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We think that it is now time for the curtains to close on the so-called ‘excess savings’ debate. While unusually high savings accumulated by households during the pandemic helped prevent recessions in advanced economies in 2023, they are likely to have …
3rd April 2024
We hosted a 25-minute online briefing on Wednesday 27 th March to discuss EM financial risks in more detail. Watch the recording here . The past few years have sharpened investors’ focus on assessing risks and vulnerabilities across the EM world. We have …
20th March 2024
We survey 12 major advanced economy housing markets to understand why house price falls have been small despite high starting points and sharp increases in mortgage rates. We then use this information to ascertain whether the correction in house prices is …
14th February 2024
Although the recent transition to a higher interest rate climate has not caused any lasting or systemic financial flare ups, it is probably too soon to sound the all-clear. And while a higher interest rate climate in the medium-term will reduce …
8th February 2024
The drop in inflation across advanced economies has caused real interest rates to rise by even more than nominal rates. While there are various ways to measure real interest rates, they all confirm that policy is now in very restrictive territory, …
31st January 2024
The economic influence of elections is often overstated. They have only tended to have significant effects if governments have embarked on big structural reforms, interfered with monetary policy or changed their geopolitical stance. Even then, the …
7th December 2023
Shifts in the long-term outlook for interest rates relative to GDP growth have left the fiscal position in most developed economies looking more precarious. Unless governments manage to reduce their sizeable primary deficits, market concerns about public …
21st November 2023
During the past decade, the global economy has transitioned out of an era in which globalisation was the key driver of economic and financial relationships into one shaped by geopolitics. Previously, most governments had believed that closer economic …
16th November 2023
The full report is available to download from the button at the top right to Global Economics, Global Markets, Asset Allocation and The Long Run subscribers, as well as to CE Advance clients. If this is outside of your current subscription and you would …
17th October 2023
Chapter 4: Financial market implications …
Chapter 3: Where will inflation (and nominal rates) settle? …
Chapter 2: How will the savings/investment balance affect r*? …
Chapter 1: Will stronger potential growth boost r*? …
Introduction and framework …
r* and the end of the ultra-low rates era: executive summary …
The government bond sell-off over the past three months raises uncomfortable questions around the risks of financial instability and the outlook for fiscal policy. This note takes stock of what has driven the rise in long-term sovereign bond yields and …
6th October 2023
Note: We discussed the economic and policy risks around the ‘greedflation’ debate in a 20-minute online briefing on Thursday, 6 th July. Watch the recording here . The surge in inflation in advanced economies has not been driven by a widening of firms’ …
29th June 2023
Note: We discussed our revamped FCIs and took your questions on global financial conditions in a 20-minute online briefing on Thursday, 20 th April . Watch the recording here . We have revamped our financial conditions indices (FCIs) for advanced …
18th April 2023
Inflation is now being driven by wage growth rather than just the temporary influence of energy effects and goods shortages, raising fears that central banks will be forced to engineer sharp increases in unemployment to tame it. But we argue that …
29th March 2023
We think that most – perhaps two thirds – of the drag on activity from tighter monetary policy in advanced economies is still to come through in 2023. So, despite some surprisingly resilient data recently, we are sticking to our forecasts for advanced …
7th March 2023
As things stand, we think it is unlikely that non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) would trigger a major financial crisis comparable to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) . The biggest risks relate to potential liquidity mismatches in open-ended …
15th February 2023
The Ukraine war has sent the risk of Russian cyberattacks on the West soaring up the agenda, with an attack on critical infrastructure potentially bringing whole economies to a halt. In most cases, a few days of disruption would not actually put much of …
22nd November 2022
The post-pandemic recovery in travel and tourism still has some way to go in parts of the world that have been slower to lift restrictions, such as in Asia. And China’s reluctance to move away from its zero-COVID approach means tourism for leisure …
15th September 2022
Hopes that policymakers can engineer a soft landing rest heavily on the belief that wage growth can be tamed without a surge in unemployment. This ‘Phillips curve’ relationship has changed recently, with G7 pay growth now higher than it was before 2020 …
6th September 2022
Equilibrium interest rates in advanced economies are probably still very low. However, there is still a lot of uncertainty about how far above this equilibrium interest rates will have to go in the near-term to quash inflation. Even if we are right in …
21st June 2022
Surging food prices are a cloud over the global economic outlook. While food inflation should fall sharply next year, it will remain high in the near term, eating further into households’ spending power and weighing on discretionary spending. What’s more, …
14th June 2022
We expect the most aggressive policy tightening cycle in decades to cause a slowdown in global economic growth, not a severe downturn. The biggest risk is that inflation stays higher for much longer than we anticipate, causing central banks to raise …
1st June 2022
We think that property markets are the weak link when it comes to the impact of tightening monetary policy. A modest rise in interest rates might only cause price falls in a few obvious candidates. But rates might have to rise only a bit further than we …
25th March 2022
Current labour shortages are not purely the result of short-term absenteeism related to the virus. Indeed, we estimate that around 80% of the shortfall can be explained by factors that will prove more persistent, such as a fall in migration. It is hard to …
8th March 2022
With equilibrium interest rates in developed markets probably still close to record lows, actual interest rates are likely to peak at a far lower level in this cycle than in most previous ones. The main risk to our forecasts is that cyclical inflationary …
16th February 2022
One possible upside of the current labour market shortages in developed economies is that they could push firms towards expanding output by raising investment and productivity instead of relying on cheap labour. However, any gains in productivity may not …
2nd December 2021
We have long been sceptical of the conventional view that inflation expectations have been an important determinant of inflation in advanced economies. At the same time, though, we doubt that expectations are as ‘anchored’ at low levels or at central bank …
1st November 2021
With supply shortages set to persist for the next 6 to 12 months, the current period of “stagflation-lite” will persist a while longer. But it is likely to remain a pale imitation of the 1970s stagflation episode. Meanwhile, we do not share the pessimism …
7th October 2021
Current supply shortages have been driven by several forces which look set to persist for six to twelve months. They have caused sharp increases in some prices (most notably energy and used cars) and also limited output. Central banks are unlikely to …
6th October 2021
We expect some major central banks to issue digital currencies later this decade, with those in countries where cash is rarest proceeding the fastest. The first generation of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will be purposely designed not to shake …
6th July 2021
Policy stimulus and tolerance of inflation by central banks may lead to higher inflation in some G7 countries in the coming years. Given the parallels with the run-up to the high-inflation era of the 1970s, it is natural to be worried about history …
29th April 2021
One legacy of the pandemic is a huge expansion in central banks’ balance sheets. Fears that this will automatically boost inflation are overdone. So, too, are worries that central banks will provoke a destabilising rise in bond yields by selling their …
17th February 2021
The relative resilience of real global merchandise trade during the pandemic has reflected several factors, most importantly robust goods spending in advanced economies. Merchandise trade flows are likely to flatten off next year as the removal of …
23rd December 2020
Financial repression – defined in the current context as measures that artificially lower the cost of government borrowing – will become an increasingly used tool to cope with higher public sector debt burdens post COVID-19. After all, it is more …
10th November 2020
The state has taken on a much greater role in G7 countries during the pandemic and there is no guarantee that it will relinquish all its new powers when the coronavirus threat fades. The pandemic could accelerate the backlash against capitalism that had …
13th October 2020
The immediate costs of the COVID crisis will be shouldered more by governments than the private sector. However, as fiscal support recedes in the coming years, a greater share of the costs will be borne by households and firms, and ultimately by their …
30th September 2020
Global supply chains have functioned well this year despite the disruption of social distancing and lockdowns, and people in many places appear more appreciative of migrants. But the pandemic is widening the rift between China and the rest of the world. …
22nd September 2020
The macroeconomic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic are likely to be very different from those of previous pandemics, largely because of the unprecedented response by governments and central banks. The most important lesson from history is that …
16th September 2020
Although low inflation is likely to be the story over the next couple of years, the huge amount of policy stimulus could push up inflation further ahead. Central banks, in theory, have the tools to nip any rise in the bud. So the bigger risk is if there …
10th September 2020
It is by no means inevitable that the coronavirus crisis puts a big permanent hole in the supply capacity of economies (i.e. their ability to produce goods and services). With the right government policies, many economies should be able more or less to …
29th June 2020
As long as social distancing isn’t practised for many years, then those behavioural changes triggered specifically by the coronavirus crisis will probably prove temporary. But those changes that were already underway and which have been supercharged by …
23rd June 2020
Inflation is the not the easy fix for the coronavirus-related rise in public sector debt that it might seem. Not only might it not actually do much to reduce public sector debt ratios, but higher inflation would impose other serious costs on economies. …
20th May 2020
The coronavirus will leave in its wake a sharp rise in public sector debt. Low interest rates suggest that many governments will be able to live with this, rather than having to resort to austerity, default or inflating the debt away. But they would still …
5th May 2020
Central banks are already facilitating fiscal packages in various ways. But with the fiscal costs of the coronavirus likely to rise much further, policymakers might consider explicitly financing them with a permanent expansion of central bank money – the …
24th March 2020
Our current assumption is that the virus-related disruption is not severe enough to prompt a widespread business debt crisis. But if the virus triggers a sharper drop in profits or a bigger rise in borrowing costs than we envisage, then these pockets of …
6th March 2020
