A more severe than expected economic downturn, the ongoing US-China trade war, eventually a hard Brexit, and unsolved challenges such as protectionism or the lack of confidence in the euro. Here are some trends that will impact markets in 2019.
Alicia García-Herrero*| Without an expectation of a larger market for European exports in the absence of additional opening up by Chinese authorities, European exporters should not enjoy the ongoing China-US negotiations.
DWS | How should a hedge fund have positioned itself if it had known the U.S. Federal Reserve’s (Fed’s) decisions and press release a day ahead of the market? Until lunchtime on Wednesday noon its staff might have reasonably concluded that the material contained preciously little actionable information. On paper, it would have all looked exactly as expected, leaving limited scope for any meaningful market reaction. This is not, of course, how things actually turned out.
Ofelia Marín- Lozano | The intervention of the ECB in sovereign bond markets stopped the rise in the internal rate of return on the periphery countries bonds, Spain and Italy. But it didn’t stop the flight to what had become the main asset of safety, German bonds, whose IRR continued falling until the nominal returns were negative.
Pablo Pardo (Washington) | Although the world’s prime economic power has grown for 114 consecutive months, Wall Street has spent the whole year in a saw teeth configuration. If stock market uncertainty was not enough, now fixed incomes have joined the chorus of anxiety. Since the summer, the yield curve has been flattening, in what appears to be the clearest sign of a recession in sight.
Financial markets expect the US Federal Reserve (Fed) to raise its federal funds target rate on Wednesday for the fourth time this year, by 25 basis points (i.e. between 2.25% and 2.50%). Looking ahead, the FOMC will likely revise its “dots” lower for 2019, while the Fed will emphasise data dependence as relevant for its policy stance, rather than guidance by FOMC ‘dots’.
In this new binary world where China is bad and the US is good, there is a great danger of over-looking the very real structural risks in the west at the moment. As told by Mark Tinker, AXA strategist in Asia, one of the current amusing party games might be to play ‘substitute the words US for China in different bearish economic projection’ and see if it worries you more or less.
The biggest challenges facing the U.S. are deep and seriously jeopardize Americans’ future prosperity. Namely, soaring national debt, Social Security’s solvency and the lack of affordable health care. The official debt is $21.7 trillion
Almudena Díez | “The producer countries already impose considerable fiscal charges on the production of oil, basically because some of them live only on oil,” says Angel Durández, a member of Repsol’s Board of Directors.
The Federal Reserve is more or less protected from the demands of political parties. But what about the influence from ‘special interest groups’ such as the banking industry on Fed policymaking? “There is hardly be any doubt that the Fed caters, first and foremost, to the needs of commercial and investment banks, ” says a report from Degussa.