Insights

03/10/2025 Investment Talks

Municipal Market Outlook

Unlike the US Treasury curve, the tax-exempt curve remains significantly positively sloped, leading to elevated yields in core and longer-duration municipal strategies. The high yield municipal market, in our view, displays a potential opportunity to provide not only tax-efficient dividends, but also pockets of price appreciation found in select sectors and security themes. In general, we expect credit stability in 2025, with potential policy shifts creating both credit negatives and positives. Some of these policy impacts may be felt in port issuers: broadly applied tariffs could impact bottom lines; hands-off energy policy could benefit traditional energy-producing local agencies and states; and Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement eligibility rate shifts could negatively impact smaller regional health care systems.

03/10/2025 Global Investment Views, Equity, Fixed income

Markets between love and fear

In February, markets showed that love is in the air: despite new tariff announcements, inflation risks, and the DeepSeek shakeup, positive market sentiment continues to prevail. In Europe, equities reached new all-time highs, and in the US, there is evidence of a broadening equity rally, as the dominance of the Magnificent Seven may be starting to fade. However, uncertainty remains at extreme levels, with renewed fears emerging following the higher-than-expected January Consumer Price Index, which recorded its fastest increase in a year and a half, and some weak US economic data.

02/28/2025 Investment Talks

Forming coalition will be easiest of next German chancellor's many challenges

Given the tensions that brought down the last German government, which was a three-party coalition, preference will be given to a two-party coalition to limit the amount of compromise necessary. The most likely coalition is between the CDU/CSU and the SPD.  The German economy, which was in recession for the second year running in 2024, is the weakest economy in the eurozone. Tightening financial conditions, rising energy prices and weakening foreign demand (particularly from China) explain the poor economic performance. Uncertainty over tariffs has been weighing on confidence and domestic demand since the start of the year. 

02/05/2025 Global Investment Views, Equity, Fixed income

Markets: a tug of war between inflation fears and optimism

The Trump 2.0 era is upon us and markets have already become extremely sensitive to inflation data, a trend that will likely last in the coming months. Higher inflation sensitivity has also turned equity/bond correlation back to positive. Markets are currently influenced by two opposing forces: the prospect of Trumponomics reinforces the narrative of US exceptionalism, while the imposition of tariffs introduces uncertainty into global supply chain dynamics and inflation trajectories.

01/28/2025 Cross Asset

Views on China for 2025 and beyond

The economic backdrop foreseen for the next 12 months suggests that the ongoing market correction will continue through the first half of 2023. In the second half of the year, we expect some of the headwinds to abate due to lower price pressures and a hold on interest rate rises. We believe this will support a gradual shift from a defensive stance, with its tilt towards gold, investment grade credit and government bonds, to increased risk exposure through developed market equity and high-quality credit.

01/10/2025 Investment Talks

January 2025 US High Yield Market Outlook & Positioning

Although full year 2024 returns for High Yield were strong and spreads tightened during the fourth quarter, fourth quarter returns were weak with losses in both October and December due to yield curve headwinds. While defaults have moderated over the last few months, Moody’s recently increased its year-end global speculative grade default by issuer forecast to 4.6% on weaker US employment. Moody’s also projects the global default rate by issuer count to decline steadily across 2025, reaching 2.7% by next November.

01/03/2025 Global Investment Views, Equity, Fixed income

A semblance of a goldilocks ahead of Trump's inauguration

Markets have cheered any good news emerging in 2024 from the economy, corporate earnings and the political environment, although occasionally they were caught by surprise. Looking ahead, they will be driven by earnings momentum, a scenario of slowing US growth, and rebalancing labor markets. On the other hand, the Fed's more hawkish stance and Trump's approach to trade, along with the international response, could create volatility. Outside the US, European growth and policy-making, as well as China's response to its domestic problems, will drive the markets.

12/31/2024 Investment Talks

What is in store for tech?

To date, the US tech winners have been those companies that are engaging in substantial AI investments. The question is how and/or when will these be monetized. In the US, we expect a reset of the tech sector valuation levels, and we prefer to diversify risk away from monothematic AI plays. Specifically, leading memory players are building up capacity in high-bandwidth memory, which supports the training of AI models, and there could be a risk of over-capacity. There is also a greater focus on geopolitics among investors, and share price volatility could increase in 2025 as Trump's government is inaugurated. The primary issues are tariffs, revisions to the US Chip Act and a fall in China-US relations, all factors that could hurt the semiconductor supply chain globally.

12/23/2024 Cross Asset

Germany’s Path Ahead

German real gross domestic product has been stagnating for five years (up by just 0.1% since 2019) as a result of several factors. Notably, its automotive sector is in crisis and global trade is no longer as supportive of its exports as it was in the past. Germany is also facing a number of challenges simultaneously: industrial competitiveness is suffering from rising energy costs and increasing competition from high-quality products from China. Additionally, the rapid ageing of its population – faster than in the rest of the eurozone – is also eroding its economy’s potential growth, estimated at 0.8%. Furthermore, if US tariffs are implemented, they could cost the German economy 0.6pp of growth, according to the Bundesbank. Disagreement over the budgetary measures to be taken to deal with threats and challenges is largely responsible for the break-up of the ruling coalition.