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“If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale” – J.K Galbraith (The Great Crash of 1929). There has been plenty of negative news over the last few months and an even bigger list of issues over the last year or so, but (US) markets appear blithely unconcerned; despite the litany of calls for a decline, (or a crash), nothing appears to dent sentiment and the buying continues.

One of the major problems Advisors (and ourselves) face is the expectations of clients. Fuelled by the relentless media focus on outsized gains in some individual assets, (mostly equities), investors imagine that these gains are easily made and thus they should get involved too. The fact is that they are abnormal (or they would not be news at all), but that is not what the media imply. Of course, fund managers are happy to play along, as they judge that this increases the interest in their products and this article contributes to this phenomenon, with the fund manager telling us that Inflation plus 5% is a “realistic and achievable goal”. The chart below does not break down the asset class exposure, but it can be found here.

Hubris is interesting because you get people who are often very clever, very powerful, have achieved great things, and then something goes wrong – they just don’t know when to stop – Margaret MacMillan (Canadian historian and Oxford University Professor). [The following analysis focusses on equities for the sake of brevity, but the points made are equally relevant to Bond Index funds and ETFs].

“We have to work towards free trade because otherwise we will miss out on many opportunities for cooperation, and relations amongst countries will become much more difficult” – Lee Hsien Loong (Prime Minister of Singapore).

With the S&P 500 Index having just touched all-time highs and Donald Trump deciding that now is a good time to demand a cut in interest rates by 1% and to re-start QE, contrasting their timidity with that of the Chinese Central Bank, averring that the US economy would go up “like a rocket” if they followed his advice. This would appear to be akin to fighting a fire with gasoline, but that doesn’t mean the Fed won’t do it anyway, (though not this week it seems!)Outside of US markets, however, things are not quite so rosy, as indicated by the fact that the MSCI World Index ex-US Index is nearly 11% below its highs (reached in January 2018), and nearly 20% below its 2007 highs, indicating that, once again, the US is leading the charge higher.

China has become an increasingly important player in the Global economy in recent years. As the economy has grown, its effect on world liquidity has also expanded. In the middle of February, the Bank of China announced that “Total Social Financing” (a metric that includes Renminbi loans to the real economy as well as Shadow Banking credit growth), exploded by a factor of three, to 4.64 trillion Yuan ($685 billion). The amount of outstanding loans in the Chinese financial system is now $30 trillion, more than double the GDP of that country. This has more than offset the declines seen in 2018, suggesting that the Government has once more opened the credit spigot, possibly in response to the economic slowdown caused by the on-going US/China trade dispute.