The Reflationary Window: Open How Wide For How Long?

The global manufacturing purchasing manager index is comfortably above the 50 threshold signaling expansion. Importantly, the upturn is fairly synchronized, with improvement visible in the US, Europe, and Asia. This corroborates the upward adjustment in global bond yields we’ve seen in recent months.
A big source of recovery in global industrial momentum in the past year has emanated from China. But growth tailwinds from real interest rate relief and fiscal expansion are set to wane in the second half of 2017, while protectionist elements of proposed US tax reform pose risks to EM growth prospects more generally. Those countries with the highest percentage of exports and trade surplus with the US as a share of GDP are most at risk of any combination of tariffs or border adjusted elements of US corporate tax reform.
One of the primary axes of debate around the sustainability of US growth momentum revolves around how to interpret the surge in soft, survey measures of economic activity – namely consumer and business confidence – relative to expectations, running well ahead of the hard data – barometers of the health in the housing, industrial, labor, household, and retail sectors. We have some sympathy for the view that the survey data usually leads hard data, and that the pickup in confidence reflects a revival in long-dormant animal spirits which is feeding higher capacity expansion and hiring plans, particularly among small firms in the NFIB survey. But the large gap between the sentiment-oriented readings of the growth outlook and the mediocre pulse of coincident real time data underscores how great expectations for a sizeable upgrade in the plane of US economic growth are. Fears of secular stagnation have done an 180 degree turn to supreme confidence about the growth outlook in the last few months. The New York Fed’s primary dealers’ survey has extended expectations for the longevity of this business cycle, such that the median respondent now thinks the expansion will last twice as long as expected just a year ago.

This post was published at FinancialSense on 02/17/2017.