Markets Insight
January 7, 2014 8:15 am
US investment case remains compelling
Quality risk assets and dollar havens are major US attractions
The world in 2014 is by common consent multipolar. Many are convinced that the US is a victim of secular economic stagnation and that its power and influence are waning inexorably as a result. Yet economic events in the coming year will probably throw up evidence to dispel some of the declinist rhetoric that is currently rife, not least in the US itself.
It is not, of course, difficult to make a gloomy case against the world’s great superpower. It is politically dysfunctional, as was shown all too clearly in 2013 by policy makers’ readiness to engage in brinkmanship over the fiscal cliff and flirt with sovereign default. The country’s waning power was demonstrated by the inability of the Obama administration to act decisively over Syria. Its capacity to act is further impaired by a high level of public sector debt. And its political class has been bought by Wall Street bankers with an efficiency and cynicism not seen since Cosimo de Medici bought up the 15th century papacy.
US haven
Economic fundamentals in the US this year are far better than in the other big advanced countries. Since the financial crisis the US is well ahead of Europe and Japan in moving to normalisation, with the retreat from unconventional central banking measures already under way.
After two years of fiscal austerity, the budget deficit is less than half what it was in 2010 – an important point in relation to potential decline since stronger public finances are the key to the projection of power around the world. The housing market, meantime, is recovering and there are growing signs of business confidence.
The coming year may not be a supercharged one for the economy but it will be a great deal better than in any of the other leading industrial countries.
Interestingly, global markets have a realistic appreciation of this relative strength. The dollar ended the year up against the rest of the world, which is no mean achievement after all that fiscal irresponsibility on Capitol Hill. It is all the more striking given that the world’s need for safe assets diminished in 2013 as the European Central Bank achieved growing success in stabilising the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, with the result that the euro gained 4.3 per cent over the year against the dollar.
Relative strength
The US has also become the pre-eminent provider of high quality risk assets. Since 2009, powered by the Federal Reserve’s liquidity creation, US equities are up 80 per cent in absolute terms or around 30 per cent relative to global equities. The Nasdaq market is 40 per cent above its 2007 high. According to S&P/Dow Jones Indices the US now accounts for 47.8 per cent of global equity market capitalisation. At these market levels, future equity returns will be more subdued, but the robustness of the relative performance conveys a message about more than central bank pump priming.
The conventional wisdom is right that we are in a multipolar world, both geopolitically and in terms of the long run decline in the role of the dollar as a reserve currency. The renminbi is set to increase its role in cross-border transactions, if not as a reserve currency in anything but the very long term. That said, 2013 demonstrated that the tilt in global economic power to the emerging markets had been exaggerated. Subject to caveats about a reversion to extremes of lunacy on Capitol Hill, that theme is likely to persist in 2014, while the notion that the US faces debilitating decline will be recognised as seriously overdone.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014
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