Inflation pressures have shown no signs of letting up across Emerging Europe, with headline inflation rates surging to multi-year highs in November. Producer price inflation has hit rates not seen in decades, food inflation continues to surge and strong …
20th December 2021
Upside inflation risks are building in India. Damage to crops from bad weather has caused spikes in vegetable prices recently. And base effects aren’t helpful: food inflation will accelerate in year-on-year terms over the next few months even if prices …
While the dollar has not made much further headway this month, despite the Fed’s hawkish message at its latest policy meeting, we think the key underlying drivers of the greenback’s rally – the relative strength of the US recovery and the Fed’s shift …
17th December 2021
The Riksbank (along with the RBNZ) is one of the few major central banks not to have a scheduled meeting in December. But with the Fed having put its hawkish cards on the table, rate hikes by the Bank of England and Norges Bank , and a chance that even …
16th December 2021
Much attention has been devoted to the Omicron-fuelled fourth COVID-19 wave ripping through South Africa but cases have picked up elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa as well, with especially sharp rises in Nigeria and Namibia. There are early signs of virus …
Governments across the Gulf have begun to unveil their 2022 budgets and tight fiscal policy remains the order of the day. Saudi Arabia outlined a 6% cut in spending next year that is expected to push the budget into surplus for the first since 2013. And …
15th December 2021
The discovery of the Omicron COVID-19 variant in late November rattled UK markets. Equities tumbled, sterling weakened and corporate credit spreads jumped. And, while the initial reaction was not unique to the UK, it does seem that investors remain a bit …
Outside China, global inflation jumped from 5.0% to 5.5% in October, its highest level since 2008. And timely data point to a further rise in November. Base effects, fading ‘re-opening’ inflation, and falling commodity prices will drag on headline …
14th December 2021
The latest EM central bank meetings confirmed that policymakers in Emerging Europe and Latin America are still focused on high and rising inflation (see Chart 1), rather than any downside risk to the economic outlook from the Omicron variant. Central …
10th December 2021
Housing market activity has surprised on the upside over the past month and home sales look set for a strong end to the year. Even as mortgage rates increased to an eight-month high, home purchase mortgage applications have surged, pending home sales are …
7th December 2021
Overview – Most commodity prices have fallen in the last week or so following the identification of Omicron – a new, and potentially more transmissible, strain of COVID-19. However, while commentary has generally focused on the effects that the new strain …
While the emergence of the Omicron COVID-19 variant has increased the downside risks to our GDP forecasts, it has arguably increased the upside risks to our CPI inflation forecasts. The transmissibility, severity and capacity for Omicron to escape …
High frequency data show that travel to retail and recreation destinations, restaurant bookings and flights have all declined in the past few weeks as coronavirus restrictions have been tightened in the face of rising hospitalisations. (See Chart 1.) It …
6th December 2021
Commercial property’s recent good run continued in October. The annual rate of rental growth surged ahead after only breaching positive territory for the first time in almost two years during August. However, given the economy’s headwinds over the near …
3rd December 2021
The emergence of the Omicron strain of COVID-19 , a worrying new variant first detected in southern Africa, has already rattled financial markets. The economic impact on Sub-Saharan Africa and around the world will depend on how transmissible it is, the …
30th November 2021
The Middle East and North African economies are potentially among the most vulnerable to the fallout from the Omicron strain of COVID-19 . The North African economies as well as Lebanon and Jordan have low vaccination rates and large tourism sectors, …
News of the spread of the Omicron variant has put COVID-19 back at the top of many investors’ list of concerns. While on a far smaller scale, the impact on markets so far has been qualitatively similar to that during the first COVID-19 meltdown between …
COVID-19 outbreaks have diverged across the region in the past month, with new cases and deaths falling recently in the hard-hit Eastern European countries of Romania, Bulgaria and Latvia, stabilising in Russia and Turkey but rising sharply in parts of …
The global spread of a more transmissible COVID variant is a particular challenge for a country trying to remain COVID-free. But after nearly two years of success suppressing infections domestically (see Chart 1), the bar to changing course before better …
29th November 2021
Amid all the uncertainty caused by the arrival of Omicron (for our initial thoughts see this Global Update ), one thing we can say with some conviction is that the new variant is further bad news for the region’s beleaguered tourism industry. Up until …
While the RBNZ has lifted interest rates by 50bp and signalled that as much as 200bp of tightening is still to come, the RBA’s central scenario remains that interest rates won’t be raised until 2024. While we have pencilled in the first RBA rate hike for …
Spillovers to other emerging markets (EMs) from Turkey’s ongoing currency crisis have been limited so far and we think this will remain the case even if Turkey’s financial markets remain under pressure . Turkey’s financial markets generally have taken a …
24th November 2021
Political developments in Latin America have generally turned in investors’ favour this month. Right-wing José Antonio Kast beat his left-wing rival, Gabriel Boric, in the first round of Chile’s presidential election which buoyed local markets. Elsewhere, …
The repeal this month of controversial reforms aimed at liberalising the agriculture sector is arguably the biggest political setback that the Modi government has faced since coming to power in 2014. And while the direct economic impact of abandoning …
The rebound in economic activity and robust investor demand paved the way for a continued improvement in Scandinavian and Swiss property markets in Q3. Office and industrial values rose further, as strong competition pushed down yields. (See Chart 1.) …
23rd November 2021
The sharp slowdown in the pace of hiring in the October Labour Force Survey caught the headlines, but the more important development was the sharp rise in fixed-weight average hourly earnings. Based on our seasonal adjustment, the fixed-weight index, …
CEE property values completed the final leg of their recovery in Q3, fully reversing the nearly 5.5% peak-to-trough drop in 2020. With rents barely moving on the quarter, falls in yields did all the heavy lifting in driving capital values higher. CEE …
22nd November 2021
US 10-year inflation compensation has risen by another 20bp or so over the past month and we think it will increase further as inflation in the US proves more persistent than most expect. This is one of the reasons why we forecast the yields of long-dated …
19th November 2021
The dollar has risen to its strongest level in more than a year and, though it is not our central forecast, we think the risk of a more sustained dollar bull market is increasing. The incoming economic data – in particular, continued well-above-target …
Inflation in the emerging world has generally surprised to the upside in recent months. But while inflation in most parts of Asia remains at levels which central banks are comfortable with, it has risen well above target in much of Emerging Europe and …
The end of the stamp duty holiday has had remarkably little impact on buyer demand. If anything, the imbalance between strong home purchase demand and limited supply is intensifying. Indeed, Rightmove reported that the average time to sell a home …
Whether Jerome Powell or Lael Brainard is given the nod over the coming days, the next 12-18 months are shaping up to be an unusually challenging period for the Fed Chair. The October data showed a renewed jump in CPI inflation to a 30-year high, with …
18th November 2021
Economic growth slowed in Q3, but we expect it to pick up again in Q4. And with earnings growth and inflation at high levels, we see the Fed Funds Rate and 10-year bond yields rising over the next few years, reflecting the upturn in economic activity. …
While October’s trade data showed good exports still depressed by the recent collapse in domestic car production (see Chart 1), there is growing anecdotal evidence that the auto sector is on the cusp of a rapid rebound. Toyota said that its global …
Germany and Austria are at the centre of the Covid storm in Europe, and the fact that vaccination coverage in Switzerland is even lower does not bode well. Vaccine take-up varies from about 60-80% in Switzerland, but is lowest in some of the …
16th November 2021
The recovery in euro-zone commercial property values picked up in Q3, supported by a small fall in yields and an improvement in the pace of rental growth. While retail rents held steady, the quarterly rise in both office and industrial rents was the …
Recent indicators confirm that the global recovery has continued, but also that it has entered a slower and more difficult phase. US GDP growth slowed sharply in Q3, and our China Activity Proxy suggests that there was a large contraction there. (See …
11th November 2021
The homeowner and rental markets are starting to swap places, with home sales and prices cooling as rental demand and rents take off. Rising mortgage rates have started to bring housing demand down, and we expect they will rise further over the next …
10th November 2021
We’ve been warning for a while that CPI inflation would rise further than most people expect and have recently pushed our own forecast even higher. We now think CPI inflation will rise from 3.1% in September to 4.0% in October and to almost 5.0% in April …
Economic growth has slowed sharply as output approaches its pre-pandemic level. We think that GDP will probably increase by only around 0.5% q/q in the final quarter, down from 2.2% in Q3. Manufacturing firms in Germany are struggling more than most and a …
8th November 2021
Trimmed mean inflation rose to 2.1% in Australia in Q3, the first time it has entered the RBA’s 2-3% target band since 2015. Even more strikingly, trimmed mean inflation in New Zealand rose to 4.4%, way above the top end of the RBNZ’s 1-3% target. One …
29th October 2021
Despite a flurry of media reports in September hinting at widespread disruption, the data suggest that China’s recent power shortages have not been too severe. Electricity output actually rose 0.6% in seasonally-adjusted m/m terms last month, the fastest …
COVID-19 vaccine coverage remains pitifully low across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, with less than 10% of populations having received at least a first dose in most countries. But there are signs that things may be slowly turning a corner. The rate of …
28th October 2021
The Gulf countries will be among the biggest winners globally from the recent rally in energy prices but most other parts of the Middle East and North Africa are net oil importers and are likely to be negatively affected. Higher energy prices will push up …
27th October 2021
The near-term outlook for South East Asia has improved dramatically over the past month or so. Daily cases of COVID-19 have collapsed and are now less than one-third of the level they were at in August. With vaccination rollouts also making good progress …
The growing likelihood that Brazil’s government will circumvent its spending cap adds to broader signs that austerity is becoming politically difficult to implement across the region. For instance, Ecuadorian President Lasso recently U-turned on a plan to …
26th October 2021
COVID-19 outbreaks have surged across the region in the past month. Record high daily cases have been reported in Russia, Romania, Bulgaria and Latvia and infections are rising sharply elsewhere. Governments have tightened containment measures, including …
Wage growth remained moderate over the summer but, with labour shortages intensifying, it seems likely to accelerate sharply soon. The Bank of Canada’s third-quarter Business Outlook Survey (BOS) added to the evidence of widespread labour shortages, which …
September was another good month for commercial property, with the first year-on-year rental growth recorded since the onset of COVID-19. But as clouds gather over the economic upturn, we suspect that the real estate recovery will also struggle to …
22nd October 2021
The extent of the shift in investors’ expectations of interest rates over the past month has been staggering. Investors are now pricing in an 80% chance of a hike to Bank Rate, from 0.10% to 0.25%, at the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting on 4 th …
