Il titolo che leggete qui sopra è un po’ forte, va riconosciuto: ma lo abbiamo scelto come testimonianza del fatto che il clima, intorno ai cosiddetti titoli Big Tech, sta cambiando.

Come accade per le Banche Centrali, fino a pochi mesi fa giudicate dalla massa degli investitori come Infallibili ed Onnipotenti, anche per i grandi colossi del Big Tech l’epoca del Consenso Unanime è finita.

Come per le Banche Centrali, , anche per i Big Tech si apre una fase nuova, nella quale si perde l’unanime consenso ed aumentano invece in modo rapido le critiche.

Si tratta di critiche ormai diffuse, tanto che vengono raccolte anche dai più potenti mezzi di informazione: a testimonianza di questo fatto, oggi Recce’d sceglie di mettervi a disposizione un articolo del Financial Times della settimana scorsa.

Leggere questo articolo vi sarà utilissimo, proprio per ciò che riguarda la gestione del vostro portafoglio in titoli.

Recce’d vi vuole riportare alla mente due fatti:

1. non ci sarebbe stato alcun rialzo degli indici di borsa globali, se non ci fosse stato il traino degli indici di Borsa degli Stati Uniti

2. non ci sarebbe stato alcun rialzo degli indici di Borsa neppure negli Stati Uniti, se non ci fosse stato un rialzo abnorme dei prezzi delle Società Big Tech come Apple, Amazon, Google e Facebook.

Se il titolo scelto dal New York Times, che dice “Facebook è più debole di ciò che pensate”, riflettesse la realtà, e diventasse il pensiero della massa degli investitori al dettaglio, le implicazioni per il futuro del vostro portafoglio titoli dovrebbero esservi evidenti.

Ad esempio, potreste andare a rivedere la storia di Borsa di Philip Morris, come suggerito dalla nostra immagine iniziale.

Published Oct. 4, 2021Updated Oct. 5, 2021, 9:02 a.m. ET

One possible way to read “The Facebook Files,” The Wall Street Journal’s excellent series of reports based on leaked internal Facebook research, is as a story about an unstoppable juggernaut bulldozing society on its way to the bank.

The series has exposed damning evidence that Facebook has a two-tier justice system, that it knew Instagram was worsening body-image issues among girls and that it had a bigger vaccine misinformation problem than it let on, among other issues. And it would be easy enough to come away thinking that Facebook is terrifyingly powerful, and can be brought to heel only with aggressive government intervention.

But there’s another way to read the series, and it’s the interpretation that has reverberated louder inside my brain as each new installment has landed.

Which is: Facebook is in trouble.

Not financial trouble, or legal trouble, or even senators-yelling-at-Mark-Zuckerberg trouble. What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. It’s a cloud of existential dread that hangs over an organization whose best days are behind it, influencing every managerial priority and product decision and leading to increasingly desperate attempts to find a way out. This kind of decline is not necessarily visible from the outside, but insiders see a hundred small, disquieting signs of it every day — user-hostile growth hacks, frenetic pivots, executive paranoia, the gradual attrition of talented colleagues.

It has become fashionable among Facebook critics to emphasize the company’s size and dominance while bashing its missteps. In a Senate hearing on Thursday, lawmakers grilled Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, with questions about the company’s addictive product design and the influence it has over its billions of users. Many of the questions to Ms. Davis were hostile, but as with most Big Tech hearings, there was an odd sort of deference in the air, as if the lawmakers were asking: Hey, Godzilla, would you please stop stomping on Tokyo?

But if these leaked documents proved anything, it is how un-Godzilla-like Facebook feels. The documents, shared with The Journal by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, reveal a company worried that it is losing power and influence, not gaining it, with its own research showing that many of its products aren’t thriving organically. Instead, it is going to increasingly extreme lengths to improve its toxic image, and to stop users from abandoning its apps in favor of more compelling alternatives.

You can see this vulnerability on display in an installment of The Journal’s series that landed last week. The article, which cited internal Facebook research, revealed that the company has been strategizing about how to market itself to children, referring to preteens as a “valuable but untapped audience.” The article contained plenty of fodder for outrage, including a presentation in which Facebook researchers asked if there was “a way to leverage playdates to drive word of hand/growth among kids?”

It’s a crazy-sounding question, but it’s also revealing. Would a confident, thriving social media app need to “leverage playdates,” or concoct elaborate growth strategies aimed at 10-year-olds? If Facebook is so unstoppable, would it really be promoting itself to tweens as — and please read this in the voice of the Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme — a “Life Coach for Adulting?”

The truth is that Facebook’s thirst for young users is less about dominating a new market and more about staving off irrelevance. Facebook use among teenagers in the United States has been declining for years, and is expected to plummet even further soon — internal researchers predicted that daily use would decline 45 percent by 2023. The researchers also revealed that Instagram, whose growth offset declining interest in Facebook’s core app for years, is losing market share to faster-growing rivals like TikTok, and younger users aren’t posting as much content as they used to.

A good way to think about Facebook’s problems is that they come in two primary flavors: problems caused by having too many users, and problems caused by having too few of the kinds of users it wants — culture-creating, trendsetting, advertiser-coveted young Americans.

The Facebook Files contains evidence of both types. One installment, for example, looked at the company’s botched attempts to stop criminal activity and human rights abuses in the developing world — an issue exacerbated by Facebook’s habit of expanding into countries where it has few employees and little local expertise.

But that kind of problem can be fixed, or at least improved, with enough resources and focus. The second type of problem — when tastemakers abandon your platforms en masse — is the one that kills you. And it appears to be the one that Facebook executives are most worried about.

Take the third article in The Journal’s series, which revealed how Facebook’s 2018 decision to change its News Feed algorithm to emphasize “meaningful social interactions” instead generated a spike in outrage and anger.

The algorithm change was portrayed at the time as a noble push for healthier conversations. But internal reports revealed that it was an attempt to reverse a yearslong decline in user engagement. Likes, shares and comments on the platform were falling, as was a metric called “original broadcasts.” Executives tried to reverse the decline by rejiggering the News Feed algorithm to promote content that garnered a lot of comments and reactions, which turned out to mean, roughly, “content that makes people very angry.”

“Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits,” said Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman. “To say we turn a blind eye to feedback ignores these investments, including the 40,000 people working on safety and security at Facebook and our investment of $13 billion since 2016.”

It’s far too early to declare Facebook dead. The company’s stock price has risen nearly 30 percent in the past year, lifted by strong advertising revenue and a spike in use of some products during the pandemic. Facebook is still growing in countries outside the United States, and could succeed there even if it stumbles domestically. And the company has invested heavily in newer initiatives, like augmented and virtual reality products, that could turn the tide if they’re successful.

But Facebook’s research tells a clear story, and it’s not a happy one. Its younger users are flocking to Snapchat and TikTok, and its older users are posting anti-vaccine memes and arguing about politics. Some Facebook products are actively shrinking, while others are merely making their users angry or self-conscious.

Facebook’s declining relevance with young people shouldn’t necessarily make its critics optimistic. History teaches us that social networks rarely age gracefully, and that tech companies can do a lot of damage on the way down. (I’m thinking of MySpace, which grew increasingly seedy and spam-filled as it became a ghost town, and ended up selling off user data to advertising firms. But you could find similarly ignoble stories from the annals of most failed apps.) Facebook’s next few years could be uglier than its last few, especially if it decides to scale back its internal research and integrity efforts in the wake of the leaks.

None of this is to say that Facebook isn’t powerful, that it shouldn’t be regulated or that its actions don’t deserve scrutiny. It can simultaneously be true that Facebook is in decline and that it is still one of the most influential companies in history, with the ability to shape politics and culture all over the globe.

But we shouldn’t mistake defensiveness for healthy paranoia, or confuse a platform’s desperate flailing for a show of strength. Godzilla eventually died, and as the Facebook Files make clear, so will Facebook.

Kevin Roose is a technology columnist and the author of “Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation.” @kevinroose • Facebook

I nostri promotori finanziari, i nostri wealth managers, i nostri private bankers, i nostri “consulenti addetti alla vendita”, vengono rimpinzati come le oche all’ingrasso con le pubblicazioni delle grandi banche globali di investimento: gli vengono spinti giù per la gola documenti di Goldman Sachs, di JP Morgan, di Morgan Stanley, di Bank of America, di UBS, di BNP Paribas, e di tutte le altre.

E’ proprio per questa ragione, che poi tutti tutti tutti la vedono alla stessa maniera: è il nuovo “pensiero unico socialista” dei mercati finanziari (perché poi le banche globali ripetono soltanto quello che “non disturba” la Banca Centrale oppure il Governo in carica).

E così che tutti ci crediamo in un medesimo “sol dell’avvenir”, tutti andiamo dalla stessa parte, tutti abbiamo la medesima opinione sul futuro.

Quello che poi mai si realizza.

E’ questa ragione che, nel nostro Blog, sono rarissime le citazioni delle analisi delle grandi banche di investimento. Ed è per questo che, sui portafogli dei nostri Clienti, è rarissimo che noi si faccia ciò che viene suggerito dalle banche come Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, UBS, BNP Paribas, e tutte le altre.

Oggi, in questo Post, facciamo una importante eccezione, e vi proponiamo un documento di JP Morgan. Perché?

Prima di tutto, perché riteniamo utile e corretto presentare ai nostri lettori, di tanto in tanto, anche l’opinione di chi NON legge i fatti ed i mercati nel modo in cui li leggiamo noi di Recce’d. E poi, in questo specifico caso, perché l’intero articolo, a nostro giudizio, serve a avvalorare la nostra tesi, che la prossima grande sorpresa sui mercati finanziari la vedremo arrivare dal mondo delle obbligazioni e non dal settore delle azioni.

E proprio per il fatto che molti, oggi, stanno ancora allineati dietro a JP Morgan. Incluso il vostro promotore finanziario.

Interest rates relative to inflation aren’t getting back to normal anytime soon.

That’s because institutions, including sovereign reserve managers, commercial banks, and pension funds are buying bonds for regulatory reasons or to match their future liabilities, breaking the relationship between a bond’s price and the underlying fundamentals, according to the newly formed Strategic Investment Advisory Group of J.P. Morgan Asset Management. 

“Central banks have backed themselves into a corner from which they will be unable to retreat,” according to the group's inaugural research publication. “The bond vigilantes are now outgunned by the bond pacifists.” The Strategic Investment Advisory Group is made up of the firm’s veteran CIOs, portfolio managers, and strategists, across asset classes and is chaired by Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy. 

In the report, called “Getting Real About Rates: the post-war era of substantially positive real interest rates may be gone for good,” the manager detailed the reasons why the low or negative real interest rates are likely to persist for a long period of time.

For example, a weak recovery from the pandemic and an extended period of financial repression have forced real interest rates to deviate from where the Federal Reserve wants them to be. In the long term, the lack of a young workforce makes it hard for the U.S. government to reduce the current debt burden, which is conducive to depressed interest rates.

To adjust to the prolonged low-interest rate environment, institutional investors should consider investing in securitized credit, equities, and real assets, according to the report. 

For fixed income investors, the traditional strategies that protect them from inflation, such as the treasury inflation-protected securities, are “less likely to work well today because they are offering low or negative real yields,” according to Jared Gross, head of institutional portfolio strategy at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Instead, portfolio managers with the obligation to invest in fixed income should consider securitized credit backed by assets like cars, real estate, and mobile phone contracts because they are “linked to the health and credit of the American consumers.”

“We think the consumer balance sheet right now is quite healthy,” Gross said. “So securitized credit is a very interesting opportunity.”

Gross also noted that the current low-interest rate environment has made value stocks more attractive than growth stocks. In particular, companies with utility-like characteristics, such as wireless carriers and telecom companies, are a good source of return because their stock prices are less volatile.

“You might be receiving a nice, attractive dividend from a company with a high dividend stock, but the price changes can wipe out the gains from dividends very quickly,” Gross said.

Lastly, the report points out that institutional investors should consider investing in “core” real assets that offer stable real yields, such as real estate, infrastructure, natural resources, and transportation. 

“They have relatively low correlations to traditional stocks and bonds, and that is what really makes them compelling,” Gross said. 

Although these alternative assets are less liquid compared to traditional stocks and bonds, they deliver the returns that investors need in the low-interest rate environment, according to Gross.

“Most investors do have room to take on additional illiquidity,” Gross said. “In a market environment such as this one, where public liquid markets simply are unlikely to deliver returns that investors need, you have to do something.”

To conclude, the overarching investment strategy in the low-interest rate environment is to “own cash flows that rise with nominal GDP,” Gross said. 

“Investors seeking to maintain and grow the purchasing power of their portfolios in such a world do have choices, if they’ re prepared to embrace the full spectrum of fixed income and hybrid assets, dividend-paying stocks and core real assets,” the report said.

La categoria dei promotori finanzari diventa di rilevanza nazionale dopo la Crisi Finanzaria del dot.com, nel Duemila.

E’ solo da vent’anni, che questa categoria ha preso purtroppo il comando delle operazioni nel settore dei servizi del risparmio.

Autorità di controllo compiacenti hanno permesso al fenomeno di dilagare: si è instaurata una vera e propria dittatura del promotore finanziario, come Recce’d ha scritto e illustrato più volte. Una dittatura che va a penalizzare l’investitore finale, costringendolo a scelte che non sono nel suo esclusivo interesse, e che invece rendono massimo il guadagno del promotore finanziario e della sua Società

E questo perché un contesto regolamentare ed amministrativo distorto mette il promotore finanziario in condizione di convincere il Cliente del fatto che “non esistono alternative”.

E grazie a questa capacità di persuadere il Cliente di ciò che non è vero, il promotore finanziario ha preso a comandare pure sulle Società dei Fondi Comuni, le quali oggi prendono una piccolissima parte dei flussi di ricavo che vengono generati dai loro stessi Fondi Comuni. E’ la dittatura del venditore: che si fa strapagare, per non fare nulla, non gestire, non capire, non aiutare, non proteggere il patrimonio del Cliente. Unicamente per piazzare la merce.

Nell’ultimo ventennio, si è registrata una sola battuta di arresto di questa tendenza, nel senso di un passo indietro forzato.

Ovvero il cambio forzato del nome: le lobby dei promotori finanziari al parlamento italiano hanno ottenuto, dopo lunghissime trattative, di poter cambiare il nome alla categoria, senza modificare per nulla le modalità con le quali questa categoria avvicina e poi gestisce il rapporto commerciale con il pubblico. Diventano così “consulenti autorizzati alla vendita”, anziché “promotori finanziari”, che è come dare una passata di calce sui danni, gli infortuni e gli errori accumulati in vent’anni. Sotto la calce, come sempre, vengno nascosti l’umidità e i guasti: che non vengono né corretti ne risanati.

Oggi le cose però stanno cambiando: anzi, sono già cambiate. I fatti degli anni 2016-2021, ed in particolare quelli del biennio 2020-2021, privano oggi la categoria dei promotori finanziari del loro più forte argomento di vendita: ovvero che “nel lungo termine tutto si aggiusta sempre, e quindi il Cliente non deve mai preoccuparsi, non deve mai vendere, non deve mai uscire dai Fondi Comuni. Deve sempre avere fiducia ed essere ottimista, e deve per sempre pagare il 3% sui Fondi Comuni (senza saperlo, senza che mai nessuno glielo abbia spiegato).

Un 3% che poi nella grandissima maggior parte si mette in tasca la Società dei promotori finanziari, ed il promotore finanziario medesimo.

Oggi le cose sono cambiate: il promotore finanziario è abituato a mettere sopra a tutto il grafico con la Borsa americana, quella che “non scende mai”. ma gli eccessi del 2020-2021 ora mettono anche la Borsa americana in gravissimo pericolo.

Il nostro amico promotore finanziario potrebbe trovarsi costretto ad andare dal Cliente e spiegare che non è vero, che nel lungo termine tutto si aggiusta, e che non è vero che basta stare lì fermi, con quei quattro Fondi comuni, e alla fine il guadagno arriva.

Anche perché se invece della Borsa americana prendiamo in esame altre Borse, si vede subito che le cose nella realtà del Mondo non stanno così, non stanno nel modo che racconta il promotore finanziario.

La settimana scorsa ne ha scritto anche il Financial Time, e tutti i promotori finanziari, farebbero bene a leggere con la massima attenzione questo articolo, insieme con i loro Clienti, ovviamente.

A tutti e due (al promotore finanziario ed anche al suo Cliente) farebbe poi bene scrivere a noi di Recce’d, e prendere un appuntamento al telefono, per confrontarsi sugli argomenti che, in modo diretto ed indiretto, sono toccati dall’articolo che segue.

Ed in particolare, sulla frase che chiude l’articolo.

The writer is a financial journalist and author of ‘More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy’

It is a truth universally acknowledged that equities will always go up in the long run. But anyone who backed a fund based on the UK’s FTSE 100 index must be starting to have their doubts.

On the last trading day of the second millennium, the index marked a then record high of 6,930.2, a story this journalist reported for the Financial Times. But the index did not pass the 7,000 level until March 2015, and was below its end-1999 level during trading last Monday. While the index has gone nowhere, at least the total return has been positive. Thanks to the reinvestment of dividend income, the annualised return for the FTSE 100 was 3.3 per cent between the end of 1999 and December 31, 2020. But that is not the kind of return that many investors were expecting back in 1999.

And the importance of dividends is slightly ironic, given that back then, counting on income was seen as a very old-fashioned way of approaching equity investment. Many technology companies did not pay dividends at all. Why has the index performed so badly? In part, this was because the end of the millennium coincided with the peak of the dotcom boom when share prices were bid up to inflated levels. But Wall Street was also involved in the dotcom bubble and its leading indices have performed much better; both the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are around three times their end-1999 level.

A better explanation may lie in the composition of the index. There has been an enormous rate of turnover in FTSE 100’s constituents; less than half those in the benchmark at the end of the last millennium are still there. Of those, five are banks (Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Standard Chartered and Royal Bank of Scotland now renamed as NatWest) which have had a chequered 20 years to say the least. They are the survivors of a much larger group that included Abbey National, Alliance and Leicester, Halifax, and Woolwich.

Many of the other long-lasting constituents are from traditional industries like food and drink (ABF, Diageo, Whitbread), supermarkets (Sainsbury and Tesco), tobacco (Imperial and BAT), mining (Anglo American and Rio Tinto) or insurance (Legal & General and Prudential). What the FTSE 100 lacks are the kind of exciting technology companies that have performed so strongly on Wall Street; the Amazons, Facebooks and Googles.

Sage is the sole tech company to remain in the index from the December 1999 list; the likes of Arm, CMG, Logica, Misys and Sema have been swallowed up in acquisitions while Energis went into administration. There are not many stocks in the current FTSE 100 to set investors’ pulses racing and that is reflected in the way that the market is rated, relative to Wall Street.

Stocks in the FTSE 100 index trade on an average price equivalent to 18.4 times their previous 12-month earnings, compared with the S&P 500 index’s ratio of 31.4. Of course, that difference could conceivably imply that UK equities are much better value than American shares right now. It could also imply that long-run investing may not pay off on Wall Street from current levels.

After all, the UK is not the only market to disappoint over the long run. In Japan, the Nikkei 225 is still well below its end-1989 level. Back at the end of the 1980s, many investors believed that conventional valuation approaches did not apply in the Tokyo market, because the big Japanese companies like Toyota and Sony had discovered the secret of long-term growth. Such was the enthusiasm that the Japanese stock market comprised 44 per cent of the FT World Index, far above its share of global GDP.

So there is more than one reason for equities to struggle over the long run; the UK had too great a reliance on stodgy sectors whereas Japan simply reached a valuation level from which further gains were unlikely. Step forward to 2021, and investors so love the big American tech companies that the US market is more than 58 per cent of the FT World Index. Investors have long stopped worrying about conventional valuation measures like a low dividend yield or a high cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio since they have not been a barrier to market rises in the past. American equities will always go up, they think. Of course, in 2007, they thought the same thing about US house prices. And we all know what happened then.

Anche il vostro private banker. persino il vostro wealth manager, anche il vostro promotore finanziario adesso è costretto a parlarvi di stagflazione.

Anche se lui non ha ben capito che cosa è, la stagflazione, ed anche se lui, il vostro promotore, preferisce sempre parlarvi di cose allegre: lui vuole tenervi su di morale, disegnare paesaggi assolati, raccontarvi di mari tropicali con le acque limpidissime, lui vuole invitarvi al campo di golf, mica preoccuparvi con le incertezze del futuro, che annoiano ed irritano.

Soprattutto, lui vuole evitare la realtà: ma poi, alla fine e come sempre, la realtà si impone su tutto.

Ed oggi, pure il promotore, pure il private banker, pure il wealh manager e persino il robo-advisor sono costretti a parlare con voi di stagflazione. perché ne scrivono anche sui siti per il trading-on-line, come vedete nell’immagine che apre questo Post.

A quella immagine ne vogliamo contrapporre una seconda: per documentare ai nostri lettori, ancora una volta, il modo nel quale la stampa nazionale affronta i temi dell’economia: il ruolo di tutti i quotidiani, su questa materia, è sempre quello di fare da fanfara per i Governi di volta in volta in carica, quasi come se i quotidiani si fossero assunti il ruolo di “spargitori di ottimismo”.

Noi giudichiamo questo atteggiamento non soltanto poco professionale ma pure un po’ ridicolo

Se solo alziamo gli occhi per un attimo dalla stampa italiana, e leggiamo la stampa internazionale, non troviamo un solo mezzo di comunicazione che oggi insista ancora sul tema della “crescita”, come si face invece per tutto il primo semestre 2021.

Oggi i toni sono decisamente, e vistosamente, cambiati. Ve lo documentiamo qui sotto.

Ed anche sui mercati finanziari, come leggete nell’immagine qui sotto, ed anche in altri Post che noi oggi pubblichiamo nel Blog, si parla soprattutto di stagflazione.

Non si tratta soltanto di Borse. si parla anche, come leggete qui sotto, di materie prime e di valute. E si torna a parlare di panico sui mercati finanziari. A poche settimane di distanza … dal “boom economico”.

Come sapete bene, noi di Recce’d mettemmo all’attenzione dei nostri lettori questo argomento ben 14 mesi fa (e precisamente in questo Post), e molte altre volte nei 14 mesi dall’agosto 2020 ad oggi.

Oggi, è molto grande il numero di commenti ed opinioni, alcune delle quali qualificatissime (immagine che segue) che mettono la stagflazione al centro di tutto.

Recce’d come dicevamo ne ha scritto in numerose ocacsioni, nel corso degli ultimi 14 mesi. affidiamo quindi una ricapitolazione ed un aggiornamento ad oggi all’articolo che segue, leggendo il quale ritroverete quelli che sono stati i temi centrali di questo Blog dall’agosto 2020 ad oggi: a partire dagli Anni Settanta, passando per il fatto che le Banche Centrali oggi sono in un angolo ed impotenti, per finire con il fallimento del “Reflation trade” che andava di moda (anche per i vostri wealth managers e private bankers) fino a qualche settimana fa. Quando a voi, amici lettori, raccontavano: “questo è il momento di investire”.

Allegriaaaaaa ….

Supply chain disruptions sweeping major economies have reawakened an old nemesis for investors: stagflation. Anxiety over rising inflation has been ever-present in markets this year. But with oil topping $80 a barrel, global food prices a third more expensive than they were a year ago and other commodities at decade highs, investors say a longer-than-expected inflationary surge is coinciding with a slowdown in growth — and making it worse. Economists and investors play down comparisons with the aftermath of the 1970s oil shock, which gave rise to the term “stagflation”. Then, inflation and interest rates ran into double digits, unemployment soared and GDP recovered only slowly from repeated setbacks.

But with energy bills now rocketing, many worry about a growth slowdown at a time when central banks are edging towards lifting interest rates in a bid to keep a lid on longer-term inflation. “The conversation around inflation has definitely shifted,” said Seema Shah, chief strategist at Principal Global Investors. “There’s still a broad agreement that a lot of it is transitory, but we still think it will last well into 2022 and really start to hit consumer spending.” “It’s not the 1970s, but this is modern-day stagflation.” Signals from the Federal Reserve and Bank of England last week that they could soon begin lifting rates have fuelled a big bond sell-off over the past week and a half.

But in contrast to the “reflation” trade at the start of this year, stocks have been unable to draw comfort from the prospect that tighter monetary policy will be accompanied by accelerating growth. Ample evidence suggests that the supply shock reverberating around the world, combined with outbreaks of the Delta variant of coronavirus, is tempering the recovery in growth. Data released this week pointed to a sharp slowdown in Chinese manufacturing, as regulatory pressures and high energy prices shut down some production.

Business surveys from the US, UK and eurozone suggest that activity has slowed as delivery times lengthened and backlogs built up. Selling activity spilled over into equity markets this week after data showed that US consumer confidence had dropped to a six-month low in August. The UK has found itself at the sharp end of stagflationary concerns, with a surge in energy prices compounded by driver shortages that left petrol pumps running dry. While revised data show activity bounced back faster than thought over the summer, the recovery now appears to be faltering. The Bank of England’s governor Andrew Bailey acknowledged this week that supply bottlenecks and labour shortages were worsening, and could hold down growth and fuel inflation for some months to come. “The recovery has slowed and the economy has been buffeted by additional shocks,” he said in a speech to the Society for Professional Economists.

Concerns over growth are one reason the pound has not benefited from a sharp rise in UK government bond yields, as they typically do, after Bailey signalled that a rate rise could come as soon as this year. Instead, sterling has slumped to its lowest level of 2021 against the dollar, as some investors fear that early rate increases could choke off a fragile recovery. “If it is stagflation, central banks are in a bind,” said Jim Leaviss, head of public fixed income at M&G Investments. “Hiking will reduce demand a little bit and strengthen the currency. But it will have no impact on supply chain issues [ . . .] it won’t bring back lorry drivers.”

That dilemma — shared by other big central banks — could threaten buoyant equity markets, according to Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz. “Central banks will be torn between reacting to the ‘stag’ and the ‘flation’,” he said. “That’s a world where investors’ confidence in policymakers is shaken, and the backstop they’ve had over the past decade isn’t there any more.” Vicky Redwood, senior economic adviser at consultancy Capital Economics, said the UK’s “stagflation lite” was visible in many countries — with the surge in inflation coming earlier in the US, but growth now slowing there too as a result of the spread of the Delta coronavirus variant. But inflation should start to ease in 2022 and the situation was still “a long way off anything like the 1970s,” she said, adding: “we won’t see inflation get into the system like we did then.”

Others warn, however, that there is no sign yet of the strains on supply chains easing, and that the world could be heading for a more sustained period of tepid growth and higher inflation than policymakers have been predicting. “It’s a global problem,” said Kallum Pickering, economist at Berenberg, arguing that companies had little visibility over “very complicated supply chains” and disruption could last much longer than thought. If supply chain problems continued for a further six to 12 months, while consumers still had job security and were willing to pay for the goods they wanted, he said: “the whiff of stagflation might be more of a stench”.

Come viene illustrato oggi, in altri Post pubblicati in questo Blog, la stagflazione è il tema dominante, oggi, sui mercati finanziari di tutto il Mondo.

Chi segue questo Blog ne era informato ormai da 14 mesi, e precisamente dal Post che pubblicammo nell’agosto del 2020.

In quel Post veniva evidenziato proprio il rischio stagflazione come il maggiore rischio per i 12 mesi successivi, con queste parole: Vi chiediamo inoltre di notare i ripetuti accenni al tema della stagflazione, e quindi degli Anni Settanta. Sarà un tema dominante, nei prossimi 12 mesi. Si tratta di un servizio che abbiamo con piacere messo a disposizione di tutti in modo gratuito, in quanto concreto esempio di come un gestore professionale di portafoglio può curare al meglio i vostri investimenti, nel vostro esclusivo interesse.

I nostri lettori più attenti, quindi, considerano la stagflazione il tema dominante oggi dui mercati finanziari, ma allo stesso tempo si domandano: quale sarà il tema dominante, tra 12 mesi? e come devo prepararmi, oggi, con il mio portafoglio di investimenti?

La stagflazione è il rischio di oggi. Quale sarà il rischio di domani?

Noi su questo abbiamo oggi le idee molto chiare, tanto che ne abbiamo scritto, nel nostro The Morning Brief, ogni mattina la settimana scorsa.

Si tratta del tema della diseguaglianza: un tema del quale quotidiani e Tv hanno accennato velocemente, ma in più occasioni, negli ultimi anni, anche a commento del successo di alcuni libri, oppure al margine di manifestazioni e proteste.

Come noi abbiamo illustrato ai nostri Clienti, nell’ultimo anni questo tema è però entrato con forza sia nelle dichiarazioni pubbliche delle Banche Centrali, sia nei documenti, nelle “ricerche” e nelle dichiarazioni delle banche e delle altre Istituzioni internazionali.

E’ quindi indispensabile non soltanto comprendere il problema nei suoi vari aspetti, ma pure capire in che modo andrà ad influenzare le scelte concrete.

Le decisioni di politica monetaria delle Banche Centrali, le decisioni di politica economica dei Governi, ed anche le scelte delle Aziende.

Noi riteniamo che l’impatto sarà molto maggiore, e molto più urgente, dell’impatto dei temi legato ai cambiamenti climatici, quei temi che oggi trovate sulle prime pagine di tutti i quotidiani.

Tra un anno, saremo qui con voi a verificare.

Nel frattempo, tra centinia e centinaia di commenti, ne abbiamo scelto uno particolarmente qualificato, che qui di seguito vi mettiamo a disposizione gratuitamente.

What worries me the most is inequality, both within and across countries. And it’s something that financial markets puts aside as a social problem, not really an economic or financial problem. And we’ve risked seeing the issue of inequality gather momentum. Covid has already been the great un-equalizer, but rather than go back to where we’ve come from, we are now creating the dynamics for inequality to worsen and to assume greater importance in disrupting all sorts of things in our society.

A highly unequal society is not an economic healthy society. But the thing that worries me even more than that is inequality of opportunity. We know what Covid did to people who had no WiFi at home, who had no computers. We know that public school districts lost touch with a lot of their students and these students were not only becoming unemployed, but unemployable, which means a lost generation of young people.

As we slowly emerge from Covid, its aftermath creates different dynamics around the world. If you’re in a developing country today, you can no longer assume that companies will come to you. The onus is increasingly on you coming to the employer. And that is the real issue when education is lagging, when technology is lagging. So I do worry that we’re going to see this massive process get larger, if we’re not careful.

We were watching a tragic movie in play mode and then Covid came along and pressed fast-forward. First, it worsened wealth inequality because the response to Covid involved massive Federal Reserve liquidity injections to boost asset prices. And who owns assets? It’s the rich. So if you look at what has happened, the top part of the wealth distribution, people are much better off than they were before Covid. But at the bottom end, that hasn’t happened.

Think of people whose jobs have been displaced by this big step toward digitalization, who have no financial assets to begin with and don’t benefit from what has happened to asset prices. In addition, they are hoping to buy a house and they’ve been priced out of the housing market. So suddenly both the actual and potential wealth and income has declined.

To add to that, if they are unemployed, there’s suddenly a skills mismatch. There are record levels of vacancies that the labor market is not able to match to workers. And then you get what economists called multiple equilibria: one bad outcome, resulting not in mean reversion, but a high likelihood of an even worse outcome.

We already know what it looks like because we’ve had a taste of it. On the economic side, it looks like insufficient aggregate demand, which is a fancy way of saying that as the rich capture more income and more wealth, they spend less of it. The poor tend to consume more. So if the incremental income and wealth all go to the rich, then you’re going to have the problem of demand, which means you’re going to have a problem of growth.

And we’ve already had a period of so-called secular stagnation, and what my colleagues and I call the new normal, where we get low and insufficiently inclusive growth. We know what that looks like. We know the social consequences. It is cultural war. It’s alienation. It’s marginalization. That’s not good for society. It eats away at the fabric of society.

We know what it looks like politically. People will become single-issue voters, and single-issue voters can be captured by all sorts of things. No wonder we’re seeing an increase in populism across the world. And then it means a less equal world. You know, I grew up interested in developing countries, and for decades it was almost an accepted fact — not a hypothesis, almost an accepted fact — that these countries would converge to the advanced economies.

Well guess what? We’re having divergence going on right now. And I suspect this divergence is not short term. So we may live in a less equal world, or to be more blunt, a much more unequal world. And that’s problematic for global economic policy coordination, interdependency, immigration. I mean, I can go on and on. So it is problematic. We’ve had a taste of it and we don’t quite like that taste, but it could become a lot worse.

The American dream is all about capturing these amazing opportunities and being able to go right up the income ladder. There’s a correct notion that inequality can incentivize people to work harder, to do better, but there comes a point when it goes from encouraging people to do good things to actually detracting from not just economic well-being, but social and political well-being.

I don’t think the American dream is dead. I think it’s harder to achieve. If you don’t have the right education to begin with, if you don’t have a set of assets to begin with, you’re looking at a much steeper curve, and that is a real problem for too many people.

The prescription is investing in human and physical infrastructure. It’s about enabling people to do more and to do better. It’s about providing people with transformational opportunities. It starts at a very early age, at pre-K, exposing bright minds to exciting education and opportunities. It continues throughout the middle school, high school, university, making elite universities more accessible to people who deserve to be there but may be held back because they come from the wrong zip code or because their parents have never had an education.

There’s a lot that can be done. It’s about fundamentally asking the question, ‘How do we enable our resources, human and physical, to be more inclusive and more productive?’