UK

Financial markets were taken on a wild ride between Wednesday and Friday of this week, with hugely important monetary policy meetings in the US, euro area and UK along with a rash of economic data. Despite all the news, noise and market volatility, the underlying message for monetary policy and bond yields in the US, euro area and UK is unchanged.

The ECB and the BoE provided a comforting signal to markets that the end of the respective tightening campaigns is coming before the summer. In the process, they are closing their hawkishness gap relative to the Fed.

This week’s Special Report goes over the structural problems facing the UK economy and our outlook for UK gilts and the sterling following turbulent moves in 2022.

While the housing downturn will be fairly mild in the US, it will be more severe abroad. Continue to favor bonds of countries whose housing fundamentals will limit rate hikes.

In this, our final report of a tumultuous year, we summarize our policy outlook for the “Big 4” central banks – the Fed, the ECB, the Bank of England (BoE) and the BoJ – and the associated bond market implications for 2023.

We explore the eight major themes that will define economic and market trends for Europe next year.

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.