Bryce Coward writes in Knowledge Leaders Capital Blog…..
With US stocks up 11% YTD and nearly 19% since the Christmas Eve low, one could surmise that the economic slowdown that occurred in the back half of 2018 both globally and in the United States was a thing of the past, or at least would be over soon. After all, the Fed is no longer tightening policy, China has been easing for over a year and expectations for an ECB rate hike keep getting punted further down the line. Yet, we shouldn’t forget that the Fed has done nothing more than alter forward guidance, China’s stimulus appears to be not working as well as it did in the past, and the ECB has few conventional or even semi-conventional policy arrows left in the quiver. Furthermore, and more importantly, the tightening of financial conditions that occurred in 2018 has yet to fully feed through to economic conditions and still has a long way to run. After all, changes in financial conditions are like hangovers in that they only start to be felt by the body (real economy) long after the intoxicant (easing of financial conditions) stops being ingested. Therefore, it’s the changes in financial conditions that happened in the previous 1 to 2 years that we should be paying attention to to get an accurate read on where the economy is headed in the months and quarters ahead. And by changes in financial conditions we simply mean changes in interest rates and measures of credit creation.
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