The Impact of Central Bank Pivots

Our CIO and Chief US Equity Strategist Mike Wilson takes a closer look at the potential ramifications of the sharp central bank policy shifts in the U.S., Japan and China.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Morgan Stanley’s CIO and Chief US Equity Strategist. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, today I'll be talking about what to expect from the sharp pivot in global monetary and fiscal policy.

It's Monday, Sept 30th at 11:30am in New York.

So let’s get after it.

Over the past few months, Fed policy has taken on a more dovish turn. To be fair, bond markets have been telling the Fed that they are too tight and in many respects this pivot was simply the Fed getting more in line with market pricing. However, in addition to the 50 basis point cut from the Fed, budget deficits are providing heavy support; with August’s deficit nearly $90b higher than expected. Meanwhile, financial conditions continue to loosen and are now at some of the most stimulative levels seen over the past 25 years.

Other central banks are also cutting interest rates and even the Bank of Japan, which recently raised rates for the first time in years, has backed off that stance – and indicated they are in no hurry to raise rates again. Finally, this past week the People’s Bank of China announced new programs specifically targeting equity and housing prices. After a muted response from markets and commentators, the Chinese government then followed up with an aggressive fiscal policy stimulus. Why now?

Like the US, China is highly indebted but it has entered full blown deflation with both credit and equity markets trading terribly for the past several years. There is an old adage that markets stop panicking when policy makers start panicking. On that score, it makes perfect sense why China equity and credit markets have responded the most favorably to the changes made last week. European equity markets were also stronger than the US given European economies and companies have greater exposure to China demand. On the other hand, Japan and India traded poorly which also makes sense in my view since they were the two largest beneficiaries of investor outflows from China over the past several years. Such trends are likely to continue in the near term.

For US equity investors, the real question is whether China’s pivot on policy will have a material impact on US growth. We think it’s fairly limited to areas like Industrial spending and Materials pricing and it’s unlikely to have any impact on US consumers or corporate investment demand. In fact, if commodities rally due to greater China demand, it may hurt US consumer spending.

As usual, oil prices will be the most important commodity to watch in this regard. The good news is that oil prices were down last week due to an unrelated move by Saudi Arabia to no longer cap production in its efforts to get oil prices back to its $100 target. If prices reverse higher again and move toward $80/bbl due to either China stimulus or the escalation of tensions in the Middle East, it would be viewed as a net negative in my view for US equities.

As discussed last week the most important variables for the direction of US equities is the upcoming labor market data and third quarter earnings season. Weaker than expected data is likely to be viewed negatively by stocks at this point and good news will be taken positively. In other words, investors should not be hoping for worse news so the Fed can cut more aggressively.

At this point, steady 25 basis point cuts for the next several quarters in the context of growth holding up is the best outcome for stocks broadly. Meanwhile individual stocks will likely trade as much on idiosyncratic earnings and company news rather than macro data in the absence of either a hard landing or a large growth acceleration; both of which look unlikely in the near term. In such a scenario, we think large cap quality growth is likely to perform the best while there could be some pockets of cyclical strength in companies that can benefit from greater China demand. The best areas for cyclical outperformance in that regard remain in the Industrial and materials sectors.

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