Business Cycles

According to BCA Research’s China Investment Strategy service, the current Pledged Supplementary Lending (PSL) program will provide much less support to the housing market and construction activity than the 2015-2018 program. China’s central bank…

The Bank of Canada (BoC) kept rates steady at yesterday’s monetary policy meeting, leaving its policy rate at 5%. The central bank presented updated economic projections in a new Monetary Policy Report (MPR), which were little changed from the last MPR in…

Flash PMIs sent a generally positive update on economic activity across major DM economies in January – particularly in the case of manufacturing. In the US, the composite index rose to a 7-month high of 52.3, beating expectations it would remain broadly…

Chinese policymakers have ramped up their efforts to support the economy and financial markets over the past few days. On Wednesday, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) announced that on February 5 it will cut the reserve requirement ratio by 0.5 percentage…

According to BCA Research’s Global Investment Strategy service, labor demand can fall even in a full-employment economy. Investors often focus on the unemployment rate as a gauge of how strong the labor market is. The unemployment rate is a valuable…

Ahead of today’s Bank of Canada (BoC) meeting and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) meeting on February 6th, our Global Fixed Income Strategists compared the monetary policy outlooks for both central banks. In Canada, core inflation has already fallen…

The S&P 500 notched a fresh record high on Tuesday for the third session in a row, bringing its year-to-date gains to 2.0%. Yet as we highlighted in a recent Insight, the lack of a broad-based rally across all S&P 500 sectors raises some concerns…

As expected, the Bank of Japan maintained its ultra-easy monetary policy stance at its meeting on Tuesday, making no changes in interest rates or yield curve control. The monetary policy statement highlighted that elevated uncertainty around the economic…

Results of the ECB’s quarterly Bank Lending Survey suggest that the tight monetary policy stance is still weighing on the Eurozone economy.  Banks tightened credit standards for businesses and consumers further in Q4 2023, contributing to the substantial…

With US equity indices forging new highs, a key dynamic to watch to gauge the sustainability of the rally is earnings releases and forward guidance. With 52 S&P 500 companies having already reported their results, the Q4 blended earnings growth…