Emerging Markets

This week we present our Portfolio Allocation Summary for January 2023.

India’s lofty EPS growth expectations are set for a major disappointment. The RBI has overtightened monetary policy despite the absence of any genuine inflationary pressures in India. Fiscal stance is also restrictive. Stay underweight this bourse in EM and Emerging Asian equity portfolios.

Relative to beaten-down expectations, global growth will surprise on the upside in 2023. Investors should overweight equities for now but look to turn more defensive in the second half of the year.

How to play China's reopening? What are the dichotomies in the performance of China's plays in financial markets? Why has the Chinese central bank tightened liquidity since October and what has been the impact on local rates and the RMB? Is global growth about to bottom? What is the outlook for EM stocks, currencies, credit markets as well as the broad-trade weighted US dollar?

China's economic recovery will be led by consumer spending on services rather than the industrial sector. The current equity market leadership – outperformance by tech stocks – is unsustainable. Persistent deflationary forces will compel policymakers to inject more liquidity and bring down interest rates to reflate the economy. Hence, the RMB will resume its decline against the USD soon.

Slowing growth would be bad for equities, but so would stronger growth since it would mean more rate hikes.

In Section I, we note that the global growth outlook has modestly deteriorated over the past month, despite an improving 12-month outlook for Chinese domestic demand in response to the imminent end of the nation’s “dynamic zero-COVID” policy. Investors should remain conservatively positioned over the coming year, as we recommended in our Annual Outlook report. In Section II, we examine whether the structural risks facing global stocks are higher or lower today than they were prior to the global financial crisis, and what that implies for stock and bond risk premia.