Paradigm shifts tend to happen slowly, and then all at once. That’s the lesson I’ve taken away from the recent market turmoil. As I wrote last week, the surprise is only that the upset didn’t come sooner.
Pundits may have pegged the worst Dow drop of the year to fresh bond yield curve inversions in the US (a historic predictor of downturns) but the underlying signs of sickness in the global economy have been with us for a long time. The question was when the markets were going to put aside the complacency bred by a decade of low interest rates and central bank money dumps, in the form of quantitative easing, and embrace this new reality.
Consider that since January 2018 every major economy except India’s has seen a deterioration in its purchasing managers’ indices. PMIs are one of the best forward-looking indicators of economic conditions for the manufacturing sector, which is a bellwether for overall economic activity. The slowdown in the eurozone has been dramatic — particularly in places such as Italy and Germany, where the economy is now officially shrinking.