Inflation

The stock market’s pre-eminent growth sector is not US tech, it is French luxuries. No other sector can compare with French luxuries’ massive and sustained pricing power. The risk for French luxuries is not a China slowdown, the risk is that the structural increase in super-wealth comes to an end. If anything though, the coming disruption from generative AI will boost super-wealth. Ironically therefore, the best investment play on generative AI might be French luxuries.

In this report, we assess the best opportunities in inflation-linked bonds in the major developed economies, based on trends in growth, inflation and the stance of monetary policies in each country. We conclude that the environment is turning more challenging for European inflation-linked bond performance versus nominal government bonds, while the opposite is true in Japan. In the US, US TIPS breakevens have likely peaked, particularly at the short end.

Commentators often use notions like debt deflation, balance sheet recession, and liquidity trap interchangeably. Yet, these are different concepts. This report develops a framework and provides a diagnosis of China’s economic malaise. A follow-up report will deal with what kind of treatment is needed for a recovery. As a trade, we recommend shorting the EM equity index.

Numerous divergences have opened up between global risk assets and global business cycle variables. These gaps are unsustainable, and odds are that the recoupling will occur to the downside with risk assets selling off.

China has generated 41 percent of the world’s economic growth through the past ten years, al-most double the 22 percent contribution from the US. Now that the Chinese growth engine is failing, we explain why it is arithmetically impossible for world growth to maintain the altitude of the past few decades. And we discuss an important investment implication.

Time is running out on the Bank of England’s tightening cycle. UK economic growth is flirting with recession, unemployment is rising, house prices are contracting and inflation is decelerating. Markets are overestimating the eventual bottom in UK inflation, and thus are also underestimating how much the Bank of England will eventually cut rates in the next easing cycle, which could begin as soon as H1/2024. The backdrop is turning increasingly positive for Gilts on a medium-term basis, while the overbought pound is due for a breather.

Collapsed complexity, plus the unwinding of favourable base effects and favourable seasonal adjustments to the inflation and jobs numbers, all pose a danger to the Goldilocks market.

The US is not out of the woods when it comes to inflation, which means that it is too early to conclude that the Fed can stop raising rates. Any further increase in inflation risk would prompt us to turn more cautious on stocks.

In this report, we dissect which markets have broken out and which ones have not, and reflect what this entails for our global macro view. Also, we analyze how the S&P 500 has been taking its cues from a change in the inflation trend. Yet, inflation dynamics are complex, and a falling inflation rate does not mean that the inflation menace has been eliminated.

An outlook for inflation and Fed policy following this morning’s CPI report.