. trade partners to appreciate their currencies against the USD. Much like Trump, Nixon had campaigned on a mercantilist platform in 1968, promising southern voters that he would limit imports of Japanese textiles. As president, he staffed his cabinet with trade hawks, including Treasury Secretary John Connally who was in favor of threatening a reduced U.S. military presence in Europe and Japan to force Berlin and Tokyo to the negotiating table.9 Economists in the cabinet opposed the surcharge, fearing retaliation from trade partners, but policymakers favored brinkmanship.10 The eventual surcharge was said to be "temporary," but there was no explicit end date. The U.S. ultimately got other currencies to appreciate, mostly the deutschmark and yen, but not as much as it wanted. Critics in the administration - particularly the powerful National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger - feared that brinkmanship would hurt Trans-Atlantic relations and thus impede Cold War coordination between allies. As such, the U.S. removed the surcharge by December without meeting most of its other objectives, including increasing allied defense-spending and reducing trade barriers to U.S. exports. Even the exchange-rate outcomes of the deal dissipated within two years. 1985 Plaza Accord - The U.S. reached for the mercantilist playbook again in the early 1980s as the USD rallied on the back of Volcker's dramatic interest rate hikes. The subsequent dollar bull market hurt U.S. exports and widened the current account deficit (Chart 8). U.S. negotiators benefited from the 1971 Nixon surcharge because European and Japanese policymakers knew that Americans were serious about tariffs. The result was coordinated currency manipulation to drive down the dollar and self-imposed export limits by Japan, both of which had an almost instantaneous effect on the Japanese share of American imports (Chart 9). Chart 8Dollar Bull Market And ##br## Current Account Balance Chart 9The U.S. Got What It ##br##Wanted From Plaza Accord The Smithsonian and Plaza examples are important for two reasons. First, they show that Trump's mercantilism is neither novel nor somehow "un-American." It especially is not anti-Republican, with both Nixon and Reagan having used overt protectionism as a negotiating tool in recent history. In fact, Trump's Trade Representative, the yet-to-be-confirmed Robert Lighthizer, is a veteran of the latter agreement, having negotiated it for President Ronald Reagan.11 Second, the experience of both negotiations in bringing about a shift in the U.S. trade imbalance will motivate the Trump administration to reach for the same "coordinated currency manipulation" playbook. The problem is that 2018 is neither 1971 nor 1985. The Trump administration will face three constraints to using currency devaluation to reduce the U.S. trade imbalance: Chart 10Globalization Has Reached Its Apex Chart 11Global Protectionism Has Bottomed Economy: Europe and Japan were booming economies in the early 1970s and mid-1980s and had the luxury of appreciating their currencies at the U.S.'s behest. Today, it is difficult to see how either Europe or China can afford significant monetary policy tightening that engineers structural bull markets in the euro and RMB respectively. For Europe, the risk is that peripheral economies may not survive a back-up in yields. For China, monetary policy tightness would imperil the debt-servicing of its enormous corporate debt horde. Apex of Globalization: U.S. policymakers could negotiate the 1971 and 1985 currency agreements in part because the promise of increased trade remained intact. Europe and Japan agreed to a tactical retreat to get a strategic victory: ongoing trade liberalization. In 2017, however, this promise has been muted. Global trade has peaked as a percent of GDP (Chart 10), average tariffs appear to have bottomed (Chart 11), and the number of preferential trade agreements signed each year has collapsed (Chart 12). Temporary trade barriers have ticked up since 2008 (Chart 13). To be clear, these signs are not necessarily proof that globalization is reversing, but merely that it has reached its apex. Nonetheless, America's trade partners will be far less willing to agree to coordinated currency manipulation in an era where the global trade pie is no longer growing. Geopolitics: During the Cold War, the U.S. had far greater leverage over Europe and Japan than it does today over Europe and China. While the U.S. is still involved in European defense, its geopolitical relationship with China is hostile. What happens when the Smithsonian/Plaza playbook fails? We would expect the Trump administration to switch tactics. Two alternatives come to mind: Protectionism: As the Nixon surcharge demonstrates, the U.S. president has few legal, constitutional constraints to using tariffs against trade partners.12 As the Trump White House grows frustrated in 2018 with the widening trade imbalance, it may reach for the tariff playbook. The risk here is that retaliation from Europe and China would be swift, hurting U.S. exporters in the process. Dovishness: There is a much simpler alternative to a global trade war: inflation. Our theory that the USD will rally amidst domestic fiscal stimulus is predicated on the Fed hiking rates faster as inflation and growth pick up. But what if the Fed decides to respond to higher nominal GDP growth by hiking rates more slowly? This could be the strategy pursued by the next Fed chair, to be in place by February 3, 2018. We do not buy the conventional wisdom that "President Trump will pick hawks because his economic advisors are hawks" for two reasons. First, we do not know that Trump's economic advisors will carry the day. Second, we suspect that President Trump will be far more focused on winning the 2020 election than putting a hawk in charge of the Fed. Chart 12Low-Hanging Fruit Of Globalization Already Picked Chart 13Temporary Trade Barriers Ticking Up Bottom Line: Putting it all together, we expect that U.S. trade imbalances will come to the forefront of the political agenda in 2018. This will especially be the case if the USD continues to rally into next year, contributing to the widening of the trade deficit. We expect any attempt to reenact the Smithsonian/Plaza agreements to flame out quickly. America's trade partners are constrained and unable to appreciate their currencies against the USD. This could rattle the markets in 2018 as investors become aware that Trump's mercantilism is real and that chances of a trade war are high. On the other hand, Trump may take a different tack altogether and instead focus on talking down the USD. This will necessitate a compliant Fed, which will mean higher inflation and a weaker USD. Such a strategy could prolong the reflation trade through 2018 and into 2019, but only if the subsequent bloodbath in the bond market is contained. China Decides To Reform Presidents Trump and Xi launched a new negotiation framework on April 6 that they will personally oversee, as well as a "100 Day Plan" on trade that we expect will result in a flurry of activity over the next three months. One potential outcome of the meeting is a rumored plan for massive Chinese investment into the U.S. that could add a headline 700,000 jobs, complemented with further opening of China's agricultural, automotive, and financial sectors to U.S. investment and exports. Investors may be fêted with more good news, especially with President Trump slated to visit China before long. President Trump, a prominent China-basher, may decide that the deals he brings home from China will be enough to convince the Midwest electorate that he has gotten the U.S. a "better deal" as promised. This would enable him to stabilize China relations in order to focus on other issues, as all presidents since Reagan have done. However, we doubt that the Sino-American relationship can be resolved through short-term trade initiatives alone. There is too much distrust, as we have elucidated before.13 The 100-day plan is a good start but it carries an implicit threat of tariffs from the Trump administration if China fails to follow through; and China is not likely to give Trump everything he wants. Moreover, strategic and security issues are far from settled, despite some positive gestures. As such, we expect both economic and geopolitical tensions to resurface in 2018. Meanwhile Chinese policymakers may decide to use tensions with the U.S. as an opportunity to redouble efforts towards structural reforms at home. Since the Xi Jinping administration pledged sweeping pro-market reforms in 2013, the country has shied away from dealing with its massive corporate debt hoard (Chart 14) and has only trimmed the overcapacity in sectors like steel and coal (Chart 15). It fears incurring short-term pain, albeit for long-term gain. However, if Beijing can blame any reform-induced slowdown on the U.S. and its nationalist administration, it will make it easier to manage the political blowback at home, providing a means of rallying the public around the flag. Chart 14China's Corporate Debt Pile Still A Problem... Chart 15...And So Is Industrial Overcapacity China has, of course, undertaken significant domestic reforms under the current administration. It has re-centralized power in the hands of the Communist Party and made steps to improve quality of life by fighting pollution, expanding health-care access, and loosening the One Child policy. These measures have long-term significance for investors because they imply that the Chinese state is responsive to the secular rise in social unrest over the past decade. The political system is still vulnerable in the event of a major economic crisis, but the party's legitimacy has been reinforced. Nevertheless, what long-term investors fear is China’s simultaneous backsliding on key components of economic liberalization. Since the global financial crisis, the government has adopted a series of laws that impose burdens on firms, especially foreign and private firms, relating to security, intellectual property, technology, legal (and political) compliance, and market access. Moreover, since the market turmoil in 2015-16, the government has moved to micromanage the country’s stock market, capital account, banking and corporate sectors, and Internet and media. The general darkening of the business environment is a major reason why investors have not celebrated notable reform moves like liberalizing deposit interest rates or standardizing the business-service tax. These steps require further reforms to build on them (i.e. to remove lending preferences for SOEs, or to provide local governments with revenues to replace the business tax). But all reforms are now in limbo as the Communist Party approaches its “midterm” party congress this fall. Most importantly for investors, the government has still not shown it can "get off the train" of rapid credit growth that has underpinned China's transition away from foreign demand (Chart 16). The country's relatively robust consumer-oriented and service-sector growth remains to be tested by tighter financial conditions. And the property sector poses an additional, perpetual financial risk, which policymakers have avoided tackling with reforms like the proposed property tax (a key reform item to watch for next year).14 The PBoC's recent tightening efforts come after a period of dramatic liquidity assistance to the banks (Chart 17), and even though interbank rates remain well below their brief double-digit levels during the "Shibor Crisis" in 2013 (see Chart 5 above, page 6), any tightening serves to revive fears that financial instability could re-emerge and translate to the broader economy. Chart 16China's Savings Fueling Debt Buildup Chart 17PBoC Lends A Helping Hand What signposts should investors watch to see whether China re-initiates structural reforms? Already, personnel changes at the finance and commerce ministries, as well as the National Development and Reform Commission and China Banking Regulatory Commission, suggest that the Xi administration may be headed in this direction. Table 3 focuses on the steps that we think would be most important, beginning with the party congress this fall. Given current levels of overcapacity and corporate leverage, we suspect that genuine structural reform will begin with a move toward deleveraging, and involve a mix of bank recapitalization and capacity destruction, as it did in the 1990s and early 2000s. These reforms included the formation of new central financial authorities, like policy banks, regulatory bodies, and asset management companies, to oversee the cleaning up of bank balance sheets and the removal of numerous inefficient players from the financial sector.15 They eventually entailed transfers of funds from the PBoC, from foreign exchange reserves, and from public offerings as major banks were partially privatized. On the corporate side, the reforms witnessed the elimination of a range of SOEs and layoffs numbering around 40% of SOE employees, or 4% of the economically active workforce at the time. Table 3Will China Launch Painful Economic Restructuring Next Year? Chinese President Jiang Zemin launched these reforms after the party congress of 1997, just as his successor, Hu Jintao, attempted to launch similar reforms following the party congress of 2007. The latter got cut short by the Great Recession. The question now for Xi Jinping's administration is whether he will use his own midterm party congress to launch the reforms that he has emphasized: namely, deep overcapacity cuts and financial and property market stabilization through measures to mitigate systemic risks.16 Bottom Line: China may decide to use American antagonism as an "excuse" to launch a serious structural reform push following this fall's National Party Congress. Short-term pain, which is normal under a reform scenario in any country, could then be blamed on an antagonistic U.S. trade and geopolitical policy. While reforms in China are a positive in the long term, we fear that a slowdown in China would export deflation to still fragile EM economies. And given Europe's high-beta economy, it could also be negative for European assets and the euro. Europe's Divine Comedy Investors remain focused on European elections this year. The first round of the French election is just 11 days away and polls are tightening (Chart 18). Although Marine Le Pen is set to lose the second round in a dramatic fashion against the pro-market, centrist Emmanuel Macron (Chart 19), she could be a lot more competitive if either center-right François Fillon or left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon squeaks by Macron to get into the second round.17 Chart 18Melenchon's Rise: Comrades Unite! Chart 19Le Pen Cruisin' For A Bruisin' The risk of someone-other-than-Macron getting into the second round is indeed rising. However, Mélenchon's rise thus far appears to be the mirror image of Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon's demise. At some point, this move will reach its natural limits: not all Hamon voters are willing to switch to Mélenchon. At that point, the Communist Party-backed Mélenchon will have to start taking voters away from Le Pen. This is definitely possible, but would also create a scenario in which it is Mélenchon, not Le Pen, that faces off against a centrist candidate in the second round. As such, we see Mélenchon's rise primarily as a threat to Le Pen, not Macron.18 While we remain focused on the French election, we think that any market relief from that election - and the subsequent German one - will be temporary. By early next year, investors will have to deal with Italian elections. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no clarity in terms of who will win the Italian election. If elections were held today, the Euroskeptic Five Star Movement (M5S) would gain a narrow victory (Chart 20). However, it is not clear what electoral law will apply in the next election. The current law on the books, which the Democratic Party-led (PD) government is attempting to reform by next February, would give a party reaching 40% of the vote a majority-bonus. As Chart 20 illustrates, however, no party is near that threshold. As such, the next election may produce a hung parliament with no clarity, but with a Euroskeptic plurality. Meanwhile, the ruling center-left Democratic Party is crumbling. Primaries are set for April 30 and will pit former PM Matteo Renzi against left-wing factions that have coalesced into a single alliance called the Progressive and Democratic Movement (DP). For now, DP supports the government of caretaker PM Paolo Gentiloni, but its members have recently embarrassed the government by voting with the opposition in a key April 6 vote in the Senate. If Renzi wins the leadership of the Democratic Party again, DP members could formally split and contest the 2018 election as a separate party. The real problem for investors with Italy is not the next election, whose results are almost certain to be uncertain, but rather the Euroskeptic turn in Italian politics. First, aggregating all Euroskeptic and Europhile parties produces a worrying trend (Chart 21). And we are being generous to the pro-European camp by including the increasingly Euroskeptic Forza Italia of former PM Silvio Berlusconi in its camp. Chart 20Five Star Movement Set For Plurality Win Chart 21Euroskeptics Take The Lead Unlike its Mediterranean peers Spain and Portugal, Italian support for the euro is still plumbing decade lows -- no doubt a reflection of the country's non-existent economic recovery (Chart 22). It is difficult to see how Italians can regain confidence in European integration given that they are unwilling to pursue painful structural reforms. Chart 22Italian Economic Woes Hurt Euro Support The question is not whether Italy will face a Euroskeptic crisis, but rather when. It may avoid one in 2018 as the pro-euro centrists cobble together a weak government or somehow entice the center-right into forming a grand coalition. But even in that rosy scenario, such a government is not going to have a mandate for painful structural reforms that would be required to pull Italy out of its low-growth doldrums. As such, it is unlikely that the next Italian government will last its full five-year term. Bottom Line: Investors should prepare for a re-run of Europe's sovereign debt crisis, with Italy as the main event. We expect this risk to be delayed until after the Italian election in 2018, maybe later. However, it is likely to have global repercussions, given Italy's status as the third-largest sovereign debt market. Will Italy exit the euro? Our view is that Italy needs a crisis in order to stay in the Euro Area, as only the market can bring forward the costs of euro exit for Italian voters by punishing the economy through the bond market. The market, economy, and politics have a dynamic relationship and Italian voters will be able to assess the costs of an exit first hand, as yields approach their highs in 2011 and Italian banks face a potential liquidity crisis. Given that support for the euro remains above 50% today, we would expect that Italians would back off from the abyss after such a shock, but our conviction level is low.19 Housekeeping This week, we are taking profits on our long MXN/RMB trade. We initiated the trade on January 25, 2017 and it has returned 14.2% since then. The trade was a play on our view that Trump's protectionism would hit China harder than Mexico. Given the favorable conclusion to the Mar-a-Lago summit - and the likely easing of risks of a China-U.S. trade war in the near term - it is time to book profits on this trade. We still see short-term upside to MXN and investors may want to pair it by shorting the Turkish lira. We expect more downside to TRY given domestic political instability, which we expect to continue beyond the April 15 constitutional referendum. We see both the yes and no outcomes of the referendum as market negative. In addition, we are closing our short Chinese RMB (via 12-month non-deliverable forwards) trade for a profit of 5.89% and our long USD/SEK trade for a gain of 1.27%. Our short U.K. REITs trade has been stopped out for a loss of 5%. Marko Papic, Senior Vice President Geopolitical Strategy marko@bcaresearch.com Matt Gertken, Associate Editor Geopolitical Strategy mattg@bcaresearch.com 1 Please see BCA Geopolitical Strategy Weekly Report, "Political Risks Are Overstated In 2017," dated April 5, 2017, available at gps.bcaresearch.com. 2 For this negotiating sequence, please see BCA Geopolitical Strategy and The Bank Credit Analyst Special Report, "A Q&A On Political Dynamics In Washington," dated November 24, 2016, available at bca.bcaresearch.com, and Geopolitical Strategy and Global Investment Strategy Special Report, "The Geopolitics Of Trump," dated December 2, 2016, available at gps.bcaresearch.com. 3 Trump loves to win. 4 Please see Federal Ministry of Finance, Germany, "Communique - G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting," dated March 18, 2017, available at www.bundesfinanzministerium.de. 5 Please see BCA China Investment Strategy Weekly Report, "Chinese Growth: Testing Time Ahead," dated April 6, 2017, available at cis.bcaresearch.com. 6 The head of the Lithuanian central bank, Vitas Vasiliauskas, was quoted by the Wall Street Journal in early April stating that "it is too early to discuss an exit because still we have a lot of significant uncertainties." This was followed by the executive board member Peter Praet dampening expectations of even a reduction in the bank's bond-buying program and President Mario Draghi stating that the current monetary policy stance remained appropriate. 7 Please see BCA Foreign Exchange Strategy Weekly Report, "ECB: All About China?" dated April 7, 2017, available at fes.bcaresearch.com. 8 Please see Douglas A. Irwin, "The Nixon shock after forty years: the import surcharge revisited," World Trade Review 12:01 (January 2013), pp. 29-56, available at www.nber.org, and Barry Eichengreen, "Before the Plaza: The Exchange Rate Stabilization Attempts of 1925, 1933, 1936 and 1971," Behl Working Paper Series 11 (2015). 9 Treasury Secretary John Connally was particularly protectionist, with two infamous mercantilist quips to his name: "foreigners are out to screw us, our job is to screw them first," and "the dollar may be our currency, but it is your problem." 10 Paul Volcker, then Undersecretary of the Treasury, provided some color on this divide: "As I remember it, the discussion largely was a matter of the economists against the politicians, and the outcome wasn't really close." 11 We highly recommend that our clients peruse Lighthizer's testimony to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Beginning at p. 29, he recommends three key measures: using the 1971 surcharge as a model (p. 31); going beyond "WTO-consistent" policies (p. 33); and imposing tariffs against China explicitly (p. 35). Please see Robert E. Lighthizer, "Testimony Before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission: Evaluating China's Role in the World Trade Organization Over the Past Decade," dated June 9, 2010, available at www.uscc.gov. 12 Please see BCA Geopolitical Strategy Weekly Report, "Trump, Day One: Let The Trade War Begin," dated January 18, 2017, and Weekly Report, "The 'What Can You Do For Me' World?" dated January 25, 2017, available at gps.bcaresearch.com. 13 Please see BCA Geopolitical Strategy Special Reports, "Power And Politics In East Asia: Cold War 2.0?" dated September 25, 2012, "Sino-American Conflict: More Likely Than You Think," dated October 4, 2013, and "Sino-American Conflict: More Likely Than You Think, Part II," dated November 6, 2015, available at gps.bcaresearch.com. See also the recent Geopolitical Strategy and Emerging Market Equity Sector Strategy Special Report, "The South China Sea: Smooth Sailing?" dated March 28, 2017, available at gps.bcaresearch.com. 14 Please see BCA's Commodity & Energy Strategy Special Report, "Chinese Property Market: A Structural Downtrend Just Started," dated June 4, 2015, available at ces.bcaresearch.com. 15 Please see BCA Geopolitical Strategy, "China: Is Beijing About To Blink?" in Monthly Report, "What Geopolitical Risks Keep Our Clients Awake?" dated March 9, 2016, available at gps.bcaresearch.com. 16 At a meeting of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs, which Xi chairs, the decision was made to make some progress on these structural issues this year, but only within the overriding framework of ensuring "stability." The question is whether Xi will grow bolder in 2018. Please see "Xi stresses stability, progress in China's economic work," Xinhua, February 28, 2017, available at news.xinhuanet.com. 17 That said, the most recent poll - conducted between April 9-10 - shows that Mélenchon may be even more likely to defeat Le Pen than Macron. He had a 61% to 39% lead in the second round versus Le Pen. 18 In the second round, Macron is expected to defeat Mélenchon by 55% to 45%, according to the latest poll, conducted April 9-10. 19 Please see BCA Geopolitical Strategy Special Report, "Europe's Divine Comedy: Italian Inferno," dated September 14, 2016, available at gps.bcaresearch.com.