Policy
We explore the eight major themes that will define economic and market trends for Europe next year.
Prefer government bonds over stocks, defensive sectors over cyclicals, and large caps over small caps. Favor North America over other markets. Favor emerging markets like Southeast Asia and Latin America over Greater China, Turkey, and emerging Europe. Stick with aerospace/defense stocks.
Prefer government bonds over stocks, defensive sectors over cyclicals, and large caps over small caps. Favor North America over other markets. Favor emerging markets like Southeast Asia and Latin America over Greater China, Turkey, and emerging Europe. Stick with aerospace/defense stocks.
In this report, we argue that the dollar will enter a volatile trading range, before a bear market begins in earnest. That said, fundamental forces are aligning for US dollar downside.
In this report, we discuss our most important investment themes for global fixed income markets in 2023, and present our main investment recommendations based on those themes. Our broad conclusion: an environment of slowing global inflation, much weaker global growth and less hawkish central banks will be positive for global government bond returns, but problematic for growth-focused spread products like corporate bonds.
We expect a bullish gold environment in 2023, conditional on a more dovish Fed. We are hesitant to go strategically long gold, since our view hinges on one variable: US monetary policy. We remain tactically bullish gold to take advantage of the reduced pace of US rate hikes.
For the first time in decades, the Fed is raising rates while the US Leading Economic Indicator has fallen into contractionary territory and the global manufacturing PMI’s new orders sub-index has dropped below 50. Hence, the outlook for global stocks is currently poor. However, the underperformance of EM equities versus the US is in a late stage. We are putting EM stocks on an upgrade watch list and recommend buying EM domestic bonds opportunistically.
The pandemic gave older Americans and Brits a massive carrot and stick to retire early. The carrot being a surge in wealth, the stick being a risk to health. In other major economies, the carrots and sticks were smaller or non-existent. Hence, the shortage of older workers, and the resulting wage inflation, is a specific US and UK problem. We go through the important economic and investment implications for 2023.
Investors should maintain a conservative and defensive strategy until recession risks are clearly reduced.
This week we present our Portfolio Allocation Summary for December 2022.