New stimulus was announced but waiting to do possibly more at the next meeting in September. In short, they decided to assess their approach, so a cautious approach. The move today is also a recognition that policy might be at…
Our forecast for FED rate hikes in 2016 was 2 hikes for 2016. We strongly doubted the then prevailing market view of 3 to 4 hikes. It is now clear that the maximum number of hikes will be 2 at…
The December rate hike is now clearly going to happen. The Fed has been spelling this out in its messages to the market. Expectations are for a 0.25 to 0.5 hike. In all likelihood it will be 0.25. The big…
The monetary policy committee in South Africa raised rates by 0.25% last week amid fears of the coming US Fed rate rise in December. This has happened even though growth is expected to be about 1.5% next year and with…
Mixed signals keep on coming from the FED regarding a rate hike. More economists and market participants are now convinced of a December rate hike. Chances of a hike did go up thanks to the recent strong jobs report. However,…
The labour market is very tight with unemployment at the medium term trend of 5.5%, this is down from over 8% a few years ago. Thus, the job market is back to normal and probably tightening. This would be a…
Germany is experiencing a slowdown in exports thanks to weakness in emerging markets, especially China which accounts for 6.5% of German exports. The slowdown in China could be more than is currently in the news and that will affect German…
The bad news is that growth is slowing for domestic and external reasons. The good news (if you can call it that) is that Japan is not the only large economy caught in a deflationary spiral. Japan grew at 4.5%…
The economy has declined by 2.5 to 3 % of GDP according to most estimates. Next year will also see a decline of over 1% of GDP. The slowdown in China has impacted Brazil and this will continue into the…
The expected September rate hike did not happen as we predicted in August. This was due mostly to turmoil in the financial markets as a result of the Chinese slowdown. In addition, the inflation numbers were weak. Going forward, we…