Economy
Lending standards continued to tighten for most loan categories in Q2, according to the Senior Loan Officer Survey (SLOOS). US banks reported tightening lending standards to businesses and all CRE categories. They kept standards mostly unchanged compared…
According to BCA Research’s US Bond Strategy service, Friday’s employment report caused financial markets to price-in some recession risk for the first time in months. The Treasury curve bull-steepened in July, a move that accelerated after Friday’s negative…
Our Portfolio Allocation Summary for August 2024.
We have previously highlighted that an upside surprise in China’s fiscal stimulus as well as an AI-triggered jump in US productivity could potentially prolong the expansion, and constitute two key risks to our recession view. Recently announced government…
The Australian CPI release for Q2 came in broadly within expectations. Headline CPI reaccelerated to 3.8%y/y from 3.6%y/y the previous quarter. Some of the narrower measures of inflation — trimmed-mean and weighted median CPI — came in below market…
The latest Conference Board measure of consumer confidence suggested that consumers were increasingly downbeat about current economic conditions. Notably, their fading optimism about labor market conditions drove the jobs-plentiful-minus-hard-to-get measure…
According to BCA Research’s Global Asset Allocation service, while the market action of the past few weeks is pointing to a return to a negative stock-bond correlation, more prints will be needed to confirm things are getting back to normal. The post-COVID…
Mounting evidence that the labor market is on its way to cracking checked two more boxes on our checklist, driving us to tactically downgrade equities to underweight while upgrading fixed income to overweight. Our tactical and cyclical (6-12 months) views are now aligned as our conviction that a recession will begin before year-end has increased.
The ISM Manufacturing PMI disappointed in July. The headline index declined at a faster pace, from 48.5 to 46.8, disappointing expectations and extending a four-month contraction streak. Details were uninspiring. New orders dipped to 47.4 from 49.3,…
The Sahm Rule – a widely watched real-time recession indicator – signals the early stages of a recession when the 3-month moving average of the unemployment rate rises at least half a percentage point above its past 12-month low. The surprise rise in the…