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Higher interest rates have begun to reduce the size of mortgage that buyers take out. As two-thirds of buyers rely on a mortgage, that will decrease most buyers’ budgets and put further downward pressure on house prices. The average mortgage rate on …
23rd February 2023
There is mounting evidence that households’ pandemic savings will no longer be able to support real spending. That implies from now on, real consumer spending will have to evolve in line with real incomes. The conventional wisdom is that households and …
22nd February 2023
While it is in America’s strategic interests to build stronger economic ties with allies to counter China’s growth, its protectionist tendencies could undermine those goals and blunt the effectiveness of its interventionist foreign policy. Our work on …
Even though the Reserve Bank of New Zealand slowed the pace of tightening at today’s meeting, it still signalled a peak in the overnight cash rate of 5.50% by the middle of this year. Our more pessimistic forecasts for economic activity and wage growth …
The higher bond yields that would follow abandonment of Yield Curve Control would make it more difficult to stabilise Japan’s public finances. But the long maturity of government debt means that the government’s interest rate bill would only creep up …
Being ranked by the Sunday Times as the top UK economic forecaster for 2022 is a great accolade and has generated a lot of interest in what we expect to happen next. Our forecasts for 2023 imply a tougher year than the consensus, with higher inflation …
20th February 2023
There are growing signs that stretched affordability is weighing on homeownership, particularly for the under 35s. We expect this to persist in the coming quarters. But there is a large pool of young adults waiting to purchase their first home once …
17th February 2023
While more disinflation may yet benefit the US stock market by, for example, facilitating a renewed decline in TIPS yields and boosting profits from the rest of the world if accompanied by a weaker dollar, we don’t think it will prevent equities from …
This week’s data contained encouraging signs that inflationary pressures are fading, and the risks to our view that Bank Rate will rise to 4.5% this year now lie to the downside. The January MSCI data also included good news for investors, with …
The Mexican peso’s outperformance since the start of 2022 has pushed up its valuation substantially, and we think that this leaves it vulnerable to sharp falls against the US dollar if, as we expect, the US economy falls into recession later this year. …
16th February 2023
The UK avoided a recession last year partly because of more spending by households on restaurants and trains and partly because of more investment by businesses in aircraft, cars and cruise ships. This suggests the recovery from the pandemic cushioned …
We think French wage inflation will remain much stronger than in the pre-pandemic period this year. This is not least because of the automatic adjustments to inflation of the minimum wage and negotiated wages engrained in the French system. Charts 1 …
Unseasonably warm weather provides little support The unseasonably warm start to 2023 provided little support to the housing market or construction, with sales and prices falling further in January while housing starts slumped to a 28-month low. As prices …
15th February 2023
Surge in sales erases Q1 recession fears The massive 3.0% m/m surge in retail sales in January may have been partly related to the unseasonably mild winter in the Northeast but, alongside the unexpected strength of payroll employment, it nevertheless …
A further decline in US inflation seems largely priced in to financial markets. But we still think investors are too optimistic about how quickly the economy will grow, and as such are sticking with our view that equities will come under renewed pressure, …
14th February 2023
The surge in employment in January highlights that some sectors are still recovering strongly and raises the prospect that the economy could avoid recession, although we still judge that a modest one is more likely than not. As the employment gains have …
Central banks need wage growth to slow significantly before they can judge that inflation is firmly under control. The least painful way for this to happen is for the recent rise in “mismatch” between workers and vacancies to reverse. However, we think …
13th February 2023
Given that US economic outperformance has tended to coincide with a stronger dollar, we suspect a “soft landing” in the US economy would provide a favourable backdrop for the greenback, if it also meant that growth in the US remained more resilient than …
10th February 2023
Almost three years on from the pandemic, only middle-income households are yet to recover financially. In the face of a looming downturn, we expect this will drive growth for discounters as middle-income households trade down their spending habits, …
We doubt the recent renewed outperformance of the “big-tech” sectors of the US stock market will continue in the coming months given the prospect of a mild recession, even if TIPS yields fall again. Despite some disappointing news on the earnings front, …
9th February 2023
We expect stretched affordability and rising unemployment to lead to an increase in rental arrears and evictions in the coming quarters, causing rental household formation to turn negative and apartment demand to soften. We have argued since mid-2022 that …
Overall services price growth has already slowed but, for the Bank of Canada to loosen policy, we will need to see far more convincing signs of lower inflation in the most labour-intensive service sectors. The Bank has stressed that it is following …
We think business insolvencies may rise to a record high of around 8,400 per quarter by Q2 2024 and take until at least early 2025 to return to a more “normal” level of just over 4,000 per quarter. The total rise in insolvencies above this normal level is …
The unexpected surge in payroll employment in January has led to claims of an economic resurgence that will force the Fed to keep hiking interest rates but, on balance, we still think the real economy is losing momentum and will eventually tip into …
8th February 2023
We think sovereign bond yields in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will drop further by end-2023. The central banks of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have generally been at the forefront of this tightening cycle in terms of starting to hike rates ( …
The surge in interest rates and tightening in credit conditions last year resulted in a broad-based plunge in loan demand in the fourth quarter. Most banks expect to continue tightening standards this year, suggests the recent drop back in long-term …
7th February 2023
Most, but not all measures of house prices show that they are falling. That has led some to contend that cash buyers may be supporting prices. But we think it is just a matter of time before the ONS House Price Index (HPI) catches up with the Nationwide …
6th February 2023
We expect a further slowing in office completions over the next few years as a combination of factors weigh on the profitability of new projects. But our latest review of the metro-level completion forecasts saw large upward revisions for Austin, NYC and …
3rd February 2023
Despite some better news recently, we still think that advanced economies face a tough couple of quarters, an outturn which does not seem to be fully discounted in financial markets. With this in mind, our view remains that risky assets in general will …
The rise in yields in the final quarter of last year was larger than that seen at the start of the GFC. While the magnitude of the rise can be explained by the jump in risk-free interest rates, the speed of the repricing has been a surprise. The surge in …
While raising rates by 50 basis points (bps) today, from 3.50% to 4.00%, the Bank of England implied that rates are very close to their peak. We still think that rates may rise to 4.50%, but perhaps via two 25bps increases rather than one 50bps rise. …
2nd February 2023
As expected following a blitz of speeches by officials ahead of the blackout window, the Fed raised its policy rate by a smaller 25bp, to between 4.50% and 4.75%, but tempered any hopes of a major dovish shift by maintaining the language in the statement …
1st February 2023
Despite the rebound in JOLTS job openings in December, voluntary quits fell slightly and point to a further moderation in both wage growth and PCE core services (ex housing) inflation. Job openings rebounded to 11.0 million in December, from 10.4 …
With interest rates nearing a peak, the next two phases of monetary policy will most probably be rates being held at that peak and then being cut. The Bank of England may soon provide some guidance on both, although ultimately it will be the economy that …
The shift away from floating-rate to fixed-rate mortgages has meant that it was always going to take longer than in past tightening cycles for the rise in interest rates to feed through to the real economy. This is one reason why we think that once Bank …
On the precipice of a recession Our tracking models now suggest the economy is more likely than not to be in recession in three months’ time, supporting the message from the latest surveys and hard activity data that GDP is likely to contract in the first …
31st January 2023
While we expect employment to weaken, it’s happening at a glacial pace. That feeds into our view that once interest rates peak (perhaps at 4.50% up from 3.50% now) they will stay high for all of this year. Employment rose by 27,000 between August and …
We think that the euro-zone will enter a recession in the first half of this year and then experience a slow recovery. Our new GDP forecasts show a 0.5% contraction in 2023 and growth of only 0.8% next year. Data released this morning confirmed that the …
It’s well known that, with the yield curve inverting the Fed is now racking up losses, but what is less appreciated is that the higher interest payments it is making are going mostly to foreign banks and money market funds. The Fed earns interest on …
30th January 2023
The shift away from floating-rate to fixed-rate mortgages presents risks as well as benefits. It will protect homeowners who are lucky enough to have a long time remaining on their fixed rate contract from higher mortgage payments. But that reduces the …
The conventional wisdom is that the annual spring wage negotiations (Shunto) are a bellwether for wage growth. In reality, the small number of employees covered by the talks and their bias towards workers in large manufacturing firms means that the Shunto …
Our forecasts for house prices, mortgage rates and incomes over the next few years mean affordability will remain relatively stretched compared with the past 15 years. But there is good reason to think that mortgage payments as a share of income were …
27th January 2023
Although we think there is still a decent case for UK equities to continue outperforming those in the US over the next few years, we don’t expect the UK’s stock market to perform significantly better than stock markets in the euro-zone over that period, …
26th January 2023
The Bank of Canada accompanied its smaller 25 bp hike with new guidance that it intends to hold the policy rate at the current 4.5% while it assesses the impact of the cumulative interest rate increases so far. While the Bank did not rule out future …
25th January 2023
We expect the slowdown in investment activity in the second half of 2022 to persist into the first half of 2023. But we think transactions will begin to recover later this year once interest rates have topped out and much of the valuation adjustment has …
20th January 2023
We now think German industry will continue to grow in the coming months as lower gas prices, easing supply shortages and high backlogs of orders support production. One of the reasons for the resilience of the German economy in the face of the energy …
With inflationary pressures easing and the global growth outlook improving, we no longer expect the US dollar to breach its late September peak. But we still think that souring risk appetite associated with recessions in developed markets will boost the …
The Fed’s hawkish transformation has been so marked that, if its forecasts are to be believed, over the next couple of years it would effectively be adopting the same reaction function last followed during the Greenspan and Bernanke eras between 1987 and …
19th January 2023
Movements in REIT pricing provide a good indication of where property capital values are heading. And the latest data are consistent with our expectation that all-property values will see a peak-to-trough fall of around 20% by the end of this year. But …
18th January 2023
The BoJ kept policy settings unchanged today, but the increase in its medium-term inflation forecasts supports our view that Yield Curve Control will be abandoned once a new Governor takes over in April . Following the unexpected widening of the tolerance …
