We recently published the 2019 End of Year Special Edition of the Weekly Macro Themes report - a summary of some of our best, worst, and most notable charts of 2019 (and the ones to watch in 2020).
Already on the blog I've covered the "Charts That Worked" and the "Charts That Didn't Work" as well as my favorite charts of 2019.
In this post I present the 'honorable mentions' -- charts that were worthy of note, but didn't quite fit in the other sections.
In many cases these charts were interesting and insightful when presented in the reports at the time, but also a lot of these have important implications for the outlook as we enter a new decade in macro and markets.
1. DM bond yields look low relative to nominal growth (n.b. GDP would need to fall 20% in one year to close that gap – my guess is it’s *not* GDP that does the heavy lifting to close this gap…).
2. As bullish as I am on global growth and risk assets, this chart does make me wonder. But then again, maybe it actually *is* different this time.
3. OK (echo)Boomer: usually demographics are the domain of the bears, but here’s a bullish story: the first wave of echo-boomers (kids of Boomers) are about to reach prime first-home-buying age.
4. Arguably the Fed strayed too far from the pack with its 2017/18 rate hiking cycle. It now has the most room to move, and given the importance of relative yields for exchange rates, this could have key (bearish) implications for the US dollar.
5. We are told it’s “not QE”, so it makes you think: is it also *not* a catalyst to a weaker US dollar…?
6. While it tends to take a few years to fully turn the corner, a possible weaker US dollar would help get things moving in the USA vs RoW equities relative performance line. Global ex-US are cheaper, and have materially higher medium term expected returns. You tend to see circa 10-year cycles of relative performance, and we just reached the end of another one of those cycles.
Thanks for your interest, please get in contact if you have any questions.
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