Europe
What is the outlook for the European housing market amid rising mortgage rates and the energy crisis? Does housing represent a systemic risk? Can households weather the storm? And what are the opportunities, if any?
The narrative that the US can tolerate much higher interest rates, compared to the rest of the world has helped the dollar in 2022. In this report, we examine the sustainability of this thesis, from our holistic assessment of global growth indicators.
Our 4Q22 and 2023 Brent forecasts remain at $100/bbl and $116/bbl. Upside price risk continues to dominate oil markets. We remain long the XOP and COMT ETFs to retain exposure to oil and gas producers’ equities, and higher commodity prices and further backwardation, particularly in copper.
The messages from the deteriorating fundamental backdrop (tight monetary policy, slowing global growth) and improved credit valuation (elevated 12-month breakeven spreads) are giving conflicting signals on corporate bond strategy. We are putting more weight on the fundamentals and are staying with an overall underweight stance on global investment grade corporates, with a slight bias towards Europe given more attractive spread valuations. At the same time, we see selective opportunities in sectors where risk-adjusted spreads are wide as signaled by our individual country sector valuation models, like US Energy and euro area Financials.