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May 30, 2018 at 05:18 PM
Investors could be in for a rude awakening as the largely benign financial market environment of recent years potentially gives way to recession, extreme economic nationalism and wealth redistribution, Pacific Investment Management Co. said.
In a report outlining its three-to five-year outlook, the asset manager sees a chance of “less market-friendly” central banks, and advises clients to reduce the riskiness of their corporate debt holdings and limit exposure to the euro region’s peripheral countries. It still expects long-term benefits to investing in emerging markets.
“Since the 2008 crisis, bad news for the economy has typically been interpreted as good news for financial assets, as policy makers have been quick to respond,” said Newport Beach, California-based Pimco, which manages $1.77 trillion. “But this ‘buy the dip’ mentality may not endure.”
(Related: US-China Trade Tensions Are Making Endowments and Foundations Nervous)
Pimco is a unit of the insurer Allianz.
Summing up the results of the company’s annual forum to plot investment strategy, three Pimco executives said that a U.S. recession in the next three to five years is likely, with knock-on effects to the rest of the world.
“We lean toward forecasting a shallower and longer, call it wok-or saucer-shaped, recession rather than a deeper but shorter V-shaped” downturn, Joachim Fels, Andrew Balls and Daniel Ivascyn wrote in the report.
Fels is Pimco’s global economic adviser, Balls its chief investment officer for global fixed income and Ivascyn its group chief investment officer. Among those who spoke at the Pimco forum this month were former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer and ex Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
