United States
According to BCA Research’s US Equity Strategy service, post-GFC US equity outperformance can be attributed to a perfect storm of advantageous policies and a human capital edge. The topic of American exceptionalism is hotly debated in the wake of the…
Second-quarter earnings season unofficially kicks off before the open on Friday, when Citigroup (C), JPMorgan (JPM) and Wells Fargo (WFC) report their results for the June 30 quarter. Bank of America (BAC), the other commercial banking behemoth, will round…
We expect continued softening in the US economy will lead to decelerating wage growth, muffling the principal consumption driver. Because the US has been the foremost catalyst for global growth in this cycle, a US recession will eventually morph into a global…
Although we ticked a second box on our checklist, the incoming data still do not indicate that a recession is imminent. We remain tactically equal weight equities with a strong bias to underweight them, but we’re not exiting the party just yet.
June nonfarm payrolls expanded by 206,000 workers, topping the 190,000 consensus expectation, but downward revisions of 111,000 jobs in April and May pulled the three-month moving average down to 177 thousand, its lowest level since January 2021. The…
Our labor market indicators have softened meaningfully during the past month but aren’t yet signaling an imminent recession. That said, the Fed can no longer ignore the labor market with the unemployment rate above 4% and rising.
Does the incipient slowdown in European data herald a soft landing and a goldilocks period for equities? We have our doubts.
The US unemployment rate stands at just 4.0% today following 27 consecutive sub-4% readings. Does this low unemployment rate guarantee a soft landing in the US economy? Our Global Investment Strategy (GIS) team’s base case is that the US economy will fall…
The ISM Services PMI largely disappointed in June. The headline index plunged from 53.8 to 48.8, its fastest pace of contraction since May 2020, far below expectations of 52.7. This series can be noisy and the June update merely reversed a surprise surge…
The US conventional 30-year mortgage rate climbed back above 7% in late June and drove a 2.6% weekly contraction in mortgage applications. The fixed-rate home affordability index sank to a nearly four-decade low. Housing is one of the most interest-rate…