Economy

Highlights U.S. domestic demand will remain robust for the foreseeable future thanks to fiscal stimulus, stronger credit growth, a falling savings rate, and plentiful sources of pent-up demand. Economic and financial imbalances in the U.S. are also muted, while the financial system is fairly resilient. All this implies that the Fed can raise rates quite a bit more - certainly above the 3% level that the market regards as the threshold at which the economy will go off the rails. Since both monetary and fiscal policy will remain accommodative for the foreseeable future, a recession is unlikely before 2020, with risks tilted to an even later onset date. The combination of a stronger dollar, slowing global trade, high EM debt levels, and the Chinese government's reluctance to pursue a massive fiscal/credit stimulus program due to concerns about financial stability and debt sustainability, all spell trouble for emerging markets. Investors should favor developed market equities over their EM counterparts. Within the developed market universe, remain overweight the U.S. over both Europe and Japan in common-currency terms. As we predicted two years ago, bonds have entered a secular bear market. However, a temporary countertrend rally is a growing risk in the near term, especially in light of extremely stretched short positioning and technically oversold conditions. Feature A New Record Will Be Set Next Year The current U.S. economic expansion will become the longest on record if it makes it to July 2019, at which point it will surpass the 1990s expansion (Chart 1). Will it last that long? We think so. In fact, the risk to our 2020 recession call is tilted towards a later downturn rather than an earlier one. Chart 1The Current Economic Expansion Will Likely Be The Longest On Record To understand why, it is useful to consider the forces that generate recessions. In one sense, business cycles are very simple things: Recessions occur when spending begins to decline in relation to the economy's productive capacity. This often sets in motion a vicious circle where rising unemployment reduces both income and confidence, leading to less spending and even higher unemployment. Conversely, recoveries occur when spending rises relative to the economy's productive capacity. This may happen because fiscal and/or monetary policy turn stimulative. It can also happen because the excesses that were built up in the lead-up to the recession are purged, allowing the economy to grow from a clean slate. Lessons From The Great Recession The Great Recession offers a vivid demonstration of these processes. The run-up in home prices starting in the early 2000s pushed up consumption. Rising housing demand also lifted residential investment. Once the housing bubble burst, everything went into reverse: Home prices and construction collapsed. Household debt, which had grown rapidly over the preceding 25 years, began to contract. The importance of shifts in aggregate demand in explaining business-cycle fluctuations may seem simple if not obvious, but it is remarkable how many people fail to understand them. One of the more strangely controversial reports I wrote while working in the global markets group at Goldman Sachs in September 2009 was a piece predicting that the Fed would need to keep rates low for "many years" to come.1 It is easy to forget now, but the U.S. 10-year yield rose as high as 3.92% in December 2009 on the expectation that the Fed would start "normalizing" monetary policy in the near future (Chart 2). Chart 2Rate Expectations Were Too Hawkish Shortly After The Great Recession, But Are Now Too Dovish Those who understood the mechanics of recessions and recoveries should have realized that the Fed would not be able to abandon its ultra-loose monetary stance so quickly. Yes, the financial crisis had ended in the sense that credit spreads were falling, equity prices were recovering, and fears of a massive bank run were receding. But the sources of demand that propped up spending prior to the Great Recession were not coming back anytime soon. The U.S. needs about 3.5% of GDP in residential investment to keep up with population growth. After the recession ended, it probably required something closer to 2% of GDP in residential investment in order to work off the excess inventory of homes that was created during the bubble years. Residential investment averaged nearly 6% of GDP between 2002 and 2006. Where exactly was that 4% of GDP in lost demand going to come from? Certainly not from the Obama stimulus package, which was too small and too transient. Likewise, while one could have reasonably debated in 2009 the extent to which debt levels would ultimately fall, it should have been pretty obvious that they would not start rising at least for the next few years. Conceptually, the level of demand is determined by the rate of growth of debt.2 Rising debt added to aggregate demand in the years leading to the Great Recession. If debt levels had simply stabilized in the aftermath of the recession, this would have still left the economy with less spending power than it had before the downturn. It took a long time, but by 2016 investors had finally internalized the lessons discussed above. The U.S. 10-year yield hit a record closing low of 1.37% on July 5, 2016. As luck would have it, this was also the day that we published a note declaring "The End Of The 35-Year Bond Bull Market." Our decision to turn more cautious on bonds was motivated by both valuation considerations and the fact that many of the forces that had dragged down bond yields were starting to drive them back up: The output gap had shrunk; fiscal policy had become more stimulative; and credit was growing anew. In addition, eight years of frugal living created plenty of pent-up demand for fixed capital and consumer durable goods. Chart 3 shows that the average age of the residential capital stock shot up from 25.8 years in 2007 to 30.1 years in 2016. The average age of the nonresidential capital stock also continued to drift up, rising to the highest level since 1963. The average age of consumer goods also increased (Chart 4). Chart 3The U.S. Capital Stock Has Aged (Part I) Chart 4The U.S. Capital Stock Has Aged (Part II) Where Things Stand Today This brings us to the present. Today, the output gap is fully closed, private-sector credit growth has returned to its long-term trend, and fiscal policy is even looser than it was two years ago (Chart 5). The replacement cycle for business investment still has further to run. Both capex intention surveys and the recent easing in lending standards for commercial and industrial loans suggest that capital expenditures will remain strong for the foreseeable future (Chart 6). Meanwhile, household spending will be supported by accelerating wage growth and a savings rate that has plenty of scope to fall from current levels (Chart 7). Chart 5The Need For Ultra-Low Rates Has Passed Chart 6Business Investment Still Going Strong Chart 7Stronger Wage Growth And A Falling Savings Rate Will Lift Spending Perhaps most importantly, the sort of financial imbalances that have triggered recessions in the past are largely absent today. Unlike a decade ago, the mortgage market is in good shape. The Urban Institute's Housing Credit Availability Index, which measures the percentage of housing loans that are likely to default over the next 90 days, remains near all-time lows (Chart 8). The corporate debt market is more problematic, and we continue to see it as the "weakest link" in the financial system. The ratio of corporate debt-to-GDP has climbed to a record high, while so-called "covenant-light loans" have proliferated. The situation is particularly bad among companies with publicly-traded bonds, who have generally been the worst offenders. Nevertheless, the situation is far from dire. The ratio of corporate net debt-to-EBITD is still reasonably low. The interest coverage ratio is fairly elevated, as is the "quick ratio," which takes the difference between current corporate assets and inventories and divides it by short-term liabilities. Corporate assets have also risen quite briskly over the past few years, which has kept the corporate debt-to-asset ratio broadly stable (Chart 9). Chart 8U.S. Mortgage Market Is In Good Shape Chart 9Corporate Debt: Problematic, But Far From Dire Looking out, rising interest rates will lift debt-servicing costs while faster wage growth will put downward pressure on profit margins. This is likely to strain corporate balance sheets, causing spreads to widen from today's ultra-low levels. However, a major wave of defaults is unlikely to occur unless earnings collapse, which rarely happens outside of recessions. The Financial System Is More Resilient Is it possible that rising defaults will force firms to lay off workers, leading to less spending throughout the economy, higher corporate defaults, and even more layoffs? Such a vicious circle cannot be dismissed, but its likelihood is mitigated by the fact that most corporate debt is held by unleveraged investors. Defaults are most economically pernicious when they lead to "leveraged losses," a term coined by my former Goldman Sachs colleague, Jan Hatzius. If a leveraged institution wishes to hold ten times as much assets as capital, a $1 loss on a bad loan will force it to reduce its assets by $10. This could result in a downward spiral in asset prices - one where fire sales lead to big haircuts to asset holders, generating even more forced sales. A credit crunch is almost inevitable in such a scenario. Unlike mortgages, which are often held by leveraged institutions, most corporate debt is held by unleveraged players such as pension funds, insurance companies, and ETFs. Bank loans account for only 18% of nonfinancial corporate-sector debt, down from 40% in 1980 (Chart 10). The share of leveraged loans held by banks has declined from about 25% a decade ago to less than 10% today. Moreover, banks today hold much more high-quality capital than in the past (Chart 11). Chart 10Banks Have Reduced Their Exposure To The Corporate Sector Chart 11U.S. Banks Are Well Capitalized Tellingly, we already had a dress rehearsal for what a corporate debt scare might look like. Credit spreads spiked in 2015. Default rates rose, but the knock-on effects to the financial system were minimal (Chart 12). This suggests that corporate America could withstand quite a bit of monetary tightening without buckling under the pressure. Chart 12Corporate Debt Scare: 2015 Was A Preview No Recession On The Horizon The discussion above suggests that U.S. aggregate demand growth will remain robust for the foreseeable future thanks to fiscal stimulus, stronger credit growth, a falling savings rate, and still-abundant sources of pent-up demand. Economic and financial imbalances are also muted, while the financial system is fairly resilient. All this implies that the Fed can raise rates quite a bit more - certainly above the 3% level that the market regards as the threshold at which the economy will go off the rails (Chart 13). Comments this week from key Fed officials, including Chair Powell, suggest that the FOMC is finally starting to see things our way. Since it will take a while for the Fed to lift interest rates into restrictive territory, it follows that the next recession is nowhere on the horizon. This observation is supported by a variety of leading economic indicators, including the ISM index, initial unemployment claims, and core durable goods orders (Chart 14). Only the yield curve is sending a modestly worrying signal, although as we discussed in a prior report,3 the danger posed from a flatter yield curve is lower today than in the past. Chart 13Markets Expect No Fed Hikes Beyond Next Year Chart 14No Imminent Risk Of A U.S. Recession It will not be until 2020, and perhaps even later, that monetary policy turns restrictive. By that time, imbalances will have grown, which implies that debt levels and asset prices will probably be higher. The unemployment rate could be in the low 3% range and core PCE inflation will likely have moved squarely above the Fed's target. Risks To The View While our baseline scenario foresees a recession happening later rather than sooner, it would be unwise to ignore the risks to that sanguine view. Four things could hasten an economic downturn: A full-blown trade war with China: Trump's procyclical fiscal policy will drain domestic savings, causing the current account deficit to widen. Since Trump is unlikely to blame his own macro policies for a rising trade deficit, he will try to find a scapegoat. He cannot blame Canada or Mexico anymore since he just negotiated a "tremendous" new USMCA agreement with them, which allegedly redresses all the injustices of the prior trade deal. Japan and the EU will also get a break, if for no other reason than they are still needed as geopolitical allies. This just leaves China as the fall guy. The risk is that the Chinese government not only raises tariffs on U.S. exports, but also retaliates against U.S. firms with operations in China. Even more dangerously, a trade war with China could escalate into an outright military conflict. The underreported story of the near collision between a Chinese warship and a U.S. destroyer this week highlights the risk of such an outcome.4 An oil superspike: Our energy strategists have argued that extremely tight supply conditions, exacerbated by sanctions against Iranian oil exports, could cause the price of crude to shoot up to $100 dollars per barrel by early next year. Every U.S. recession over the past 40 years has been preceded by a rapid increase in oil prices (Chart 15). While there are reasons to think that an oil shock would be less damaging than in the past - the U.S. is now a net energy exporter; the volume of oil consumption as a share of real GDP has fallen by a third since 1995, and by half since 1980; inflation expectations are much better anchored - a big enough oil spike, if combined with other adverse shocks, could create the conditions for another recession. An Italian sovereign debt crisis: Italy is caught between a rock and a hard place. The Italian private sector saves too much and spends too little. A shrinking population has reduced the need for firms to invest in new capacity. The prior government's pension cuts have also incentivized people to save more for their retirement. The result is a private sector savings-investment surplus that stood at 5% of GDP in 2017 compared to close to breakeven a decade ago (Chart 16). Unlike Germany, Italy cannot export its savings to the rest of the world through a large trade surplus because it does not have a hypercompetitive economy. Nor can the Italian government risk running afoul of the bond vigilantes by emulating Japan's strategy of absorbing private-sector savings with large budget deficits. It is unlikely that these tensions will come to a head before the next global recession. Nevertheless, Italy's fiscal woes certainly make global financial markets more vulnerable to a risk-off event. Emerging market meltdown: As our EM strategists have highlighted, the combination of a stronger dollar, slowing global trade, high EM debt levels, and the Chinese government's reluctance to pursue a massive fiscal/credit stimulus program due to concerns about financial stability, all spell trouble for emerging markets. It is doubtful that an EM crisis would bring down the U.S. economy - even the 1990s crises did not do that - but it could exacerbate a preexisting slowdown, especially if the spillovers from EM lead to a tightening in U.S. financial conditions via a sharp appreciation of the dollar, wider credit spreads, and a selloff in U.S. stocks. Chart 15Rapid Increases In Oil Prices Tend To Precede Recessions Chart 16Italy: Private Sector Saves Too Much And Spends Too Little Investment Conclusions In many respects, the economic and financial landscape today resembles that of late-1997 and early-1998. Back then, the U.S. stock market was rallying while emerging market assets were selling off. The decoupling between U.S. and global stocks came to a thunderous end in the summer of 1998. Popular lore attributes the 22% plunge in the S&P 500 from July 20 to October 8 to the implosion of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), but in fact almost all of the decline in the index occurred before the problems at LTCM surfaced. It was more the steady drip of bad news over the course of 1998 - the spread of the crisis from Thailand to Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea; the collapse of Hong Kong-based Peregrine Investments Holdings, Asia's largest private investment bank; growing fears that China would devalue its currency; and finally, the Russian sovereign debt default - which caused market sentiment among U.S. investors to turn from euphoric ambivalence to bearish hysteria (Chart 17). Chart 17Key Events During The Asian Crisis It is impossible to know if such a phase-transition will occur again, but prudent investors should consider scaling back risk if they are currently overweight risk assets. We moved to neutral from overweight on global equities in June, while maintaining our preference for developed over emerging markets. Within the developed market universe, we continue to favor the U.S. over both Europe and Japan in common-currency terms, given our expectation of further dollar strength. If global stocks do suffer a correction during the next few months, this will present a buying opportunity. U.S. equities, which account for over half of global stock market capitalization, tend not to peak until six months or so before the start of a recession (Table 1). Keep in mind that the S&P 500 rallied by 68% between its October 1998 lows and April 2000. Emerging market stocks bottomed in September 1998, before doubling over the subsequent 18 months. Following this script, we expect to flip our recommendation from being underweight to overweight EM equities at some point in 2019, probably in the first half of the year. The 1998 template is also helpful for thinking about the outlook for bond yields. The 10-year Treasury yield rose from 4.16% in October 1998 to 6.79% in January 2000, but not before falling from nearly 7% in April 1997. We do not expect a similar decline in yields this time around, but a modest dip from current levels would not be surprising, particularly because bond sentiment is highly bearish at the moment (Chart 18). As with stocks, any decline in bond yields would be temporary. Bonds are now in a secular bear market that could last a decade, if not longer. Our baseline views for global equities, bonds, currencies, and commodities are illustrated in Appendix A. Table 1Stocks And Recessions: Case-By-Case Chart 18Bond Sentiment Is Very Bearish Peter Berezin, Chief Global Strategist Global Investment Strategy peterb@bcaresearch.com 1 "Goldman Says Deleveraging May Keep Fed Rate Low for 'Years,' " Bloomberg, September 10, 2009. 2 Recall that GDP is a flow variable (how much production takes place every period), whereas credit is a stock variable (how much debt there is outstanding). Thus, credit growth affects GDP and, by extension, the change in credit growth (the so-called credit impulse) affects GDP growth. 3 Please see Global Investment Strategy Weekly Report, "Don't Fear A Flatter Yield Curve," dated December 22, 2017. 4 Steven Lee Myers, "American and Chinese Warships Narrowly Avoid High-Seas Collision," The New York Times, October 2, 2018. Appendix A Appendix Chart IMarket Outlook: Equities Appendix Chart IIMarket Outlook: Bonds Appendix Chart IIIMarket Outlook: Currencies Appendix Chart IVMarket Outlook: Commodities Strategy & Market Trends Tactical Trades Strategic Recommendations Closed Trades