Mike Wilson: Pricing a More Hawkish Fed

While our outlook for 2022 already called for a hawkish Fed, recent signals from the central bank of more aggressive tightening have given cause to reexamine some of our calls while remaining steadfast in key aspects of our narrative for the year.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Mike Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and Chief U.S. Equity Strategist for Morgan Stanley. Along with my colleagues, bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the latest trends in the financial marketplace. It's Tuesday, January 18th at 11:30 a.m. in New York. So, let's get after it.

Last week, our economics team adjusted its forecast on Fed policy, given the more hawkish tone in the most recent Fed minutes and commentary from Chair Powell and other governors. We now expect the Fed to fully exit its asset purchase program known as quantitative easing by April. We also expect the Fed to increase rates by 25 basis points 4 times this year and begin balance sheet normalization by July. That's a lot of tightening, and fits with our general outlook for 2022 that we published back in November. To recall, our Fire and Ice narrative assumed the Fed was behind the curve and would need to catch up in a hurry, given the dramatic move in inflation that we've experienced during this pandemic. Public outcry and consumer confidence measures suggest inflation is the number one concern right now - making this a political issue as much as an economic one. Expect the Fed to keep pushing until financial conditions tighten.

What that means for equity markets is that valuations should come down this year via a combination of higher long term interest rates and higher equity risk premiums. The changes to our Fed forecast simply mean it's likely to happen faster now, making the hand-off between lower valuations and higher earnings more challenging. This is the classic finishing move to the mid-cycle transition we've been anticipating for months, and it appears we've finally arrived.

Our outlook for 2022 incorporated a fairly hawkish Fed, and while that hawkishness has increased since we published in mid-November, it doesn't change our year-end targets, which are already well below the consensus. Specifically, our base case year-end target for the S&P 500 is 4400. This compares to the median forecast of approximately 4900. Our target assumes a meaningfully lower Price Earnings multiple of 18x the forward 12-month earnings. This would be a 15% drop from the current Price Earnings multiple of 21x. Our EPS forecast is largely in line with consensus. In short, our view differs with consensus mainly on valuation rather than growth.

The faster ending to QE and more aggressive rate hikes simply brings this valuation risk forward to the first half of the year. Furthermore, given the Fed's new guidance it will try to shrink its balance sheet, means valuations could even overshoot to the downside of what we think is fair value. Bottom line, the bringing forward of tapering and rate hikes is likely to lead to a 10-20% correction in the first half of this year for the S&P 500, in our view.

The good news is that markets have been adjusting for months to this new reality, with 40% of the Nasdaq having corrected by 50% or more. As we've noted many times, the breadth of the market remains poor as it goes through the classic rolling correction under the surface as the index grinds higher. This phenomenon is largely due to the relentless inflows from retail investors into equities. On one hand, this rotation from bonds to stocks by asset owners makes perfect sense in a world of rising prices. After all, stocks are a decent hedge against inflation, unlike bonds. However, certain stocks fit that billing better than others. In its simplest form, it means value over growth stocks or short duration over long - think dividend growth stocks. In addition, we would favor defensively oriented value stocks relative to cyclicals, given our view growth may slow a bit more in the near term before re-accelerating in the second half. Bottom line, don't fight the Fed and be patient with new capital deployments until later this Spring.

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