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President Joe Biden’s June 3 executive order (EO) is in my view another important milestone in the long-term deterioration of US-China bilateral relations. The order, which takes effect August 2, aims to limit US investors’ ability to fund Chinese companies seen as supporting China’s military-industrial complex. It builds on the Trump administration’s executive actions but is broader in approach, clearer in detail, and more market friendly.
Under the terms of the EO, the list of targeted Chinese companies increases from 44 to 59. As expected, the focus is on emerging or frontier technologies critical to military power, such as avionics, advanced communications, nuclear, and space. However, while this EO largely represents a continuation of Trump’s policy, it has a new focus on Chinese surveillance and human rights issues, which is consistent with the Biden administration’s general approach to…
The global macro discourse has shifted over the past few months to a debate around “good” versus “bad” inflation. I think there is a better way to frame it. In my view, as we look ahead, the question should be: will we see a continuation of the status quo or are we on the verge of a regime change? I think there is a high chance it will be the latter.
Over the past 20 years, there have been a number of instances when inflation has jumped higher. Often this has been due to higher energy costs, occasionally a response to strong demand and sometimes tax changes. Each time, the jump has proved short-lived, but has acted as a tax on consumers, eroding the purchasing power of households by squeezing real wages. In response, consumer spending has slowed, and the economy has cooled. In effect, these temporary bouts of inflation acted as an automatic stabiliser on the economy. Was that bad inflation? For households, yes — but not for…
The US stock market appears dramatically different to me now than it did just 12 months ago. Equity issuance by US-listed firms has gone up since then, while cash returned to shareholders has gone down. Based on net cash flow, I believe the market is starting to look overvalued and even bears some resemblance to the tech-stock bubble of 1999 – 2000, with stocks offering little reward potential but plenty of risk. As of this writing, I would suggest that US equity investors consider overweighting defensive, cash-producing stocks.
Is it 2000 all over again?
For 10 years following the 2008 global financial crisis, the US equity market was more or less a “cash cow,” reliably returning cash to shareholders via dividends and share repurchases. Broadly speaking, the market’s annual cash yield was around 3%, with a dividend yield of 2% and net repurchases of 1%. That changed in recent months, with net cash flow turning…
“We suggest that a budget constraint be replaced by an inflation constraint.”
— Three MMT economists in a 2019 letter to the Financial Times
MMT in a nutshell
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is often dismissed as a fringe concept regarding unlimited government spending, but it’s a bit more nuanced than that. Basically, MMT holds that a nation’s budget doesn’t (or shouldn’t) really constrain spending because the government can always print more money if needed. Thus, it’s the “real” economy — the production, purchase, and flow of goods and services — that truly matters.
Taking it a step further, the government can theoretically spend as much as it wants to until said spending begins to create excess demand, thereby generating inflation, at which point the government should…
In my February 2021 blog post, Anchors aweigh at the short end?, co-authored with my colleague Caroline Casavant, we shared our outlook for short-end interest rates and short-duration credit assets, along with an idea on how to diversify liquidity sources through exposure to short-hedged non-USD government bills.
By way of follow-up here, here’s an actionable implementation strategy for investors to consider: “Tier” cash-management buckets and select investment components for each tier to enhance yield on excess cash balances.
An actionable strategy
Given today’s historically low interest rates, many clients wish to boost the yield on their operating cash, but without compromising the important role of cash as a source of portfolio liquidity. We believe the answer may lie in “tiering” one’s cash investments to ensure…
