Vous consultez actuellement le site Web destiné aux clients institutionnels du Canada. Vous pouvez modifier votre lieu de résidence ici ou visiter d’autres sites Web de RBC GMA.

Bienvenue sur le site institutionnel ph & n pour les investisseurs institutionnels
English

Pour accéder au site, veuillez accepter nos conditions générales.

Veuillez lire les conditions générales suivantes attentivement. En accédant aux sites rbcgma.com et à toute autre page de ceux-ci (le « site »), vous acceptez d'être lié par ces conditions ainsi que par toute modification que pourrait apporter RBC Gestion mondiale d'actifs Inc. (« RBC GMA Inc. ») à sa discrétion. Si vous n'acceptez pas les conditions générales figurant ci-dessous, n'accédez pas à ce site Web ou à toute page de celui-ci. Phillips, Hager & North gestion de placements est une division de RBC GMA Inc.

Aucune offre

PLes produits et les services de RBC GMA Inc. ne sont offerts que dans les territoires de compétence au sein desquels ils peuvent être vendus légalement. Le contenu de ce site Web ne représente pas une offre de vente ni une sollicitation d'achat de produits ou de services auprès de toute personne dans un territoire de compétence au sein duquel une telle offre ou sollicitation est considérée comme illégale.

Aucun renseignement figurant sur ce site Web ne doit être interprété comme un conseil en matière de placement ni comme une recommandation ou une représentation de la pertinence ou du caractère approprié de tout produit ou service. L'ampleur du risque associé à un placement particulier dépend largement de la situation personnelle de l'investisseur.

Aucune utilisation

Le matériel figurant sur ce site a été fourni par RBC GMA Inc. à titre d'information uniquement ; il ne peut être reproduit, distribué ou publié sans le consentement écrit de RBC GMA Inc. Ce matériel ne sert qu'à fournir de l'information générale et ne constitue ni ne prétend être une description complète des solutions d'investissement et des stratégies offertes par RBC GMA Inc., y compris les fonds RBC, les portefeuilles privés RBC, les fonds PH&N, les fonds de catégorie de société RBC ainsi que les FNB RBC (les « fonds »). En cas de divergence entre ce document et les notices d'offre respectives, les dispositions des notices d'offre prévaudront.

RBC GMA Inc. prend des mesures raisonnables pour fournir des renseignements exacts, fiables et à jour, et les croit ainsi au moment de les publier. Les renseignements obtenus auprès de tiers sont jugés uniquement ; toutefois, aucune déclaration ni garantie, expresse ou implicite, n'est faite par RBC GMA Inc., ses sociétés affiliées ou toute autre personne quant à leur exactitude, leur intégralité ou leur bien-fondé. RBC GMA Inc. n'assume aucune responsabilité pour de telles erreurs ou des omissions. Les points de vue et les opinions exprimés sur le présent site Web sont ceux de RBC GMA Inc. et peuvent changer sans préavis.

À propos de nos fonds

Les fonds de RBC GMA Inc. sont distribués par l'entremise de courtiers autorisés. Les investissements dans les fonds peuvent comporter le paiement de commissions, de commissions de suivi, de frais et de dépenses de gestion. Veuillez lire la notice d'offre propre à chaque fonds avant d'investir. Les données sur le rendement fournies sont des rendements historiques et ne reflètent en aucun cas les valeurs futures des fonds ou des rendements sur les placements des fonds. Par ailleurs, les données sur le rendement fournies tiennent compte seulement du réinvestissement des distributions et ne tiennent pas compte des frais d'achat, de rachat, de distribution ou des frais optionnels ni des impôts à payer par tout porteur de parts qui auraient pour effet de réduire le rendement. Les valeurs unitaires des fonds autres que ceux de marché monétaire varient fréquemment. Il n'y a aucune garantie que les fonds de marché monétaire seront en mesure de maintenir leur valeur liquidative par part à un niveau constant ou que vous récupérerez le montant intégral de votre placement dans le fonds. Les titres de fonds communs de placement ne sont pas garantis par la Société d'assurance-dépôts du Canada ni par aucun autre organisme gouvernemental d'assurance-dépôts. Les rendements antérieurs peuvent ne pas se répéter. Les parts de FNB sont achetées et vendues au prix du marché en bourse et les commissions de courtage réduiront les rendements. Les FNB RBC ne cherchent pas à produire un rendement d'un montant prédéterminé à la date d'échéance. Les rendements de l'indice ne représentent pas les rendements des FNB RBC.

À propos de RBC Gestion mondiale d'actifs

RBC Gestion mondiale d’actifs est la division de gestion d’actifs de Banque Royale du Canada (RBC) qui regroupe les sociétés affiliées suivantes situées partout dans le monde, toutes étant des filiales indirectes de RBC : RBC GMA Inc. (y compris Phillips, Hager & North gestion de placements et PH&N Institutionnel), RBC Global Asset Management (U.S.) Inc., RBC Global Asset Management (UK) Limited, RBC Investment Management (Asia) Limited, BlueBay Asset Management LLP, and BlueBay Asset Management USA LLC.

Déclarations prospectives

Ce document peut contenir des déclarations prospectives à l'égard des facteurs économiques en général qui ne garantissent pas le rendement futur. Les déclarations prospectives comportent des incertitudes et des risques inhérents, et donc les prédictions, prévisions, projections et autres déclarations prospectives pourraient ne pas se réaliser. Nous vous recommandons de ne pas vous fier indûment à ces déclarations, puisqu'un certain nombre de facteurs importants pourraient faire en sorte que les événements ou les résultats réels diffèrent considérablement de ceux qui sont mentionnés, explicitement ou implicitement, dans une déclaration prospective. Toutes les opinions contenues dans les déclarations prospectives peuvent être modifiées sans préavis et sont fournies de bonne foi, mais sans responsabilité légale.

Accepter Déclin
org.apache.velocity.tools.view.context.ChainedContext@5e055c6a
Par  Eric Lascelles 28 juin 2022

Dans cette vidéo, l’économiste en chef Eric Lascelles fait part de nouvelles économiques positives et négatives. L’optimisme semble entraîner les marchés financiers à la hausse, alors que s’améliorent les perspectives d’inflation. On note également une amélioration du côté des chaînes logistiques et du prix de certaines marchandises. Toutefois, le risque de récession demeure élevé, car les banques centrales continuent de hausser leurs taux, ce qui touche les marchés vulnérables, comme celui du logement. (en anglais seulement)

Watch time: 12 minutes 30 seconds  |   Hover your cursor over the video to see chapter options

Transcription

(En anglais seulement)

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our latest video MacroMemo. We’ll cover quite a few things in this addition.

We’ll talk about happier financial markets over the last few weeks. Why that is; whether that’s sustainable.

We’ll spend a moment on COVID, though not a lot of time there.

We’ll talk about inflation. In particular is inflation peaking? Which I think is the key question. But we’ll also spend a moment on Japan and Japanese inflation. We’ll spend a moment on whether this is stagflation or not. It’s a definitional issue mostly.

And then we’ll pivot to the economy and indeed acknowledge still high recession risks, and we’ll see what central banks are up to and the extent to which the housing market is weakening, and whether the inventory cycle is perhaps turning as well. So quite a bit to cover off here.

Let’s begin with happier financial markets. And so over the last couple of weeks we have seen risk assets like stocks go up and express optimism. And in general I think we can say that optimism is on the back of the thought that perhaps inflation could be peaking. We’ll talk about that in a moment. The thought that central banks might not have to raise rates as much as previously feared. And indeed I have to say I concur on both fronts. But I should say, we are still cautiously positioned from an investment perspective ourselves. And I would say it would be unusual for markets to bottom before the economy has even really begun to show any serious weakness.

We’re looking for evidence of inflation actually turning lower instead of possibly peaking. We’re looking for significant downgrades in earnings expectations, which will then set a sufficiently low level of expectations that you could easily see markets rising off of that. So we’re still looking for other things to happen before we can speak with confidence about markets bottoming. But nevertheless, it’s fair to say a few things have gone perhaps tentatively right over the last few weeks.

A very quick moment on COVID. And so the comment really is one that I think we broadly appreciate but is starting to show up in the data, which is just that we can see that the economic damage from COVID restrictions is continuing to shrink. Our measure of global stringency of government restrictions is easing quite nicely. And so again, no surprises there, but it’s always good when the data aligns with what you think is happening.

I will say though on the COVID file that we are starting to see something of another wave form. It’s most obvious in Europe. It seems to be the BA.5 Omicron subvariant, which is more contagious than the BA.2 that was the dominant entity in recent waves. I wouldn’t say we’re expecting lockdowns though at this point in time. I would say we’re thinking this could be a fairly short-lived and a fairly small wave. That’s been the experience in places like Portugal that have already experienced a fair chunk of that.

And in general I guess the comment still stands, which is we’re assuming there will continue to be future waves of COVID-19. There is a seasonal element as well. And so this coming fall and winter could be interesting on that front, but we are not expecting significant economic damage from them to the extent that governments just don’t seem to be in the business of locking down anymore.

Let’s move from that into the inflation story. And so inflation is the big issue right now. It is so incredibly high relative to the norm of the last several decades and indeed just the historical norm more generally. We’ve been musing about—and as I mentioned a moment ago, markets have been musing about—whether inflation might finally be peaking after a very long run higher.

There’s no guarantees, but I would say we do see a few things that suggest it might be beginning to go through that process. And perhaps there could even be a modest decline then over subsequent months. And there are a few ways of tackling this. One would be to say the biggest drivers of high inflation came from supply chain problems and from commodities. And when we turn to those two things we do see some improvement.

And so on the supply chain side we are definitely seeing some improvement. The cost of shipping is down. In fact it’s back down to the levels of last summer. The number of ships waiting in port are also significantly lower. Manufacturers are complaining less about supplier deliveries and the time it takes to get those things, so that’s been a material improvement. And they’re saying they think there should be some further improvement.

And then China’s reopening again at least for the moment, though that’s been an on-again/off-again story for some time. There are seasonal challenges ahead to the extent that, believe it or not, the holiday shopping season, or at least the procurement for that season, is already beginning. But in general, I think it’s quite clear that supply chains are not as troubling as they were. And we’re hearing anecdotes in the field as well to that effect. And then on commodity prices, which were the other big driver of inflation, we are beginning to see lower prices there. And so lumber prices are down. Copper and other base metal prices have fallen quite notably. Oil prices are down somewhat over the last month or so. The price of wheat is down too. And certainly food still very expensive, and still quite troubled as it’s difficult to get those products out of Ukraine and Russia. But still, we’re seeing improvements even in food it would seem. And so it would make sense if inflation stopped to be quite so high as those things begin to turn. So that’s an optimistic thought.

And then we also tackled it in a different way, whether inflation is peaking as we built a 19-input scorecard, and it again asks whether U.S. inflation is turning lower. And two months ago all 19 indicators would have said no. Today, 2 out of the 19 say yes, inflation is turning lower; 9 say maybe; 8 say no. And so hardly definitive, but nevertheless that is a significant change. And so we do think that we’re beginning to see some sort of pivot here. It’s not a one-way street. There could yet be reversals and so on, but we’re beginning to see some sort of turn. And in terms of the variables that are saying tentatively yes, inflation is turning, that includes pandemic boom goods, that is to say things for which the price rose particularly spectacularly in the early phase of the pandemic, we are starting to see those prices come off.

Similarly, market-based inflation expectations are beginning to come off as well. And so, again we are getting some evidence that maybe inflation is not far from a peak, which is a very good thing indeed.

Japanese inflation is a bit of a different story in the sense that Japanese inflation just isn’t as high as it is elsewhere. Much of the developed world is recording 7, 8, 9, 10% inflation. Japan is running 2.5%. And Japan also has a different motivation than other countries. It’s been stuck with too low inflation for a long time. And so actually, it doesn’t mind running a little bit too much inflation for a while, in part to catch up from prior undershoots. But even more importantly, maybe to reset expectations in a way that might let them run closer to 2% inflation in the future, which is what they’d like to do.

And so, for the moment, the Bank of Japan isn’t talking about rate hikes. It isn’t trying to cut down on inflation. That could change. If 2.5% inflation becomes 5 or 10% inflation, obviously that changes the dynamic, and we’d see the Bank of Japan raising rates as well. But in the meantime, actually, Japan is probably secretly pleased that it is finally running inflation closer to where it would like to be.

And then my last thought on inflation is, is this stagflation? And so we should define that and say stagflation is slow growth or bad growth combined with bad inflation or high inflation. And I would say we’re not there right now in the sense that growth is still okay for the moment, even though inflation is much too high. If you use a broad definition, for the next year I think maybe you could argue we could be going into a temporary period of stagflation to the extent that we’re expecting quite weak growth, that we expect inflation to stay a little too high for a while.

But we don’t think it’s a long-term story. We’re not convinced that stagflation will persist over the long run. And actually, if you really ask me what is the definition of stagflation, yes, it’s too little growth. Yes, it’s too much inflation. But over an era, not just over something like a year. And so that’s just not what we’re expecting right now.

Let’s turn to the economy. And so, really, the story of the economy is a familiar one. We’re seeing clear weakness in the economic confidence data. So confidence has fallen both from consumers and businesses. That suggests there should be some economic weakness to come. However, we’re not actually seeing that much genuine weakness in the consumer and business spending and investments. So we think that probably still happens, but we’re not there yet. So we’re still getting okay economic data.

Despite that, the recession risk is still quite high, we think. We’ve said we think it’s quite high, the highest in some time. Arguably, more likely than not, over the next 18 months or so. There are just so many headwinds in terms of high gas prices and high interest rates and high food prices and all those sorts of things.

There is new evidence on that front, though. And so we can say, for instance, the Wall Street Journal came out with a survey of economists who assigned a 44% probability of a recession. You should know economists tend to be somewhat conservative. And so just about every time you’ve had a probability that high, there has been one. So I would say that probably argues the recession risk is even higher than that.

Similarly, the New York Fed just released its latest big econometric model forecast. And it forecasts a recession and forecasts minus 1% GDP over the next four quarters. And so when you get big models like that predicting recession, that’s also a pretty strong signal because it’s quite rare for such models to make those claims.

A brief thought on central banks; it’s a familiar one. Central banks are still raising rates and doing so aggressively. In fact, the Fed just delivered a 75 basis point rate hike. That’s the fastest increase since 1994. Likely another one of that magnitude at the next opportunity later in the summer; other central banks thinking broadly similarly. Maybe we’re passing peak central bank expectations in the sense that the market’s no longer convinced that policy rates have to go to 4% or higher at the end of this cycle. I have to say I agree. I think it probably ends in the 3s somewhere. But nevertheless, we are seeing still quite significant tightening, and it’s a painful experience for borrowers.

Now when there’s pain for borrowers, the housing market often gets involved. And so we’re seeing the economic weakness in housing that you would expect. And so in the U.S., we can see, for instance, that mortgage applications are sharply lower. Higher costs are perhaps set to impede the supply of houses as well. I could say that housing market expectations via a variety of surveys have weakened as well. And so we’re expecting weakness there, but we don’t see many parallels to the global financial crisis. In fact, I could say that credit scores are in a very, very different place for people getting mortgages today relative to the mid-2000s.

And it’s a similar story in Canada. We can see now that home sales are falling fairly sharply, though still only at this point to pre-pandemic norms. We can see home prices falling, not just in the hottest, bubbliest markets, but in a lot of markets at this point in time, though prices are still a lot higher than they were before the pandemic.

I will say we expect those trends to continue for some time. And so I must say, as much as we’ve been talking for a while about Canadian home prices perhaps falling 10% with other scenarios that are better and worse than that, I am starting to think maybe we were too conservative in that call and that a base-case forecast perhaps needs to predict more than a 10% price decline. So do be braced for that. Not expecting financial crises to emerge from it, but Canada’s housing correction is likely to be a bit more intense than other markets where the run-up wasn’t quite as great.

And let me finish on inventories. And so for much of the last year, companies were desperate to build their inventories. And that no longer seems to be the case, at least at the economy-wide level. You are increasingly getting companies that are complaining they have too many inventories, that are regretting all of the procurement that they did. And so they’re starting to look to adjust that. And so that’s bad from a short-term economic growth perspective. That’s not great from that perspective, but it is good in a couple of other ways. And so maybe the most important way is just it helps to fix supply chains. Supply chain problems have been, in significant part, because you and I were buying perhaps too many goods. But also in part because companies were trying to jam through even more orders to bolster their inventories, and they’re not trying to do that anymore. So that’s a good thing for supply chains.

And then simultaneously, if companies find themselves with too many things, they’re unlikely to raise the prices on those things. They want to get those things out the door. And so that could actually help to contain inflation as well. And so I would say, broadly, some helpful things on the inventory front, though I wouldn’t want to completely ignore the fact that, historically, the inventory cycle has preceded the economic cycle. And so the fact that companies are now looking to shed inventories does maybe say something about the economic outlook. It does suggest the economic outlook might be somewhat dimmer in the future.

Okay. As always, I’ll stop there. Thanks for sticking with me. Hopefully you found some of that useful and interesting. Please tune in again next time. Thanks so much.



For more information, read this week's #MacroMemo.

Déclarations

Publication date: June 28, 2022

This report has been provided by RBC Global Asset Management Inc. (RBC GAM Inc.) for informational purposes as of the date noted only and may not be reproduced, distributed or published without the written consent of RBC GAM Inc. Additional information about RBC GAM Inc. may be found at www.rbcgam.com. This report is not intended to provide legal, accounting, tax, investment, financial or other advice and such information should not be relied upon for providing such advice. RBC GAM Inc. takes reasonable steps to provide up-to-date, accurate and reliable information, and believes the information to be so when provided. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Interest rates, market conditions, tax rulings and other investment factors are subject to rapid change which may materially impact analysis that is included in this document. You should consult with your advisor before taking any action based upon the information contained in this document.

Any investment and economic outlook information contained in this report has been compiled by RBC GAM Inc. from various sources. Information obtained from third parties is believed to be reliable, but no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made by RBC GAM Inc., its affiliates or any other person as to its accuracy, completeness or correctness. RBC GAM Inc. and its affiliates assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions.

All opinions and estimates contained in this report constitute RBC GAM Inc.'s judgment as of the indicated date of the information, are subject to change without notice and are provided in good faith but without legal responsibility. Interest rates and market conditions are subject to change. Return estimates are for illustrative purposes only and are not a prediction of returns. Actual returns may be higher or lower than those shown and may vary substantially over shorter time periods. It is not possible to invest directly in an unmanaged index.

A note on forward-looking statements:

This report may contain forward-looking statements about future performance, strategies or prospects, and possible future action. The words "may," "could," "should," "would," "suspect," "outlook," "believe," "plan," "anticipate," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "forecast," "objective" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties about general economic factors, so it is possible that predictions, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not be achieved. We caution you not to place undue reliance on these statements as a number of important factors could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statement. These factors include, but are not limited to, general economic, political and market factors in Canada, the United States and internationally, interest and foreign exchange rates, global equity and capital markets, business competition, technological changes, changes in laws and regulations, judicial or regulatory judgments, legal proceedings and catastrophic events. The above list of important factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive. Before making any investment decisions, we encourage you to consider these and other factors carefully. All opinions contained in forward-looking statements are subject to change without notice and are provided in good faith but without legal responsibility.

® / ™ Trademark(s) of Royal Bank of Canada. Used under licence.

© RBC Global Asset Management Inc., 2022