The market always tries to distract investors from what the obvious themes, a bit like a good striker selling a dummy to a goalkeeper, before he tugs it away. I’ll try my best to avoid that mistake here. Seen from my desk, the state of play in the global economy currently can be boiled down to two stories: First, the intensifying slowdown in real narrow growth in the major economies, and second, the fact that monetary policy divergence between the Fed and the rest of the world is being stretched to hitherto unseen extremes. This doesn’t mean that other stories—EM wobbles, Italian bond market woes, and trade wars—aren’t important. They are, especially for macro traders who have deservedly re-gained their mojo this year. But no matter how much joy investors have in the murky world on emerging market currencies, they will, sooner or later, have to take a view on the two themes highlighted above. Using money supply as part of global business cycle analysis is a controversial topic. For some analysts, it is the holy grail, while others will walk out of the room if you even mention it. Many economists prefer the credit impulse—the second derivative of loan growth—but if you actually draw the charts, you will find that this indicator very often is closely aligned with M1 growth.
Read MoreI have two objectives with this week’s missive. I want to contrast what I think are the two prevailing narratives used to explain markets in the first half of the year. And then I want to have a look at the durability of large-cap equity earnings because it seems to be crucial to what happens next. The first story pits the storm chasers against the connectors. The former primarily sees events such as the equity volatility surge in February, the widening LIBOR/OIS spread and the leap in Italian two-year yields as a result of a change in market structure. The ratio of liquidity-providing market makers to crowded trades has shrunk dramatically, creating the condition for face-ripping reversals in consensus and complacent positioning. The storm chasers sees this, and are trying to exploit it. They don’t necessarily ignore the big picture, but they are sufficiently confident in its stability to believe that storms can arise independently of it. Proponents of this view would argue that it is the combination of 15-sigma events and a stable overall environment that is the central story. For example, the fact that the February blow-up of the short vol trade was linked to a bigger story—that the market as a whole would crash—is what makes the initial trade, and the rebound, so attractive.
Read MoreAfter two weeks on the road seeing investors, I am convinced that portfolio managers are becoming increasingly sceptical about the synchronized global recovery. That’s probably a good shout. I recently surveyed global leading indicators, and didn’t like what I was seeing. The data since have been worse. My in-house diffusion index of global leading indices has been flat since the start of the year. Its message is simple, global manufacturing accelerated sharply for most of last year, but momentum petered out in Q1. It doesn’t yet point to an outright slowdown, though other short-leading indices, such as the PMIs, do. The signal is more uniformly downbeat for the global economy if we look at liquidity indicators. Inflation is rising, with oil prices at a 12-month high, and nominal M1 growth is decelerating. Historically, this has been one of the more reliable omens for slowing growth in the global economy. Of course, investors don’t have to peruse economic data to tell them that something is afoot. Let me see whether I can remember everything. We have had wobbles in emerging markets, the return of political risk and higher bond yields, and even euro-exit chatter, in the Eurozone periphery as well as the morbid fascination that Deutsche Bank is going to blow a hole in the European, and perhaps even in the global economy.
Read MoreI said my peace on global growth and EM currency crises last week, so I won’t belabour those here. I am struggling, however, to square the circle on the dollar and U.S. bonds. The story for the greenback appears simple; interest rate differentials suddenly matter again. The Fed is on the move, but expectations for tighter monetary policy elsewhere has been pushed back, especially in the U.K. and in the Eurozone. Even in Japan, few believe that the BOJ will do anything, anytime soon. HSBC’s FX Chief, David Bloom, does an admirable job explaining this in a recent segment on Bloomberg TV. By this account, the rout in EM is as much about a shift in G4 central bank expectations as it is about the lagged effect of higher short-term rates in the U.S. and structurally-vulnerable balance sheets. As long as European and Asian central banks drag their feet, and the Fed keeps going, the dollar will continue to rally; its simple. The problem with this story is that it assumes that the combination of a hawkish Fed and higher U.S. bond yields persists. Almost all my models are telling me to fade this story. For starters, the curve continues to lurk as the proverbial elephant in the room.
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