Recession-Hard/Soft Landing
Both the US and China have structural imbalances that need correcting. The former has a structurally imbalanced labour market in which demand far outstrips supply. The latter has a massively overvalued housing market. The concurrent correction of these two structural imbalances in the world’s two largest economies will necessitate a sharp slowdown in global growth, and leads to several investment conclusions.
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 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.
In this <i>Strategy Outlook</i>, we present the major investment themes and views we see playing out next year and beyond.
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.
Commodity currencies have been rather resilient, despite the broad rise in the dollar this year. In our view, we are about to experience a big rotation in commodity currency market performance at the crosses, from NZD, to CAD and finally to AUD.
The Chinese government will repress social unrest, then relax Covid-19 social restrictions to try to stabilize the economy. Russia will be aggressive in the short term but will pursue a ceasefire before March 2024. European and Italian risk will stay high on energy constraints.
This week we present six key investment views for 2023.