Money/Credit/Debt

We maintain our view that China’s economic growth in the coming months will remain lackluster. Beijing's recent measures to provide additional financing may help to bridge the gap in government spending in the rest of 2023 and into 2024, but the impact on growth will be very limited.

China’s economic growth will stagnate, at best, rather than revive. Lower valuations of Chinese equities are justified, and share prices have more downside. The RMB will continue to depreciate versus the US dollar.

Europe’s weak patch is not about the ECB’s policy tightening, at least not yet. 2024 is another story, and the ECB’s policy will prompt a Eurozone’s recession around the summer.

The biggest banks report that consumer credit card delinquencies still have yet to get back to pre-COVID levels and other credit performance indicators, leading and lagging, remain solid. There is still a great deal of cash sloshing around the banking system, though consumption has clearly slowed. We reiterate our view that a recession is coming, but not before the year is out.

The Hamas attack against Israel, timed almost 50 years to the day after a similar surprise attack on Yom Kippur of 1973, has evoked parallels with the 1970s. Parallels not only with Middle Eastern geopolitics then and now, but also with inflation, economics, and financial markets. In this report, we explain what went wrong in the 1970s and whether the mistakes will be repeated. Plus: the sharp sell-offs in some Latin American currencies are reaching a potential turning-point.