Asia

China's economic recovery will be led by consumer spending on services rather than the industrial sector. The current equity market leadership – outperformance by tech stocks – is unsustainable. Persistent deflationary forces will compel policymakers to inject more liquidity and bring down interest rates to reflate the economy. Hence, the RMB will resume its decline against the USD soon.

Slowing growth would be bad for equities, but so would stronger growth since it would mean more rate hikes.

In Section I, we note that the global growth outlook has modestly deteriorated over the past month, despite an improving 12-month outlook for Chinese domestic demand in response to the imminent end of the nation’s “dynamic zero-COVID” policy. Investors should remain conservatively positioned over the coming year, as we recommended in our Annual Outlook report. In Section II, we examine whether the structural risks facing global stocks are higher or lower today than they were prior to the global financial crisis, and what that implies for stock and bond risk premia.

Both the US and China have structural imbalances that need correcting. The former has a structurally imbalanced labour market in which demand far outstrips supply. The latter has a massively overvalued housing market. The concurrent correction of these two structural imbalances in the world’s two largest economies will necessitate a sharp slowdown in global growth, and leads to several investment conclusions.

How to play the reopening? Which sectors will benefit the most? What will be the impact of the reopening on the rest of the world? Why is the PBoC facing the Impossible Trinity? Why has the PBoC tightened liquidity, prompting a rise in onshore interest rates? What are the implications for interest rates and the currency going forward? Is it time to upgrade Chinese onshore and offshore stocks?

We explore the eight major themes that will define economic and market trends for Europe next year.