While the big easing in market rents inflation over the past few years suggests falls in all-tenancy rents inflation are in the offing, both measures of rents inflation will probably stay above pre-pandemic rates. At its heart, rental price inflation is …
15th April 2025
Although the EU is likely to respond to US tariffs at some point, recent developments reinforce our view that it will move slowly and that any retaliation will be moderate. This should limit the damage from the trade war for Europe and is one reason why …
The ECB’s Bank Lending Survey paints a positive picture of the housing market. Conditions for consumer credit and corporate loans were less encouraging, and the tariff chaos of the past two weeks might have made banks more cautious about lending and …
Argentina’s latest IMF programme and the move to partially dismantle some capital controls and liberalise the exchange rate suggests policymakers are moving more quickly than we’d anticipated to restore macro orthodoxy. The parameters of the exchange rate …
14th April 2025
The recently-announced fiscal plan in Bahrain is a welcome shift towards fiscal consolidation, but there’s a high risk of slippage and the public debt dynamics are alarming. Although other Gulf states would almost certainly step in if Bahrain faced major …
The IMF’s Resilience and Sustainability Facilities with Egypt and Pakistan will incentivise policymakers to implement climate adaptation and mitigation policies. That said, both countries still need to attract significant amounts of private investment to …
While the recent drop in crude oil prices would lower inflation a bit, that drag will be more than offset by a boost from the weaker Australian dollar. The upshot is that barring a sharp fall in business confidence, we’re sticking to our forecast that the …
With the Swiss currency having experienced its largest two-week appreciation since the “Frankenshock” in 2015, the SNB may already have started selling francs in the FX market. We have a 25bp cut pencilled in for June, but the risks are that policymakers …
11th April 2025
This week’s coalition agreement sets the stage for a substantial fiscal stimulus which should eventually get Germany’s economy growing again. But the new government will have to deal with new challenges from the US which mean there is unlikely to be much …
President Trump’s trade war has created material downside risks for the global economy. Our forecasts assume that tariffs on most countries outside China will stay at 10% and retaliation by other governments will be moderate. In this scenario, global GDP …
10th April 2025
Despite President Trump’s latest decision to pause the US’s “reciprocal” tariff regime for 90 days, there is still a real risk that the second-order effects of higher US tariffs on the UK economy are bigger and that UK inflation and interest rates fall …
We have updated our forecasts for Canada to account for the latest changes in US trade policy. (See Table below.) A recession should be avoided, but the harsh tariffs on the vehicle sector and uncertainty about the future of the USMCA mean GDP growth is …
The direct trade impact of US import tariffs on Africa is likely to be limited, but there could be more harmful indirect effects via weaker growth in other key trading partners, lower commodity prices and/or a more challenging external financing …
The troubles at Brazilian bank Banco Master that have grabbed the headlines recently seem to be contained and, by most measures, the banking sector as a whole appears to be in good shape. But there has been a sharp run-up in lending to households over the …
Trump’s tariffs have darkened the outlook for industrial demand across Europe, but Germany looks more exposed than most. Even if the paused 20% reciprocal tariff on EU imports is not reinstated, the blanket 10% tariff and product-specific tariffs, most …
Despite the 90-day pause to the US’s “reciprocal” tariff regime, ECB policymakers will still need to assess the impact of higher US tariffs for euro-zone inflation. Some have argued that tariffs could boost euro-zone inflation in the medium term, but our …
The trade war has merely delayed rather than scuppered further policy tightening by the Bank of Japan. Accordingly, we’re sticking to our forecast that the 10-year JGB yield will rise to 1.75% by year-end. Whereas the 10-year US Treasury yield has on net …
Housing activity set to slow in the near term March’s RICS survey suggests both the weak domestic economy and the headwinds from the global tariff storm continue to increase the downside risks to our 2025 forecasts for housing demand and prices. But the …
The lasting fallout on oil demand from President trump’s ‘liberation day’ tariffs and subsequent retaliation, coupled with OPEC+’s plan to quicken supply increases, pose a major downside to oil prices. There are still many moving parts at this stage and …
9th April 2025
More encouraging figures from the previously underperforming Midwest region suggest that it may be turning a corner. But while this may continue for several quarters more, there has not been enough improvement in the longer-term fundamentals to expect it …
Some oil producers, such as the UAE and Kuwait, should be able to easily weather a period of low oil prices. But a sustained decline in prices would be a bigger challenge for Saudi Arabia, which would need to tighten fiscal policy, and producers with weak …
Oil prices have now fallen well below the level needed to balance current accounts across much of the Gulf, which may raise concerns about the sustainability of the region’s dollar pegs. And, indeed, there are some tentative signs of pressure on pegs. …
With the exception of some industrial assets, commercial property in the UK is not directly impacted by the higher tariffs announced by President Trump and property equities have performed relatively well. Nevertheless, a 5% fall in property equity prices …
While gold prices have edged down since “Liberation Day”, this is not unusual during a sudden equity market selloff. In fact, gold’s track record suggests that prices are likely to rise from here, especially if a worst-case scenario for the US economy and …
The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) decision to cut the repo rate by another 25bps today to 6.00% comes as no surprise given the recent sharp drop in inflation and the headwinds from US tariffs. But the dovish tone of the communications reinforces our …
Unless they are rolled back, the latest US tariff hikes mean that China’s shipments to the US will more than halve over the coming years, even assuming the renminbi weakens to 8.00/$. This will reduce China’s GDP by somewhere between 1.0-1.5% depending on …
Even if Japan’s attempts to negotiate a trade deal with Trump succeed quickly, concerns about the impact of escalating tensions between the US and other trading partners will force the Bank of Japan to keep interest rates unchanged for a few more months. …
President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are particularly high on some of the lowest-income EMs, which are also among the most vulnerable to the suspension of US aid flows. That raises the risk of balance of payments strains, and also provides an opening for …
8th April 2025
Last week we held a series of roundtable discussions with clients in our London office about how the pandemic will shape real estate into the 2030s. This note shares our answers to some of the most interesting questions raised, covering the pandemic’s …
Vietnam is pulling out all of the stops to secure concessions from Donald Trump. If the tariffs remain in place, the hit to Vietnam’s economy would be severe and would prompt a sharp cut to our GDP growth and interest rate forecasts for this year. Not …
The Bank of Canada’s quarterly business and consumer surveys were nowhere near as bad as we feared, but that may only be because the survey periods preceded the most recent tariff announcements. Either way, it’s clear that those tariffs and uncertainty …
7th April 2025
March’s batch of PMIs across much of the Middle East and North Africa came in softer as worries about a global trade war weighed on activity. Those concerns will have only mounted in the wake of President Trump’s tariff announcement last week. And with …
Australia and New Zealand are safe havens in the current global trade storm because they have small manufacturing sectors, export little to the US and haven’t been hit with high US tariffs. We’re therefore sticking to our forecast that the RBA will only …
Clinton adviser James Carville famously quipped that he would like to be reincarnated as the bond market but, as President Donald Trump is now finding out, the equity market can be pretty intimidating too, with the S&P 500 down by more than 10% since his …
6th April 2025
President Trump’s tariffs, retaliation by China, and OPEC+’s decision to accelerate the pace of oil output increases have caused the price of Brent crude to tumble to its lowest level in four years. If the Gulf states persist with the production plans set …
4th April 2025
China has responded to US tariffs with an additional 34% tariff on all US goods, the most sweeping it has ever imposed. Some US companies have also been added to China’s unreliable entities list and export controls have been expanded. This is an …
There has been a marked dovish shift on th e Polish National Bank’s (NBP’s) MPC and it now looks like interest rate cuts will come this year , rather than in 2026 as we'd previously thought . But we think this will be another punctuated cycle of interest …
Korea’s Constitutional Court upheld President Yoon’s impeachment today which should ease concerns around Korea’s institutional frameworks. With fresh presidential elections now set to occur soon, there is a chance that fiscal policy will be loosened but …
The exemptions granted to many commodities from reciprocal tariffs suggests that the Trump administration is reticent to drive a further wedge between US and international metals prices and/or risk boosting gasoline prices. More generally, against the …
3rd April 2025
We hosted two online Drop-In sessions on 3 rd April to discuss the fallout from President Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcement. (See a recording here .) This Update contains answers to some of the questions that we received and links to several more …
Canada has escaped much more lightly than we feared from President Trump’s big announcement, with the import-weighted US tariff likely to be 8% based on current plans and potentially below 5% in the near future. Nonetheless, the much larger tariff rate on …
We are significantly downgrading our end-2025 forecast for the S&P 500 for two key reasons. The first is yesterday’s announcement of greater tariffs on US imports than we had assumed . In such circumstances, we no longer think the economic backdrop will …
Mexico got off lightly from the tariffs announced by President Trump yesterday and the overall hit to the economy from US trade measures may be a bit smaller than we’d initially thought. Even so, we think growth will be very modest this year, perhaps just …
The pandemic triggered an exodus from large cities in both the UK and US as households used the freedom of remote work to move to cheaper locations with larger homes. In the rental market, that trend has largely reversed, with younger households valuing …
If the 20% US tariff on the EU is sustained it is likely to reduce economic activity in the euro-zone by more than the 0.1-0.2% of GDP we had previously assumed. The impact on inflation should be small but risks to growth and confidence cement the case …
We’d already assumed substantial US tariffs on China in our forecasts. But the latest hikes take them even higher than we had anticipated. The economic hit to China will range between 0.5-1.0% of GDP depending on what happens to the exchange rate. China …
Asian economies will be hit harder than most by US reciprocal tariffs. We were already expecting more rate cuts than the consensus in most countries in the region, but there’s now a risk that central banks in Malaysia and Taiwan may have to start easing …
President Donald Trump’s country-specific reciprocal tariffs turned out to be bigger than expected, with our calculations pointing to an import-weighted average tariff of 15.0%. If, as the Executive Order suggests, the 25% product-specific tariffs already …
2nd April 2025
Our scenarios of how different rates of US tariffs on UK exports could influence the UK are designed to provide clients with some real-time context when President Trump announces tariffs tonight. These are rough rules of thumb for blanket tariffs on all …
Spillovers from the war in Gaza and threats of cuts to foreign assistance from the US have thrown the spotlight onto Jordan’s shaky balance of payments and public finances. For now, we think that the dollar peg will remain intact, and a sovereign default …
