Tutti abbiamo assistito, nelle ultime cinque settimane, ad ore ed ore di filmati, in TV oppure in streaming, che raccontano l’orrore della guerra.

Per ore ed ore, dal divano di casa, abbiamo seguito le storie delle famiglie divise ed abbiamo guardato immagini da altre case, case ormai senza divano, case senza tavolo e case senza muri. Tutti siamo stati colpiti dalle immagini devastanti di edifici sventrati dalle bombe e di bambini che attraversano la frontiera per andare a vivere, auguriamoci temporaneamente, in un Paese che non è il loro.

Dopo cinque settimane, tutti noi abbiamo ricordato quanto la guerra è orribile. Tutti noi ci siamo ritrovati ad affrontare un disagio profondo, che per molti Occidentali sembra fosse definitivamente stato sepolto nel passato.

La guerra, è un orrore: su questo, nessuno aveva dubbi. Vedere per ore le conseguenze della guerra, in TV, conferma questo giudizio.

Tutto ciò detto, non possiamo fermarci a questo.

Ed infatti, nei dibattiti TV che seguono le immagini, ed anche durante i TG ed anche in streaming, tutti noi abbiamo ascoltato migliaia, e forse decine di migliaia, di opinioni, sui vari aspetti di questo conflitto, e sulle ricadute del conflitto sulla nostra stessa esistenza, sociale, politica ed economica.

Recce’d non può, ovviamente, aggiungere elementi originali di valutazione e giudizio, a queste decine di migliaia di analisi, nelle quali è stato detto di tutto ed anche il contrario di tutto.

Allo stesso tempo, non possiamo del tutto esentarci dallo scrivere di Ucraina, vista l’urgenza con la quale il tema si ripresenta, giorno dopo giorno dopo giorno, anche sui mercati finanziari.

Abbiamo quindi deciso di utilizzare un Post per raccontare al lettore quello che, a noi di Recce’d, proprio non piace di questa vicenda. Guerra a parte, ovviamente: come ad ognuno di voi, anche in noi la guerra suscita orrore e repulsione, amarezza e disperazione.

Tutto ciò detto, non possiamo fermarci a questo.

Ed allora, al nostro lettore raccontiamo quello che proprio non ci piace di questa vicenda. Che cosa significa “non ci piace”? Significa. quello che ci lascia una sensazione di disagio, quello ce a noi risulta torbido, difficile da accettare e difficile da comprendere.

E partiamo da come l’episodio bellico è stato raccontato dalla maggior parte dei media, italiani ed internazionali: a Mosca c’è un individuo, sicuramente isolato, e probabilmente squilibrato, che decide un giorno di invadere un paese confinante, gettando il proprio Paese nella misera e nella disperazione.

Questa lettura di ciò che è successo nelle ultime cinque settimane non ci convince, e ci suscita disagio: è troppo semplice, tanto da sembrare semplicistica. Sembra una storia, una storiella da raccontare ai bambini, oppure un film western: c’è il Buono, c’è il Cattivo, il Buono vince.

Moltissime cose non ci convincono, di questa storia: e sarebbe lungo elencarle qui nel Post. Ci affidiamo invece ad un articolo, pubblicato in settimana dal New York Times, che fin dal suo titolo si domanda: “E se non fosse vero che Putin ha fatto un errore di calcolo?”.

Vi invitiamo a leggerlo, per poi riprendere con il nostro commento.

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

The conventional wisdom is that Vladimir Putin catastrophically miscalculated.

He thought Russian-speaking Ukrainians would welcome his troops. They didn’t. He thought he’d swiftly depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. He hasn’t. He thought he’d divide NATO. He’s united it. He thought he had sanction-proofed his economy. He’s wrecked it. He thought the Chinese would help him out. They’re hedging their bets. He thought his modernized military would make mincemeat of Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians are making mincemeat of his, at least on some fronts.

Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.” Russia’s sieges of Mariupol and Kharkiv — two heavily Russian-speaking cities that Putin claims to be “liberating” from Ukrainian oppression — resemble what the Nazis did to Warsaw, and what Putin himself did to Grozny.

Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The conventional wisdom is entirely plausible. It has the benefit of vindicating the West’s strategy of supporting Ukraine defensively. And it tends toward the conclusion that the best outcome is one in which Putin finds some face-saving exit: additional Ukrainian territory, a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality, a lifting of some of the sanctions.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

The possibility is suggested in a powerful reminiscence from The Times’s Carlotta Gall of her experience covering Russia’s siege of Grozny, during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. In the early phases of the war, motivated Chechen fighters wiped out a Russian armored brigade, stunning Moscow. The Russians regrouped and wiped out Grozny from afar, using artillery and air power.

Russia’s operating from the same playbook today. When Western military analysts argue that Putin can’t win militarily in Ukraine, what they really mean is that he can’t win clean. Since when has Putin ever played clean?

“There is a whole next stage to the Putin playbook, which is well known to the Chechens,” Gall writes. “As Russian troops gained control on the ground in Chechnya, they crushed any further dissent with arrests and filtration camps and by turning and empowering local protégés and collaborators.”

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

If this analysis is right, then Putin doesn’t seem like the miscalculating loser his critics make him out to be.

It also makes sense of his strategy of targeting civilians. More than simply a way of compensating for the incompetence of Russian troops, the mass killing of civilians puts immense pressure on Zelensky to agree to the very things Putin has demanded all along: territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality. The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Within Russia, the war has already served Putin’s political purposes. Many in the professional middle class — the people most sympathetic to dissidents like Aleksei Navalny — have gone into self-imposed exile. The remnants of a free press have been shuttered, probably for good. To the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below. Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.

This alternative analysis of Putin’s performance could be wrong. Then again, in war, politics and life, it’s always wiser to treat your adversary as a canny fox, not a crazy fool.

L’articolo che avete appena letto a noi è sembrato interessante, proprio perché propone una lettura dei fatti recenti da una angolazione che NON è quella prevalente sui media Occidentali.

Noi associamo le considerazioni fatte dall’articolo del New York Times ad altre considerazioni, e ad informazioni di prima mano di cui disponiamo: possiamo dare per certo, ai nostri lettori, che almeno fino ad oggi 2 aprile 2022 l’economia russa non è precipitata nel baratro di cui hanno parlato Biden, Macron, Johnson, Von der Layen e Draghi. Almeno fino ad oggi, questa affermazione non è riscontrata dai fatti.

E neppure dal cambio del rublo, che ognuno di voi può andare a vedere sul Web.

Qui sopra, il titolo di un articolo pubblicato dalla notissima Società di Consulenza Aziendale Mc Kinsey ci riferisce di “danni crescenti derivanti dalla guerra in Ucraina”, associando poi il costo in termini di vite umane che sono andate perdute e l’aumento del costo dei generi alimentari e dell’energia (insieme con i colli di bottiglia nelle catene produttive).

Qui si fa un po’ di confusione: prima di tutto, perché il costo in termini di vite umane si colloca su un piano diverso, rispetto alla “crisi energetica”, e poi anche perché non si capisce se quel costo ricade soprattutto su Russia ed Ucraina, oppure se si tratta del costo pagato dall’Occidente.

Non ci addentriamo oltre: se ne parla, decisamente troppo, durante le decine di talk show televisivi, ed ogni nostro lettore si sarà già fatto una propria opinione.

Ritornando però a quello che a noi di Recce’d proprio non piace, quello che non ci convince, quello che ci mette a disagio, vi proponiamo in lettura qui di seguito un secondo articolo, che spiega le ragioni (da noi condivise) per le quali le Nazioni dell’Occidente dovrebbero smetterla di compiacersi.

By

Pankaj Mishra

29 marzo 2022, 20:53 CEST

Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include “Age of Anger: A History of the Present,” “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia,” and “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.”

Cold War language about Western unity and the “long fight” against autocracy has become more rousing as Russia flounders in Ukraine. It is time to start worrying that the response to Vladimir Putin's aggression, led by U.S. President Joe Biden, might cause more widespread damage than even the Russian despot had planned.

One only has to recall the Western reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. After that atrocity, politicians and journalists freely indulged in the kind of spine-stiffening rhetoric Biden used in Warsaw last week. Those few dissenters who warned against self-congratulatory hawkishness — including the late writer Susan Sontag, who pleaded, “Let's not be stupid together” — were viciously attacked. 

As it happened, the decision to declare an open-ended war on terror — quickly taken and fulsomely endorsed in that atmosphere of fervent unanimity — led to violence on multiple continents and helped unravel entire societies.

The fanatics of al-Qaeda never posed a serious threat to Western political, military and economic power. Their suicidal attack was, arguably, symptomatic of the overall decline of militant Islam worldwide. Putin’s brutal assault on Ukraine seems another sign of thwarted energies that have turned self-destructive.

Yet rhetorical overkill and thoughtless policy from Western powers might well accelerate their own loss of legitimacy while helping turn a regional crisis into a global conflagration. 

Certainly, memories of the counter-productive response to 9/11 weigh heavily on the minds of those — a large part of the world’s population — who do not share the Western goals of isolating and punishing Russia through sanctions. Since 9/11, most people around the world have regarded the Western ideology and practice of humanitarian intervention, democracy-promotion and regime change with increasing distrust. Such skeptics are unlikely to be stirred by Biden’s denunciations of autocracy, broadcast from illiberal Poland of all places.

Russophobia, latent or manifest in a range of actions in the West today, is about as likely to bring about positive change as Islamophobia. There is little evidence that global isolation and humiliation can motivate a people to overthrow their oppressive leaders.

And Putin is more equipped than any Islamist demagogue to take advantage of his citizens’ anger at the West. He is adept at packaging his imperialism as a riposte to the real and perceived humiliations of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even if Putin is overthrown at some point, a more unhinged form of chauvinism may well emerge from a defeated, immiserated and still nuclear-armed Russia.

Those Western hawks comparing Putin to Adolf Hitler and lamenting appeasement at Munich in 1938 should go back a bit further in history and remember how the Treaty of Versailles after World War I made another global calamity inevitable.

They ought also to reflect on how the West’s talk of antagonistic and irreconcilable blocs undermines its own ideology of globalization. It was Western politicians, businessmen and journalists, after all, who claimed that the end of the Cold War had made possible a new world order in which market forces rightly prevailed over state sovereignty and soft power over hard, creating a “win-win” scenario for all nations and peoples.

This “flat world” was, of course, always an optical illusion. The West’s advanced nation-states deeply influenced transnational networks of trade and capital. The ownership, assets and intellectual property of multinational banks, companies and insurance firms remained largely in their home countries. And the global economy remained subject to regulation by Western-dominated organizations such as the G-7, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Most non-Western countries resented this “rules-based liberal order” even as they went along with it. When globalization seemed to empower a rival to the West, such as China, they were quick to note how quickly leaders such as former U.S. President Donald Trump moved to undermine it.

The swift abandonment of Russia by Western businesses has reinforced the idea that this new world order is controlled by and primarily designed for the benefit of a minority of Europeans and Americans. The weaponizing of globalization by its principal movers and shakers undercuts their claim to be creating a moral, political and economic universalism that transcends nation-state rivalries.

Western cold warriors would do better to direct their energies to negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. It is swift peace-making that can stave off, among other things, a bleak future of hunger and chaos, especially for the poor countries of Asia, Africa and the Middle East that depend on Russia and Ukraine for energy, fertilizer and food.

Biden can’t seem to stop talking about the importance of Western unity. But unity in itself is not a virtue. As Sontag noted, it is always possible to be stupid together.

Anche questo secondo articolo, come il precedente, lo abbiamo scelto, e messo a disposizione dei nostri lettori, perché offre un punto di vista alternativo sulle recenti vicende belliche, ed in questo senso è molto utile per sviluppare una propria coscienza critica, un proprio punto di vista meno appiattito sulla “visione convenzionale” dei fatti in Ucraina.

Noi di Recce’d non condividiamo ogni passaggio di questo articolo, come sanno bene i nostri Clienti con i quali ci confrontiamo ogni giorno. E tuttavia, a noi sembra utile leggerne proprio ogni passaggio, e riesaminare tutta intera la vicenda da un punto di vista alternativo.

A noi risulta utile, in particolare perché ci porta a ragionare di mercati finanziari. E quindi ci riporta sul nostro terreno.

Come dice il titolo che vedete qui sotto, ad oggi non abbiamo un “cessate il fuoco” tra le parti, ed ogni ipotesi di “cessate il fuoco” porta con sé una serie di problemi, in gran parte aggiuntivi rispetto a quelli che già oggi sono sul tavolo.

Noi ripetiamo qui quello che scrivemmo già un mese fa: questa vicenda è per il lungo periodo. Resterà con noi per anni. Ed oggi è impossibile individuare vincitori e vinti: il tempo ce lo dirà, chi ha guadagnato e chi ha perso.

Proprio per questo, come leggete nel titolo qui sotto, “i mercati finanziari farebbero bene a cambiare atteggiamento”.

Almeno tra gli investitori, sarebbe bene evitare, con anticipo, le conseguenze negative dell’essere “stupidi insieme”.

A tutti noi piace ricevere regali.

Ad esempio, ai lettori del suo Blog, ormai da dieci anni Recce’d regala lavoro, regala il suo lavoro.

O meglio, una parte del suo lavoro, lavoro dal quale molti lettori hanno però ricavato concrete indicazioni, sia per raggiungere nuovi guadagni sia per limitare le proprie minusvalenze.

Ovvio che noi non regaliamo, ai lettori del Blog, per intero il nostro lavoro: sarebbe materialmente impossibile.

Ogni lavoro, infatti, implica dei costi.

E i costi sono tanto più grandi, quanto è accurato, approfondito, quotidiano il lavoro di analisi, di valutazione, e di simulazione sui prezzi degli asset finanziari, e ancora prima (è indispensabile) sui dati economici, e sulle notizie della geopolitica, della politica, della società.

Nessuno, noi crediamo, tra i nostri lettori è così semplicione da credere che per scrivere, in una sede pubblica, ed anche qui nel Blog, diciotto mesi fa, di

• inflazione non transitoria

• stagflazione

• Anni Settanta

• recessione

noi di Recce’d ci siamo accomodati su una terrazza a Portofino, aspettando di vedere tramontare il sole, e aspettando al tempo stesso che improvvisamente un’idea illuminasse la nostra serata.

Ecco dove sta il vantaggio dei lettori del Blog: si appropriano gratuitamente di un lavoro che, a loro, viene fornito gratuitamente.

I Clienti di Recce’d, oltre che a questo lavoro, accedono poi alla parte più importante. Come si trasformano, quando, in che quantità, le indicazioni che trovate qui nel Blog in scelte di portafoglio?

Come si costruisce un portafoglio in titoli? E sulla base di quale strategia di investimento, poi, lo si modifica?

Ovviamente, non si tratta di una attività che può essere effettuata in un dato giorno, mese anno: non ha senso pensare di decidere “oggi, e per i prossimi cinque anni”.

Si tratta invece di una attività che va effettuata ogni giorno: ma proprio ogni giorno.

Ogni investitore, se intende essere consapevole delle proprie scelte sugli investimenti, e quindi sui propri soldi, deve necessariamente tenere conto di tutto ciò che accade, e modificare sia le sue valutazioni sia le sue scelte operative sulla base di ciò che accade.

Un esempio concreto: voi lettori, oggi, che valutazioni afte sull’argomento “soft landing”? Certamente, ne avrete già letto, sul vostro quotidiano, oppure almeno sentito parlare, al TG economia.

Noi di Recce’d, che cosa pensiamo? In estrema sintesi, lo abbiamo già spiegato, proprio qui nel Blog, sette giorni fa.

Con i nostri Clienti? Beh … con loro c’è occasione di esaminare questo tema, insieme con altri temi, ogni mattina.

Allo scopo di non ripetere cose che noi di Recce’d abbiamo già detto, ed anche allo scopo di fornire ai nostri lettori un contributo nuovo, ritrovate qui sotto un articolo della prestigiosa rivista Barron’s pubblicato soltanto poche ore fa: il tema è il “soft landing”, e noi vi abbiamo messo in evidenza i passaggi sui quali oggi vi è indispensabile fermarvi a riflettere.

Su che cosa riflettere? Su tre cose in particolare:

1. sui numerosi spunti, legati all’attualità (della politica, della geopolitica, e dei dati) a cui si fa cenno in questo articolo

2. sul fatto che, solo sei mesi fa, il vostro private banker, il vostro wealth manager, il vostro robo advisor, il vostro familiy banker, vi ha più volte garantito che “lo scenario di recessione non è neppure lontanamente da prendere in esame, a proposito del portafoglio titoli”: oggi però, sembra che sia rimasto solo quello

3. e infine, sul fatto che solo 18 mesi fa in Occidente, è stata lanciata la più grande manovra di “stimolo” all’economia della Storia dell’Uomo: e quindi? Sarà stato anche il più grande errore di politica economica della Storia dell’Uomo? L’articolo che segue sembra dire esattamente questo: quello “stimolo” enorme, impressionante, BIG, beh … non ha risolto proprio un bel nulla, ed anzi …

Spiraling inflation and an aggressive monetary policy tightening cycle by the Federal Reserve could be enough to tip the U.S. economy into a recession even in the best of times. Add an Eastern European war into the mix, and the risk of a downturn spikes.

Major economic forecasters see a roughly 1 in 3 chance of a recession within the next 12 to 18 months, not-insignificant odds that have more or less doubled since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. That’s in part because history shows the Federal Reserve does not have a stellar record of avoiding a recession when it hikes rates.

Guiding the economy to a safe landing amid mounting turbulence—including an oil price shock, severe geopolitical risk and a flattening yield curve—would be one of the greatest policy maneuvers in the central bank’s recent history. And the Fed does have a significant factor in its favor: the U.S. economy remains fundamentally strong. Consumers are flush and businesses are in hiring mode. Some economists and Fed officials contend that could be enough for it to withstand a series of interest rate increases.

But the fallout from the war adds a new dimension.

“Prior to the invasion, when we were just talking about policy normalization at the Fed, I was thoroughly convinced the economy could absorb what the Fed was planning to do,” says RSM chief economist Joe Brusuelas. While that’s still a possibility, he adds, “what I’m uncertain about is the external shock that has little to do with economic or financial fundamentals, and everything to do with geopolitics.”

At the center of the debate over whether it’s time to prepare for a recession is the Fed and its indication that it plans to raise interest rates at least six more times this year in an attempt to slow down rising inflation—and officials have recently hinted they could move faster than that. Steep rate-hike cycles have historically been catalysts for economic downturns, because moving aggressively to slow the economy carries an inherent risk of going too far, stalling growth and driving up unemployment.

Alan Blinder, a former Fed economist and current Princeton University professor who has a forthcoming book on monetary and fiscal policy history over the past 60 years, says the Fed has just once in the last 11 tightening periods nailed a “perfect soft landing,” which came in the early 1990s. But twice more, in the mid-1960s and early 1980s, the central bank raised interest rates without sparking an official recession—and such “soft-ish” landings, he said in a recent presentation, are not all that rare.

Still, eight recessions out of 11 tightening cycles is reason for concern, and some economists say the risk now is significant in part because the Fed waited so long to act on inflation—consumer prices have risen 7.9% year over year, and are expected to keep climbing—that it has to tighten quickly in order to get things under control. That in turn could carry a greater chance of overdoing it.

“This is the biggest disconnect, historically, between current Fed policy and their goals of price stability,” says Stephen Roach, a former chief economist at Morgan Stanley now a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale University. “I can’t think of any time when they have been faced with the type of tightening they have to contemplate in the current environment where they’ve been able to sidestep a recession.”

The compounding factor is the Russia-Ukraine war, which could keep oil and other commodity prices elevated for months to come and risks bringing down global demand. A prolonged period of higher oil prices would mean U.S. households are forced to redirect spending from discretionary goods and services to necessities—gas and groceries, primarily—which slows the economy by itself.

At the same time, continued supply chain disruptions stemming from both the war and Covid-related factory shutdowns in China could keep prices elevated even longer. All of which would lessen the chances that the Fed is able to get a handle on inflation soon.

The U.S. remains more insulated from the impact of Russian sanctions than Europe does. But still, “if there’s significant global financial market stress above and beyond what we’re seeing today, if there’s significant deterioration in global economic conditions, it’s hard to see how the U.S. economy fully escapes that,” says Robert Rosener, senior U.S. economist with Morgan Stanley.

Despite the mounting risks facing the U.S. economy at home and abroad, however, there are a number of reasons to believe the economy could grind on even amid a tightening and uncertain environment. The labor market is remarkably strong, with record levels of job openings, sustained demand for workers, a rising labor-force participation rate, and unemployment that has fallen to 3.8%, just 0.3 percentage point above its prepandemic low.

American consumers remain healthy, too, even as the cost of living rises, and an estimated 60% of households continue to hold on to excess savings built up during the pandemic. At the same time, home and stock portfolio values have soared, and overall household net wealth climbed more than 37% between the first quarter of 2020 and fourth quarter of 2021, Federal Reserve data shows. Growth has been so strong that even a sizeable slowdown this year could still leave the economy humming along.

“I can’t think of any time when they have been faced with the type of tightening they have to contemplate in the current environment where they’ve been able to sidestep a recession.”

— Stephen Roach, former Morgan Stanley chief economist

Take Morgan Stanley’s recent gross-domestic product estimates, for example. Economists with the firm recently adjusted their GDP forecast to reflect higher commodity prices and tighter financial conditions, lowering it to 4% growth for 2022, down from 4.6% at the start of the year. “That’s a good chunk that we’ve taken out of growth to reflect recent developments,” Rosener says. “But you look at that, and it’s hard not to see an economy that has a buffer to absorb some of these things.”

The hope among some economists is that the economy’s underlying strength will be enough to keep any recession relatively shallow and short-lived, if not fend it off entirely. Brusuelas, who sees a roughly 20% chance of recession, expects any slowdown to be of the “garden variety”—nine to 12 months of a household-driven contraction sparked by a decline in consumer purchasing power as commodity prices spike.

Tempering the pain is likely to be the U.S. labor market, where employers who have spent more than a year competing to hire and retain workers are unlikely to let them go amid a mild slowdown or recession, economists say. The layoff rate hit an all-time low of 0.8% in December and climbed only 0.1 percentage point in January despite the Omicron-induced economic shutdowns, government data shows—a possible signal of how employers might react to the next slowdown as well. A delay in widespread layoffs would minimize the hit to employment, thereby limiting the damage to consumer demand and the broader economy.

“Businesses know that their problem cutting through the business cycle, through the pandemic, through any disruption, is going to be labor and finding qualified workers,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “They’re loath to reduce payrolls.”

Still, while the economy for now looks steady, the level of uncertainty around the world means the status quo could change quite quickly, says Roach, the Yale economist. “We need to be cautious in avoiding overcomplacency,” he says, “based on what we perceive to be a fairly balanced situation today

Cantavano i R.E.M in uno dei loro primi brani: “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)”. Fu un grande successo.

Quel grande successo, in un certo senso, anticipava i tempi che noi stiamo vivendo. In questo Post, cercheremo di aiutare i nostri lettori a comprendere la portata (appunto epocale) dei fatti a cui stiamo assistendo, dal 2020 ad oggi, e soprattutto di quelli a cui assisteremo in futuro.

Se sfugge questo aspetto, se non si capisce l’ampiezza dello sconvolgimento, se sfugge la portata epocale del cambiamento, ogni strategia di investimento è destinata ad un disastro: tutti noi investitori oggi siamo chiamati ad investire su mercati finanziari che NON sono quelli del passato, anche recente; ed attraverso i mercati, ad investire su economie che NON sono quelle del passato, anche recente; e tutto questo in un contesto sociale e geopolitico che NON è quello del passato, anche recente.

Si tratta di argomenti di una tale ampiezza, che richiedono competenze di varia natura, alle quali Recce’d accede in modo privilegiato avendo per decenni costruito relazioni professionali con qualificati esperti (di tematiche sociali e politiche) in tutte le maggiori aree economiche del Pianeta.

Un network di altissimo livello, con il quale i contatti, in questo periodo, sono quotidiani, e da qui derivano poi i contenuti che mettiamo a disposizione dei nostri Clienti ogni mattina.

Ai lettori del Blog, noi offriamo in lettura due articoli, in questo Post, che sono utilissimi per comprendere che stiamo attraversando un momento della Storia di quelli nei quali cambiano tutti i punti di riferimento.

Come vedete, il primo dei due articolo porta un titolo che richiama, appunto, il brano dei R.E.M.

By

Liam Denning

18 marzo 2022, 12:00 CET

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy, mining and commodities. He previously was editor of the Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column and wrote for the Financial Times' Lex column. He was also an investment banker. @liamdenning

Roughly half the U.S. population has little or no memory of the Cold War. Which is good; life ought to be lived without the existential dread of mushroom clouds.

Yet for many of us growing up in the West, the Cold War period was actually better than any time our ancestors experienced. We enjoyed economic growth, access to high-quality health care and education and jet-powered trade and travel. Plus peace, even if predicated on mutually assured destruction. In the post-Cold War years, when roughly half of today’s population was growing up, things turned positively fantastic. Economies boomed as trade barriers fell and Chinese manufacturing hit its stride. And there was the internet and on-demand everything. Plus peace, even if marked by occasional terrorist attacks and the odd faraway war. Nuclear weapons remained, of course, but came to seem like relics. 

Russia’s attack on Ukraine marks the end of all that and the beginning of a new normal — or, rather, a shift back toward the old normality.

“What we think of as normal is actually the most distorted moment in human history,” writes Peter Zeihan, a geopolitical analyst, in his forthcoming book, “The End of the World Is Just the Beginning.” As the title suggests, this is not a happy read.

Zeihan’s central premise is that the globalized world now ending was founded on a bribe. In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. offered access to the only functioning industrialized market of any scale — its own — with free trade policed by the only navy still capable of doing so — its own — and security guarantees for key allies in Europe and Asia. In return for this opportunity to recover, the other countries had to set aside their historical squabbles and imperial ambitions and support the Americans’ strategic priority: containing the USSR.

There had been an earlier era of globalization, in the decades leading up World War I. But that one stemmed from technological advances in shipping and communication rather than a true embrace of multilateralism. Back then, trade was dominated by the competing empires that ultimately clashed in 1914.

The decisive break from history at the end of World War II happened because its unequivocal victor, the U.S., declined to subjugate defeated enemies and broken allies. Instead, it used direct aid and economic access to rebuild them. And other countries, too. With free trade secured, otherwise economically marginal or previously insecure regions (except those aligned with Moscow) could develop, selling to and buying from a global marketplace. Without this peculiar order in place, it is hard to imagine a Singapore or even a Saudi Arabia — and definitely not a Ukraine — as sustained sovereign actors.

Weird as this was, its persistence after the USSR collapsed was even weirder. As the American bribe became harder to justify, the U.S. eventually ended up with a president who rejected free trade, openly denounced NATO allies as moochers and reveled in the old style of great-power politics.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine, combined with a changed White House, has reinvigorated the U.S.-led alliance. Now, rather than wither, NATO may actually gain new members. Economic sanctions on Russia have been swift, harsh and surprisingly cohesive. And with the invasion clearly not going according to plan, it may seem as if the lifespan of our “distorted moment” could lengthen.

Not so fast. There’s no ceasefire in Ukraine yet and, even if a settlement is reached soon, the world has changed. 

For one thing, Russia, which spans 11 time zones and exports all types of vital commodities, is no longer part of the international system in the way it was just a few weeks ago. Sovereign debt default appears imminent. Putin’s pattern of behavior, his age and his apparent obsession with Ukraine make him more likely to double down than to back down. The oil majors that have withdrawn and the aircraft leasing firms that have had their planes, er, nationalized won’t be coming back — even assuming they get an invitation. And however unrealistic it might seem for Western Europe to sever its energy umbilicus with Russia, keeping it intact is at least as unrealistic.

The dislocation and cost involved in isolating Russia means it’s too soon to declare that the U.S.-led order is completely revived. This war is barely three weeks old, and we have yet to see how unity will hold up over an extended period of potential energy shortages.

One effect of postwar globalization was that it reduced the importance of location — which, in geopolitical terms, is about as distorted as things get. Dizzyingly complex, extended supply chains make it possible to lay your hands on gasoline or a smartphone or anything else pretty much anywhere. And security guarantees mean there’s little need to worry about that giant, revanchist power across your border.

Now location matters again. Germany, with its capital about 750 miles from Kyiv and its reliance on Russia for half of its gas, is in a different place in several senses from neighboring France, whose capital lies almost 1,300 miles from the war zone and gets only a quarter of its gas from Siberia. Poland and the Baltic states, despite also being members of the EU and NATO, are in an entirely different space from both. The border with Russia is now like a geopolitical event horizon, and proximity to it will shape how countries respond — raising the potential for divisions, as seen already in continental Europe’s reluctance to follow the U.S. and U.K. in sanctioning Russian energy.

Even assuming this current crisis revives the U.S.-led order, it wouldn’t look like the one we grew up with. Washington’s commitment has faded, as every U.S. ally is already aware. President Joe Biden is poles apart from his predecessor. But his recent State of the Union speech, while calling for the world to stand with Ukraine, also doubled down on protectionism and reshoring. “There has to be a recognition among America’s allies that their physical security depends on the Americans — and that comes at a cost,” says Zeihan.

Germany is the most striking example of a major ally suddenly recognizing this, though well past time. The idea that a $4 trillion economy built on international trade and surrounded by former adversaries would have barely a navy to speak of and a military smaller than Morocco’s is, in historical terms, ludicrous. This explains why, with Ukraine under attack, Berlin has decided to rearm with gusto — another apparition from the old normal.

Predicting the implications of this shift in the foundation is impossible; one can’t be sure which parts of the structure will collapse and which will hold up (apart from Russia’s capital markets, which are clearly ruined already). China’s unfolding reaction is crucial. There is a world of difference between Beijing doubling down on siding with Moscow and its accommodating the international order from which it has benefited enormously.

Yet the obvious potential change is accelerating fragmentation, something glimpsed already in rising protectionism and in the vaccine diplomacy (or lack of it) during the pandemic. In economic terms, “decoupling and deglobalization is bullish in the first order but bearish in the second,” says Kevin Book of ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm. The alternative to outsourcing and division of labor is duplication of industries, which means doing and investing more in the near term but incurring the cost of inefficiencies over the longer term. And you thought inflation was bad already.

Surging gasoline prices and long lead times for sofa-buyers are not, however, the worst potential outcomes here. 

Book, for example, has assessed the effects from Russia’s oil and gas exports (4.5% of global consumption) being cut off. He estimates that they range from 100% of the world managing with 4.5% less energy to 4.5% of the world going without altogether. The first endpoint mostly entails higher prices, assuming a world that still coordinates relatively uninhibited energy flows. If the world reverts to the older normal of great-power competition, the outcome would tend more toward some states being cut off completely.

Zeihan, in the section of his book that’s focused on agriculture, raises a similar, but more troubling, dimension:

The industrialized Order hasn’t simply enabled us to increase the total calories grown by a factor of seven since 1945, it has enabled vast swathes of the planet to have large populations when geography alone wouldn’t previously support them. Populations in North Africa and the Middle East in particular have expanded by a factor of seven since 1945. Bulk food shipments originating a continent (or more) away are now a commonality.

Given the news and images from Ukraine, it may seem petty to sound the alarm on access to stuff. Except that access to sometimes vital stuff, at broadly affordable prices and without fear of interdiction, has been the making of not merely Western prosperity but, in other parts of the world, sheer viability. Book characterizes the world’s apparent slip back toward its longstanding historical condition of disconnection and friction as “reversion to the mean.” “Mean” being the operative word, one might add.

L’articolo che avete appena letto è ricchissimo di spunti, che vi invitiamo ad approfondire. Uno in particolare a noi è sembrato molto significativo: l’accenno ai decenni che portarono il Mondo verso la Prima Guerra Mondiale. Anche in quegli anni il Mondo aveva inseguito una “globalizzazione” che allora era basata sugli Imperi europei, e che allora come oggi prometteva “infinita prosperità per tutto il Mondo”.

Non andò a finire bene. E come abbiamo già scritto più sopra, oggi nessuna razionale politica di investimento può essere sviluppata e messa in pratica a prescindere da questo tipo di considerazioni, ovvero a prescindere dal fatto che stiamo attraversando un cambiamento di epoca.

Ma c’è in particolare un aspetto della attuale situazione che noi suggeriamo ai lettori di approfondire. ed è quello di cui si scrive nel secondo articolo di questo Post.

Si tratta di un articolo di livello eccellente, nel quale viene ripreso lo spunto del periodo che precedette la Prima Guerra Mondiale, ma questo spunto qui viene sviluppato ed associato a quella che qui viene definita “La Grande Illusione del Capitalismo”, che noi vi suggeriamo di approfondire.

Trovate inoltre una serie di spunti di attualità, inclusi alcuni utili grafici, tra i quali vi segnaliamo quello relativa alle spese militari di NATO e Russia. Quest’ultimo è un dato che aiuta tutti a comprendere meglio quelle che, a prima vista, sono state definite “mosse irrazionali”.

By

John Micklethwait and

Adrian Wooldridge

24 marzo 2022, 05:01 CET

A book published in 1919 on “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” isn’t the obvious starting place for understanding the economic consequences of the current war in Ukraine. But it’s worth taking a little time to read John Maynard Keynes’s famous description of the leisurely life of an upper-middle-class Londoner in 1913 — just before the Great War changed everything:

The inhabitant of London [in 1913] could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.

Keynes then describes how this Londoner could speculate on the markets and travel wherever he wanted without a passport or the bother of changing currency (the gold standard meant that his money was good everywhere). And then the famous economist delivers his coup de grace by going inside the privileged Londoner’s head: 

[The Londoner] regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.

Keynes’s cosmopolitan Briton, completely unaware that the first great age of globalization was about to be shot to pieces at the Somme, is the urban equivalent of the cavorting toffs in “Gosford Park,” Robert Altman’s movie about a weekend in a grand country house just before the outbreak of war. One of us possesses a photograph of the Bullingdon, Oxford’s poshest dining club, in 1913: The future rulers of the world stare out at us with frozen arrogance. Within a year most of them were in the trenches. 

Foppish aristocrats weren’t the only ones who were complacent. Intellectuals agreed. Norman Angell’s “The Great Illusion,” the Edwardian bestseller published in 1909, argued that war was impossible given the interconnectedness of the world. The great businesses of Europe and the U.S. operated on the same assumption. The first great age of globalization, which started in the 1860s and was underpinned by British power and coordinated by British statecraft, had left the commercial classes free to make money — businesspeople then faced far fewer barriers than their modern equivalents when it came to moving money, goods or people around the world.

It’s easy to mock the shortsightedness of the West’s ruling class in 1913 — for not seeing how the rise of Germany and the complex web of alliances between the Great Powers could turn an assassination in Sarajevo into a global conflict. Clio, the muse of history, is always wise after the event, but future generations could well ask the same question about us: How could they not know? 

Keynes’s Londoner, lounging in his bed, had at least this excuse: The end of his age of globalization came with little warning. In our case, globalization has been under sustained attack for two decades, with serious assaults in 2001 (when two planes, hitherto symbols of modernity, slammed into the World Trade Center); 2008 (when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global financial system went into cardiac arrest); and 2016 (when the British voted to leave the world’s largest free-trade zone and Americans elected a nativist TV personality as president). The “decoupling” of the global economy into Chinese and Western portions has been gathering pace for some time. And the biggest drama before Ukraine was a virus that froze supply chains and forced the world into hibernation.

And yet, at the beginning of 2022, many of us shared the assumptions of Keynes’s Londoner. We ordered exotic goods in the confident expectation that Amazon would deliver them to our doors the next day. We invested in emerging-market stocks, purchased Bitcoin, and chatted with people on the other side of the world via Zoom. Many of us dismissed Covid-19 as a temporary suspension of our global lifestyle. Vladimir Putin’s “projects and politics of militarism” seemed like diversions in the loonier regions of the Twittersphere. 

Now that we have been shaken awake, most of our attention is on the bloodshed in Ukraine, and rightly so. But just as World War I mattered for reasons beyond the slaughter of millions of human beings, this conflict could mark a lasting change in the way the world economy works — and the way we all live our lives, however far we are from the carnage in Eastern Europe. The “inevitable” integration of the world economy has slowed, and the various serpents in our paradise — from ethnic rivalries to angry autocracies to a generalized fury with the rich — are slithering where they will. 

That doesn’t mean that globalization is an unalloyed good. By its nature, economic liberalism exaggerates the downsides of capitalism as well as the upsides: Inequality increases, companies sever their local roots, losers fall further behind, and — without global regulations — environmental problems multiply. Yet liberalism has also dragged more than a billion people out of poverty in the past three decades and, in many cases, promoted political freedom along with economic freedom. The alternatives, historically speaking, have been wretched. Right now, the outcome that we have been sliding toward seems one in which an autocratic East gradually divides from — and then potentially accelerates past — a democratic but divided West. 

From this perspective, the answer to globalization’s woes isn’t to abandon economic liberalism, but to redesign it. And the coming weeks offer a golden opportunity to redesign the global economic order.

By any economic measure the West is significantly more powerful than the East, using the terms “West” and “East” to mean political alliances rather than just geographical regions. The U.S. and its allies account for 60% of global gross domestic product at current exchange rates; China, Russia and the autocracies amount to barely a third of that. And for the first time in years, the West is coming together rather than falling apart. This week, Joe Biden is traveling to Europe as the leader of the newly united and reinvigorated free world.

Free World

Share of global GDP by country and level of freedom based on political rights and civil liberties

Sources: IMF; Freedom House

Note: GDP figures are the latest available.

So far, for all his talk of uniting democracies, Biden has done little to highlight, let alone advance, the economic dimension of freedom. The question for Biden and the European leaders he will meet this week is simple: What sort of world do they want to build in the future? Ukraine could well mark the end of one great episode in human history. It could also be the time that the free world comes together and creates another, more united, more interconnected and more sustainable one than ever before. Seizing that opportunity will require an understanding of both economics and history.

The Way We Were

The end of the last global age was particularly brutal. Even once the slaughter had begun in Flanders, British shopkeepers, with stoic good humor, displayed signs as the war started that read “Business as usual during alterations to the map of Europe.” But it was not to be. The conflagration quickly halted trade, capital flows and migration. Governments interfered in the economy more deeply than ever before. When the guns finally fell silent in 1918 and peace was forced on Germany at Versailles (in the Carthaginian terms that Keynes decried so eloquently), the Bidens, Johnsons and Macrons of the time tried to restore the old world order of free trade and liberal harmony — and comprehensively failed. 

The new superpower, America, refused to become the defender of the faith that Great Britain had protected with such skill until 1913. A beggar-thy-neighbor policy of tariffs slowed the world economy and eventually produced the Great Depression, with global trade shrinking by more than half in 1928-1933. The serpents continued to slither: Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler exploited defeat and poverty to create aggressively anti-liberal regimes, the Soviet version of which lasted for seven decades. The situation for liberal economics was so dismal that, by the mid-1930s, Keynes himself had abandoned free-market liberalism as a lost cause and was campaigning for national self-sufficiency.  

Only after the Second World War did economic integration resume its advance — and then only on the Western half of the map. What most of us today think of as globalization only began in the 1980s, with the arrival of Thatcherism and Reaganism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reintegration of China into the world economy, and, in 1992, the creation of the European single market.

Yet once politicians got out of the way, globalization sped up, driven by technology and commerce. Young technology companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. took off while old technology companies such as Nokia Oyj, a Finnish rubber-boot and electronics maker that by 2010 was the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones, got a new lease on life. McDonald’s Corp. opened restaurants in Moscow’s Pushkin Square in January 1990 and just off Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in April 1992. As the new century dawned and an unknown “pro-Western” bureaucrat called Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, the daily volume of foreign-exchange transactions reached $15 trillion. 

More recently, as the attacks on globalization have mounted, economic integration has slowed and in some cases gone into reverse.

Shrinking Share

Trade’s share of global GDP peaked in 2008

Source: World Bank

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks a bigger and more definitive assault than the previous ones. 

That’s partly because the immediate rupture is so savage. The supply of basic commodities, from wheat to nickel to titanium to oil, has been disrupted. The West is doing everything it can to “cancel” Russia from the global economic system — sanctioning oligarchs, expelling Russian banks from the global financial plumbing, and preventing Russia’s central bank from accessing its reserves. There’s talk of throwing Russia out of the World Trade Organization. 

Even when they haven’t been forced to do so by law, Western companies are boycotting Russia and closing down their Russian operations. Russian consumers can no longer use Visa, MasterCard and American Express. The McDonald’s in Pushkin Square is closed — along with 850 other branches. Photos have appeared on social media of Russians standing in interminable queues for sugar and other basic foods or else fighting over remaining scraps, just as they did in the Soviet days. For its part, the Kremlin has hit back by blocking access to Facebook and threatening to imprison or fine anyone suspected of spreading “fake” news, thereby essentially closing down Western news organizations inside the country.

We Didn’t Mean It

The Western policymakers meeting this week will say they have no intention of closing down the global order. All this economic savagery is to punish Putin’s aggression precisely in order to restore the rules-based system that he is bent on destroying — and with it, the free flow of commerce and finance. In an ideal world, Putin would be toppled — the victim of his own delusions and paranoia — and the Russian people would sweep away the kleptocracy in the Kremlin. 

In this optimistic scenario, Putin’s humiliation would do more than bring Russia back to its senses. It would bring the West back as well. The U.S. would abandon its Trumpian isolationism while Europe would start taking its own defense seriously. The culture warriors on both sides of the Atlantic would simmer down, and the woke and unwoke alike would celebrate their collective belief in freedom and democracy. McDonald’s would be open again in Pushkin Square — and Keynes’s various serpents would slither out of the garden.  

There’s a chance this could happen. Putin wouldn’t be the first czar to fall because of a misjudged and mishandled war. Many of Russia’s most powerful people are seeing their mansions, yachts and private planes confiscated, all for an invasion they weren’t consulted about. Younger Russians, particularly in the big cities, are more liberal than their parents. Russian shoppers don’t want to return to the Soviet era.  

Meanwhile in the West, Ukraine has already prompted a great rethink. As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has proclaimed, we are at a Zeitenwende — a turning point. Under his leadership, pacifist Germany has already proposed a defense budget that’s larger than Russia’s. Meanwhile, Ukrainian immigrants are being welcomed by nations that only a few months ago were shunning foreigners, and, after a decade of slumber in Brussels, the momentum for integration is increasing.

The Power of Alliances

Military expenditure in 2019 U.S. dollars

Source: SIPRI

Note: Figures for China and Russia (1992-2012) are SIPRI estimates.

But this turning point can still lead in several directions. The chances of a regime change in the Kremlin remain slim, given Putin’s popularity and terror machine. Western Europe has heard pious words about integration and immigration before. And look at the West’s leaders! Joe Biden hardly conveys an image of world-changing dynamism; after his initial heroics, Olaf Scholz greeted Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s speech to the German parliament with pudding-like inertia; Emmanuel Macron is bent on winning an election while trying to look like Zelenskiy, in hoodie and stubble; while Boris Johnson has dared to compare the Ukrainian resistance to Brexit.  

As we wait for these giants to act, the facts on the ground are changing in economics as well as politics. In particular, the invasion of Ukraine is accelerating changes in both geopolitics and the capitalist mindset that are deeply inimical to globalization.

The changes in geopolitics come down to one word: China, whose rapid and seemingly inexorable rise is the central geopolitical fact of our time.  

The immediate question with China is how far it will support Putin in Ukraine. On the sidelines of the Winter Olympics in February, Xi and Putin signed a statement rejecting NATO expansion in Europe and American alliance-building in Asia and agreed that the promotion of democracy was a Western plot. China has still notably failed to participate in Western sanctions. But now that Putin’s triumph looks less assured, China’s support for him looks more conditional. A week ago, the mere rumor that Russia had asked for military assistance — a rumor that Beijing immediately denied — sparked the biggest drop in China’s stock market since 2008. On the same day, a Chinese think tanker, Hu Wei, posted a fascinating memorandum warning his country that the invasion of Ukraine is revitalizing the West, and that China needs to dump the burden that is Russia.

Regardless of whether China’s leader decides to ditch Putin, the invasion has surely sped up Xi’s medium-term imperative of “decoupling” — insulating his country from dependence on the West. Xi has spent much of his rule building a Sinocentric economic order through the Belt and Road Initiative. China has joined the 15-member Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and applied to join the 11-member Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a free-trade bloc that the U.S. first invented, then foolishly abandoned. 

For the “wolf pack” of young Chinese nationalists around Xi, the reaction to Ukraine is another powerful argument for self-sufficiency. China’s vast holdings of dollar assets now look like a liability given America’s willingness to confiscate Russia’s assets, especially if the regime were to think about invading Taiwan (where its claim that the island is culturally and legally part of China is frighteningly like Russia’s claims about the Ukraine).  

Some Americans are equally keen on decoupling, a sentiment that bridged Republicans and Democrats before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Biden may have dropped Trump’s Sinophobic rhetoric — there’s no more talk of “the China virus” — but he has kept in place most of the tariffs, export controls and investment regulations that he inherited, and added a few of his own. For many Americans, too, Ukraine has been a pre-Taiwan test case: They don’t want to end up relying on Taiwanese components that might suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke.  

So, absent any decisive action by the West, geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs: an Asian one with China at its heart and perhaps Russia as its energy supplier; an American-led bloc; and perhaps a third centered on the European Union, with the Europeans broadly sympathetic to the U.S. but nervous about the possible return of an America-First isolationist to the White House and irked by America’s approach to digital and media regulation. Other powers will vacillate between these two (or three) great blocs, much as they did during the Cold War. India may do what it has done so well over Ukraine and play both sides. Pakistan will lean toward China but not fully commit while India is in play. Saudi Arabia will exploit uncertainty over energy supplies to pursue brutality at home and Islamist policies abroad. And so on.  

The Bonfire of the Certainties 

Just as important as this geopolitical shift is the change in the capitalist mindset. If the current age of globalization was facilitated by politicians, it has been driven by businesspeople. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher didn’t decide that the components of an iPhone should come from 40 countries. Facebook wasn’t created by senior politicians — not even by Al Gore. Uber wasn’t an arm of the Department of Transportation. 

From a CEO’s viewpoint, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has done more than unleash Western embargoes and boost inflation. It is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years.  

In the great intellectual battle of the 1990s between Francis Fukuyama, who wrote “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992), and his Harvard teacher Samuel Huntington, who wrote “The Clash of Civilizations” (1996), CEOs have generally sided with Fukuyama. The view from the boardroom has been straightforward: Democracy won’t always win (China taught capitalists that quickly), but sensible economics usually will. Businesses could rely on a world in which countries would specialize in their comparative advantage. Commerce and free trade would bring people closer, as Fukuyama argued, rather than divide them, as Huntington warned — and businesses that ran themselves globally and wove the most cost-effective supply chains would prosper. 

Commercially speaking, this bet paid off spectacularly. Over the past 50 years multinationals have turned themselves from federations of national companies into truly integrated organizations that could take full advantage of global economies of scale and scope (and, of course, global loopholes in taxes and regulations). World trade in manufactured goods doubled in the 1990s and doubled again in the 2000s. Inflationary pressures have been kept low despite loose monetary policies. Even with a barrage of political disruptions — Trump’s tariffs, Brexit and so on — profits have remained high, as the cost of inputs (such as energy and labor) have been kept low.

Booming Trade

Merchandise exports doubled in the 1990s and again in the 2000s

Source: World Bank

Note: Indexed data. 1990 = 100

Now what might be called the Capitalist Grand Illusion is under assault in Kyiv — just as Norman Angell’s version was machine-gunned on the Western Front. All the dangers that used to appear at the bottom of a CEO’s morning briefing are slithering to the top. Militarism and cultural rivalries keep trumping economic logic. Putin invading Ukraine is merely one in a long list of economically self-harming decisions that vary from dynastic thuggishness (Saudi Arabia bombing Yemen and murdering journalists) to knee-jerk isolationism (Brexit). And these stupidities reinforce each other: Thus, the French are responding to Britain’s act of self-harm in leaving the EU by cutting their companies off from the continent’s main source of cheap capital in the City of London.

Against such persistent irrationalism, CEOs who used to build empires based on just-in-time production are now looking at just-in-case: adding inefficient production closer to home in case their foreign plants are cut off. The head of one of the world’s most powerful investment firms, with shares in almost every significant Western company, talked privately about “a tsunami of recalculations” on the weekend after Putin invaded Ukraine. The CEO of one of America’s most iconic multinationals admits that he is reexamining production across China. Every Western company is now wondering how exposed it is to political risk. Capitalists are all Huntingtonians now.

Nor is just fear changing the capitalist mindset. Greed is also acquiring an anti-global tint. CEOs are rationally asking how they can profit from what Keynes called “monopolies, restrictions and exclusions.” Now that governments are using national security as an excuse for national champions, businesspeople can choose from a plateau de fruits de mer of opportunities for rent-seeking and competition-crushing in industries like energy, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. That erstwhile Thatcherite Narendra Modi now echoes Mahatma Gandhi’s calls for self-sufficiency and imposes tariffs for local industries. Japan’s new prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has created the job of economic-security minister with a mandate to intervene in cybersecurity, chipmaking and much else besides. Macron has declared that “The state will need to take in hand several aspects of the energy sector.” Biden used his State of the Union speech on March 1 to promise that “Everything from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the steel on highway guardrails is made in America from beginning to end. All of it.” Both sides of Congress applauded.  

So the second age of globalization is fading fast. Unless something is done quickly and decisively, the world will divide into hostile camps, regardless of what happens in Ukraine. And this divided world will not suit the West. Look at the resolution passed by the United Nations General Assembly to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The most trumpeted figure is that only 40 countries did not vote for this (35 abstained, and five voted against it), compared with 141 countries who voted in favor. But those 40 countries, which include India and China, account for the majority of the world’s population.

These deeper changes in capitalism and geopolitics increase the stakes this week. Joe Biden and his European interlocutors have a lot on their plate with Putin’s escalating terror and nuclear-tinged threats, but they also need to address the wider economic ramifications of the war sooner rather than later. Do nothing and the drift toward protectionism will inevitably accelerate. The Chinese, for one, seem pretty sure that the West lacks the collective character to keep up its current stance as energy prices soar and compassion fatigue sets in. But we still have time to shape a very different future: one in which global wealth is increased and the Western alliance bolstered.

Despite his less-than-stellar presidency thus far, Biden comes to Europe with several big advantages. The first is that the West is more united and determined than it has been for decades. The sense of unity behind liberal values is no longer confined to the metropolitan elite. One of the great problems with modern liberalism for the past few decades has been its lack of a gripping narrative and a compelling cast of heroes and villains. Globalists have talked a bloodless language of “comparative advantage” and “non-tariff barriers,” while populists have talked about sneering elites and hidden conspiracies. Now Putin has inadvertently reversed all that. Freedom is the creed of heroes such as Zelenskiy; anti-liberalism is the creed of monsters who drop bombs on children.

The second is Biden’s long experience. George H. W. Bush, another long-serving vice president who stumbled into the big job, was much mocked for his lack of “the vision thing.” Yet his handling of the last days of the Soviet Empire in 1989 was exemplary: He provided Mikhail Gorbachev with gentle encouragement, resisted premature triumphalism, and worked with allies to lay the foundations of a new global order. So far, Biden’s handling of the Ukraine invasion has been similarly nuanced. He has drawn a line between supplying the resistance and becoming involved in the war (or giving others an excuse to claim the U.S. is involved). And he has put firm pressure on China to stay out of the conflict. 

Biden needs to go further in the coming weeks. He needs to reinforce the Western alliance so that it can withstand the potential storms to come. The American president has spent his first year in office talking about reengaging America with the world after Trump’s isolationism, and forming an alliance of democracies, but so far he has failed to give his allies the economic cement to bind together these alliances — especially free-trade pacts. His commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, was dispatched to Asia last year to talk about inviting countries like Singapore and Malaysia into vague things like “frameworks,” when all America’s Asian allies really want is a solid trade deal — in fact, one like the CPTPP deal that Trump jettisoned. 

Biden needs to recognize that expanding economic interdependence among his allies is a geostrategic imperative. He should offer Europe a comprehensive free-trade deal to bind the West together; it could be a slightly remolded version of the rejected Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, based on regulatory convergence (under which a product safe to sell in the EU is safe to sell in the U.S., and vice versa). He should also join CPTPP.

It is not difficult to imagine Europe or democratic Asia signing up for these sorts of pacts, given the shock of Putin’s aggression and their fear of China. Biden’s problem is at home. Why should the Democratic left accept this? Because, Biden should say, Ukraine, China and America’s security matter more than union votes. The U.S. president’s first job is to protect his country. Biden is old enough to remember that the United States won the last Cold War peacefully because it united the free world behind it. This is the way to win the next one peacefully as well. Put together the free world’s economic potential — the EU, North America, Latin America’s biggest economies and the democracies of Asia — and it can do more than see off the autocracies; it can pull them toward freedom. 

Biden should pursue a two-stage strategy: First, deepen economic integration among like-minded nations; but leave the door open to autocracies if they become more flexible. China could be wooed toward freedom. But nothing will improve unless Biden first glues together the free world. That means freer trade — and the sooner he tells his party that, the better. 

Biden can soften that message at home by adding a political dimension to his trade agenda. “Build back better” applies to globalization, too. A global new deal should certainly include a focus on making multinational companies pay their taxes, and the environment should be to the fore. But Biden should also talk about the true cost of protectionism in terms of higher prices, worse products and less innovation. Spreading economic freedom remains the best guarantor of both global and American prosperity: global prosperity because, for all its travails, the last 50 years of globalization have enriched most of the world; and American prosperity because his country’s prosperity depends on his country’s security.

Constructing such a “new world order” will be laborious work. But the alternative is a division of the world into hostile economic and political blocs that comes straight out of the 1930s. Biden, Johnson, Scholz and Macron should think hard about how history will judge them. Do they want to be compared to the policymakers in the aftermath of World War I, who stood by impassively as the world fragmented and monsters seized the reins of power? Or would they rather be compared to their peers after World War II, policymakers who built a much more stable and interconnected world?

Nobody would understand the significance of that choice better than Keynes. He first came to prominence as a decrier of the Treaty of Versailles — and the know-nothing statesmen of the time. But at the end of World War II he participated in something that was much more constructive. 

In 1944, with the defeat of Hitler seemingly inevitable, President Franklin Roosevelt invited the Allied powers to a conference to design the postwar order — under the aegis of Keynes and, on the American side, the economist Harry Dexter White.

The elderly Keynes had heart problems and a strong dislike for American summers — “one sweats all day and the dirt sticks to one’s face” — so he was delighted that the conference was held in New Hampshire rather than the infernal federal capital. The Mount Washington Hotel in the White Mountains was selected partly for the climate, but also because it had all the amenities of civilized life — its own power plant, post office, golf course, church, beauty parlor, barber shop, bowling alley and cinema.

This was the setting for the most consequential conference since the disastrous Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Keynes, no longer a protectionist, played a leading role in designing the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the infrastructure of the postwar Western order of stable exchange rates. He helped persuade the U.S. to lead the world rather than retreating into itself. He helped create the America of the Marshall Plan. This Bretton Woods settlement created the regime that eventually won the Cold War and laid the foundations for the second age of globalization.

At the closing banquet on July 22, the great man was greeted with a standing ovation. Within two years he was dead — but the world that he did so much to create lived on.

That world does not need to die in the streets of Kyiv. But it is on course to do so, unless the leaders meeting this week seize the moment to create something better. 

— With assistance by Lara Williams

Ad un mese dall’invasione dell’Ucraina, se guardiamo ai mercati finanziari internazionali i dati forti che richiedono attenzione sono due:

1. il generale rialzo dei rendimenti obbligazionari, ancora più ampio sulle scadenze a breve termine (2 anni) rispetto a quello che ha interessato le scadenze lunghe (10 anni e 30 anni)

2. il rafforzamento del dollaro USA, che ha rotto la soglia psicologica di 1,1000 contro euro

Nella nostra strategia di portafoglio, e quindi nei nostri portafogli modello, queste due posizioni sono ben rappresentate, sia per varietà sia per percentuale.

Nel mese di guerra in Ucraina, invece, per quello che riguarda le Borse c’è ben poco di rilevante da segnalare: elevata volatilità, fortissimo aumento dei rischi, ma alla fine i livelli sono solo di poco più bassi di quelli di un mese fa. Ma ci sarà tempo, ovviamente.

Come abbiamo spiegato in settimana, nel nostro The Morning Brief, oggi le Borse hanno perso ogni importanza, nel quadro dei mercati finanziari internazionali: non possono più muovere in modo autonomo, e devono semplicemente riflettere quello che accade in altri comparti del mercato internazionale. E quindi, almeno in questa fase, non perdiamoci altro tempo.

Ritornando ai tassi ed alle valute, è inevitabile scrivere di Banche Centrali: anche le Banche Centrali, come le Borse, hanno perso ogni autonomia di movimento. Non possono più decidere nulla.

Possono soltanto parlare: ed infatti parlano, e parlano moltissimo. Parlano per persuadere, convincere, fare vedere quello che non esiste. Esattamente come fecero, fino a sei mesi fa, con la “inflazione transitoria”.

Oggi che cosa ha preso il posto della “inflazione transitoria”? Il tema di oggi si chiama “soft landing”, ed è quindi un “atterraggio morbido”, da intendersi come atterraggio morbido di una economia che (lo dice l’espressione medesima) soffre di un grave guasto.

L’economia che ancora nell’autunno scorso volava, quella che tutti (o quasi) descrivevano come “in grande salute”, e “protetta da ogni rischio” grazie alle “manovre di stimolo delle Banche Centrali”, oggi è costretta (ce lo dicono i banchieri centrali) ad atterrare. Un atterraggio forzato: la sola cosa che i banchieri centrali possono augurarsi, è che sia “soft”, ovvero “il meno doloroso possibile”.

Anche questa volta, finirà come per l’inflazione “transitoria”. Anche questa volta, i banchieri centrali stanno mentendo al pubblico?

Il Wall Street Journal, questa settimana, con i grafici che seguono e con il testo che leggete qui sotto, ha illustrato le grandi incertezze che pesano sullo scenario di “soft landing” che le Banche Centrali oggi promettono.

Soft Landings, Past and Future: The Fed points to historical episodes when it raised interest rates without causing a recession. Today inflation is higher and the job market tighter.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell explained this week what he and his colleagues hoped to accomplish with the interest-rate increases they initiated last week. “The economy achieves a soft landing, with inflation coming down and unemployment holding steady,” he told a conference of economists.

In 1965, 1984 and 1994, the Fed raised interest rates enough to cool an overheating economy without precipitating recession, he noted, adding it may have done the same in 2019 but for the Covid-19 pandemic.

Unfortunately, history isn’t on his side. Inflation is much further from the Fed’s objective and the labor market, by many measures, tighter than in previous soft landings, yet the Fed starts with real interest rates—nominal rates adjusted for inflation—much lower, in fact deeply negative. In other words, not only is the economy already traveling above the speed limit, the Fed has the gas pedal pressed to the floor. The odds are that getting inflation back to the Fed’s 2% target will require much higher interest rates and greater risk of recession than the Fed or markets now anticipate.

The biggest contrast with prior soft landings was that in the past, the Fed sought only to keep inflation from going up—not to actually push it down. Today, though, it starts with core inflation, which excludes food and energy, above 5% using the Fed’s preferred price index, more than 3 percentage points above target.

History and the Fed’s own models are pretty clear: When inflation is too high, pushing it down requires damping demand and pushing up unemployment so that workers and firms must settle for lower pay and prices. Yet the median projections released by Fed officials show no such thing: They anticipate core inflation falling to 4.1% at the end of this year, 2.6% next year, and 2.3% in 2024 while unemployment stays near a 50-year low of 3.5% to 3.6% for the entire period.

Questo nostro Post ha lo scopo di mettervi in guardia dal credere alla storia del “soft landing”: già oggi è possibile leggere, nei dati e nelle notizie, quale sarà lo sviluppo degli eventi nelle prossime settimane e mesi.

E lo sanno anche alla Federal Reserve, ed alla BCE, ovviamente: a differenza di Recce’d, però, la Federal Reserve e la BCE soffrono di un (grave) conflitto di interessi.

In teoria, Federal Reserve e BCE dovrebbero servire “gli interessi del pubblico”, ma nella realtà, come ci dimostrò Mario Draghi alla BCE e come ci dimostrano oggi Lagarde e Powell, le banche centrali sono istituzioni (oggi più che in passato) politiche, che fanno scelte politiche e quindi avvantaggiano e privilegiano alcune parti della società e dell’economia su altre parti.

Questa è la sola spiegazione che vi serve, per capire “come è possibile” che nel 2021 TUTTI i banchieri centrali si siano sbagliati sulla “inflazione transitoria”. Ed allo stesso tempo, per comprendere perché, oggi, vi vogliono “vendere” la storia del soft landing. Una storia che non poggia su alcun elemento concreto: è solo un sogno, una aspirazione.

E noi, investitori consapevoli, dobbiamo sempre ricordare: “hope is not a strategy”.

Il conflitto di interessi, del quale abbiamo fatto cenno solo poche righe qui sopra, è spiegato alla perfezione dall’articolo che vi offriamo qui sotto: nel quale si sottolinea che la Federal Reserve oggi NON FA neppure quello che lei stessa, la Federal Reserve, dice che bisognerebbe fare (e la medesima cosa deve essere detta della BCE). Come è possibile? Mentire sapendo di mentire?

Clive Crook

21 marzo 2022, 12:00 CET

Clive Crook is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering economics, finance and politics. A former chief Washington commentator for the Financial Times, he has been an editor for the Economist and the Atlantic. @clive_crook

The Federal Reserve embarked last week on its long-advertised monetary tightening: a quarter-point increase in interest rates, with the suggestion of six more by the end of the year, and a plan to run down its stock of government debt (details to follow). This was widely expected and essentially a non-event.

Much more interesting was the way Fed Chair Jerome Powell explained what the central bank was doing. This was downright puzzling, and it raises some questions about what comes next.

Inflation stands at a 40-year high and keeps exceeding the Fed’s projections. Its new forecasts show inflation at 4.3% at the end of this year, 1.7 percentage points higher than it projected three months ago. Yet the policy interest rate is projected to be only 1.9% at year’s end — an increase of just one percentage point over the previous projection, and still significantly below what most economists see as the “neutral rate” (neither adding to nor subtracting from demand) of 2.5%.

Powell therefore needed to say why policy was shifting so slowly, bearing in mind that inflation has already risen further and more persistently than the Fed expected and that the Russia sanctions shock will make things worse.

Here’s a good rationale: The interest-rate plan splits the difference between economists who want to keep rates close to zero to avoid tipping a fragile recovery into recession, and those who think the Fed has let inflation run out of control and want more forceful corrective action.

There’s much to be said for this middle course. The outlook is uncertain and the Fed has to contend with upside and downside risks. In addition, if the Russia shock is mostly on the supply side, as seems likely, monetary policy should mostly ignore it, for the same reason it was right to ignore the rise in inflation due to the supply-side part of the Covid shock. Central banks, according to the standard view, should “look through” temporary fluctuations in supply.

So the message might have been: Yes, demand is trending a little high, so tightening shouldn’t wait any longer. But let’s be careful not to overdo it.

Powell didn’t strike this balance. Asked about the downside risk, he said this:

[T]he probability of a recession within the next year is not particularly elevated. And why do I say that? Aggregate demand is currently strong, and most forecasters expect it to remain so. If you look at the labor market, also very strong. Conditions are tight, and payroll job growth is continuing at very high levels. Household and business balance sheets are strong. And so all signs are that this is a strong economy and, indeed, one that will be able to flourish, not to say withstand but certainly flourish, as well, in the face of less accommodative monetary policy.

Does this kind of economy really need another year of (admittedly diminishing) monetary stimulus — or “accommodation,” as Powell calls it? In effect, he is arguing against postponing tightening yet again, as though the view that it’s already been delayed too long isn’t worth mentioning. But this view is both widely held and increasingly plausible.

Powell was directly asked whether he believed the Fed had fallen “behind the curve.” The questioner reminded him that he’d told a Senate committee earlier this month that if the Fed had known earlier what it knows now about the path of the economy, it would have begun to tighten sooner. Powell answered that perfect hindsight isn’t much help in setting forward-looking policy. That’s true, but beside the point. If the Fed, knowing what it now knows, would have tightened sooner, then it has ground to make up, and it should be raising rates by half a percentage point or more, not a quarter of a point.

Economists who think the Fed has a lot of catching up to do are entitled to be puzzled. They heard the central bank say it agrees with their analysis but for some reason isn’t going to do what that analysis demands.

One wonders whether the Fed might have acted differently last week if it hadn’t spent so much time coaching markets to expect the gentlest possible start. That seems quite likely. And the possibility draws attention to a persistent problem with the Fed’s communications.

Its commentary and projections set policy expectations too firmly — expectations that the Fed then seems reluctant to disappoint. Reading the Fed’s so-called dot-plot of future interest rates, investors penciled in six more quarter-point rises by year’s end before Powell had stopped talking. What the dot-plot projections actually say is that the Fed’s policy makers are all over the place on what should happen to interest rates. The spread of estimates for the fourth-quarter policy rate ranges from 1.4% to 3.1%, and none of these numbers, I’m willing to bet, was offered with much conviction. It’s a huge mistake to let the median estimate — 1.9%, implying six more increases of 25 basis points — guide expectations as much as it does.

When the future is uncertain — and it’s rarely been as uncertain as now — why invite investors to make false assumptions, especially when that might limit the flexibility you’re likely to need? The Fed should take a good hard look at how it talks to the markets.

Durante la settimana, nel nostro The Morning Brief che è riservato ai Clienti, abbiamo in dettaglio esaminato le ricadute sulla strategia di investimento di questo stato di cose, molto complesso, ed estremamente incerto: in estrema sintesi, si tratta di sapere distinguere tra la verità e le menzogne. Non c’è qui lo spazio per una analisi di dettaglio, sulle singole posizioni dei nostri portafogli modello oppure sui singoli mercati finanziari. E tuttavia, abbiamo selezionato per voi un ottimo articolo, che segue qui sotto, nel quale si mettono in evidenza le principali implicazioni per i mercati finanziari, e per noi investitori. Più in basso, vi regaliamo alcune delle nostre conclusioni.

In Congressional testimony on March 2, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that “it is more likely than not” that the central bank “can achieve what we call a soft landing” in the economy. In other words, he believes that the Fed can raise interest rates enough to get raging inflation under control without forcing the economy into a recession. The odds that Powell can pull that off are getting longer by the day. 

History shows that when the central bank increases rates, a recession is almost assured. The Fed’s 12 rate-raising campaigns since the early 1950s resulted in 11 recessions, with the only exception coming in the early 1990s. What makes the Fed’s job extra hard now is that the inflation rate is so high. “To the extent that inflation comes in higher or is more persistently high than that, we would be prepared to move more aggressively by raising the federal funds rate by more than 25 basis points at a meeting or meetings,” Powell told lawmakers.

Increasing the odds of a recession this time is the Fed’s plan to reduce the almost $9 trillion of assets on its balance sheet after it stops buying U.S. Treasury and mortgage-backed securities this month. Those assets have risen $4.8 trillion since the pandemic commenced in early 2020. Powell said the reduction will be conducted “in a predictable manner,” largely through letting obligations it owns mature rather than outright sales. Nevertheless, this is a big reversal from the $140 billion in asset purchases it had been making each month to support the economy through the pandemic.

Another sure sign of a recession is an inversion of the so-called yield curve, which happens when the interest rate on the 2-year Treasury note rises above that on the 10-year note. An inversion makes it unprofitable for banks and other financial institutions that borrow through deposits and other short-term markets while lending at longer maturities. That restrains lending and thereby depresses business activity. At present, the 2-year yield is 1.53%, still lower than 1.84% 10-year note yield, but the spread has narrowed from 1.07 percentage points on Dec. 31 to just spx0.27 point.

The Fed is between a rock and a hard place. If it backs off tightening monetary policy, it risks persistent inflation, spurring buyers of goods to expect more of the same, so they buy ahead of need. The result is pressure on inventories and production capacity, leading to further price hikes. That confirms expectations and induces more pre-buying, generating a self-feeding inflationary spiral. Such was the case in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Major stock indexes are down anywhere from 8% to 15% this year. In recessions following significant credit restraint and yield curve inversions, the average drop in the S&P 500 Index has been 36% in recent decades. A similar plunge or greater is likely, given the extremely high level of equity prices as well as rampant speculation. It would take a 55% drop in the S&P 500 from here to bring the cyclically-adjusted price-to-earnings ratio back to 17, which is its average over the very long term. And bear markets usually overshoot on the downside just as bull markets tend to exceed rational extremes. That’s especially true when the previous bull market was saturated with speculation – just like the latest one.  

Robinhood Markets Inc., the darling of aggressive but green investors, plunged in the last half of 2021, and another 12% in January after reporting a $423 million loss in the fourth quarter. Bitcoin continues to be very volatile along with the overall stock market, typical of the opening stages of major bear markets. SPACs, with no sales or earnings and only the hope of merging with viable companies, are reminiscent of the dot-com companies of the late 1990s, which was followed by a Nasdaq plunge of 78%. Almost half of all startups with less than $10 million in annual revenue that went public last year through SPACs have failed or are expected to fall short of the 2021 revenue and earnings targets they provided to investors, according to a survey by The Wall Street Journal.

In this environment, investors should be extremely cautious. Stocks are still overpriced and vulnerable. Bond investors are worried about inflation. We may be entering a time when cash is king.

Dal punto di vista pratico, ed operativo, e quindi con riferimento alla gestione del portafoglio titoli, a nostro giudizio lo spunto più interessante sul tema di questo Post lo ha offerto in settimana l’articolo che segue, e che chiude il nostro Post.

In questo articolo, Mohamed El Erian spiega le ragioni (forti) per le quali le economie ed i mercati finanziari occidentali sono stati precipitati, dopo il 2020, in una situazione che per numerosi aspetti somiglia alla situazione nella quale si trovarono molti Paesi Emergenti nei decenni precedenti.

Vi suggeriamo di rifletterci: noi lo abbiamo già fatto (già nel 2020, e anche nel Blog) ed abbiamo quindi adeguato la nostra strategia di investimento, che appunto è basata sul fatto che il comportamento dei mercati finanziari, in Occidente, avrà sicuramente alcune somiglianze con quello dei Mercati Emergenti nei decenni precedenti.

Per moltissimi, sarà una enorme sorpresa. Non per i Clienti di Recce’d.

Mohamed A. El-Erian

22 marzo 2022, 10:30 CET

Judging from price movements on Monday, the Federal Reserve risks slipping further into a no-win interaction with markets that is more familiar to developing countries that lack policy credibility than to a systemically important central bank — let alone the world’s most powerful one. Absent a quick reestablishment of its inflation credential, something that the markets doubted again on Monday, the Fed would face even more of a no-win policy paradigm that would cause what, only a few months ago, was avoidable harm to livelihoods in the U.S. and beyond.

This unfortunate sequence is painfully familiar to some developing countries:

• First, through a misdiagnosis of the economic situation or policy inertia or both, the central bank falls behind inflation realities and erodes its inflation-fighting credibility.

• Second, swallowing its pride, the central bank acknowledges that inflation is too high, toughens up its policy narrative and embarks on the needed measures.

• Third, rather than be reassured by this (albeit late) change, markets run further away from the central bank and signal the need for even more aggressive policy measures.

• Fourth, the central bank finds itself in the dilemma of either risking a recession by validating the ever-more hawkish market pricing or seeking to minimize such damage, often unsuccessfully, by enabling high and potentially more destabilizing inflation to persist even longer.

With this sequence in mind, consider what happened on Monday, less than a week after the Fed’s top policy-making committee raised interest rates by 25 basis points and signaled further increases.

In a presentation to the National Association for Business Economics, Chair Jerome Powell tried to restore the Fed’s eroded inflation-fighting credibility by signaling that the central bank is willing to increase interest rates by 50 basis points in May, repeat that at other meetings and continue raising past the neutral level in a bid to meet its inflation objective. Yet nominal market yields, the yield curve and inflation breakevens were far from reassured. Instead, they moved further away from the Fed.

While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has amplified the Fed’s policy challenges, the hole it is in is of its own making, and that was illustrated by Monday’s developments.

Despite ample evidence to the contrary starting almost a year ago, the Fed stuck to its “transitory” characterization of inflation until the end of November — what I called months earlier one of the worse inflation calls in the history of the Fed. Even after it belatedly “retired” the word from its vocabulary, the Fed kept its foot on the accelerator of policy stimulus. To illustrate the extent to which its policies remained misaligned, it was still injecting liquidity through its asset purchases earlier this month, including the week in which the February reading for U.S. inflation came at 7.9%.

For many months, I have been arguing that the Fed should come clean on why it got the inflation call so wrong, explain how it has improved its understanding and forecasting of the current inflation dynamics, immediately stop its liquidity injections and start its interest rate hiking cycle. The idea was to ease off the accelerator and start tapping the brakes softly instead of having to do what the market is asking for now and Chair Powell acknowledged on Monday: Having to hit the brakes a lot harder.

That was then. What about now? Is there still an optimal policy response for the Fed?

I worry that, being so late and having lost so much credibility, the Fed is far away from the policy world of “first bests.” Rather than having a way to contain inflationary expectations, cause no undue damage to the economy and meet its dual objective, the Fed is increasingly being forced to consider what is the least bad policy mistake it wishes to be remembered for: meeting its inflation target by causing a recession, or allowing high and potentially destabilizing inflation to persist well into 2023.

This awful trade-off is familiar to too many developing countries. And one of their typical reactions may also shed light on what may be tempting for the Fed: simply hope for an immaculate recovery — that is, some mix of consequential productivity gains, quick-healing supply chains, surging labor force participation and continued financial market resilience to pull the central bank out of the deep hole it has dug for itself.

Si tratta di una delle nostre linee guida irrinunciabili.

Una delle linee guida seguendo le quali sviluppiamo la nostra strategia di investimento per i nostri Clienti: tra realtà e fantasie, noi scegliamo sempre di guardare alla realtà, per quanto fastidiosa, dolorosa, sporca, e confusa.

Sarà sempre meglio, anche per i vostri soldi e per i vostri investimenti, dei disegnetti a colori che trovate sulle slides del promotore finanziario, del wealth manager, del private banker, ed anche della grande banca internazionale di investimento.

Perché sarà sempre lì, alla brutta, sporca e confusa realtà, che i mercati finanziari alla fine dovranno ritornare.

Ne scriviamo nuovamente oggi perché proprio in questo momento, mentre sui mercati finanziari si scrive e si parla di “crisi energetica” e prezzo del petrolio, di “soft landing” e di “cessate il fuoco”, nella realtà intorno ai mercati finanziari si sono messe in moto dinamiche ben più importanti.

Anche per noi investitori, è ben più importante seguire queste dinamiche, ed anticipare l’impatto di questi fattori, piuttosto che perdere tempo a vedere “dove ha chiuso ieri sera la Borsa”.

Per fornire ai lettori un esempio concreto, abbiamo scelto questa settimana un articolo del Wall Street Journal, articolo nel quale si riferisce dello stato delle cose per quello che riguarda i prodotti dell’agricoltura, le scorte alimentari e la produzione di fertilizzanti.

Il nostro suggerimento a tutti gli investitori, in questo momento, è di non illudersi guardando le figurine a colori sullo schermo dello smartphone oppure del pc: la realtà ha colori meno brillanti, ha contorni meno definiti, soffre di imperfezioni ed ha odori a volte sgradevoli, ma prevale sempre.

Come spiega benissimo questo articolo, la crisi alimentare del 2022 non si risolverà presto, e non è detto che si risolva per il meglio: in ogni caso, condizionerà le nostre vite (anche quelle di noi che viviamo nei Paesi Occidentali) e senza alcun dubbio condizionerà anche il comportamento dei mercati finanziari.

The symbolism of Ireland’s government telling its farmers to grow more crops because of wartime shortages should be lost on no one: it recalls Irish ministers in the 1940s ordering growers to plant more grain during the second world war.

This time round the programme, designed to replace imports from Russia and Ukraine, relies on cash rather than coercion. The rush across the EU to get more crops in the ground goes against the decades-long direction of European agricultural policy and subsidies.

Warnings of a global food crisis are not a drill. It’s not Covid-related general interruptions to trade that are causing soaring food prices and shortages. There was a false alarm along those lines early in the pandemic, when governments worried about shortages and export restrictions similar to those on personal protective equipment. In fact, the supply chains held up quite well.

The current episode looks more like the global food crisis in 2007 to 2008. Shocks didn’t emanate from the trading system but ended up there, with countries slamming on export controls to keep produce at home. Food prices have been rising sharply since the middle of last year, chased higher by energy costs — not mainly the diversion of crops to biofuels but the fossil-fuel intensity of modern agriculture, including the use of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.

The Ukraine war has disrupted output and exports of grain and fertiliser from two of the world’s biggest producers. There’s a historical irony here: Stalin’s insistence that Ukraine keep exporting grain in the early 1930s to pay for imports of machinery to industrialise the Soviet Union worsened the Holodomor famine, in which more than 3mn Ukrainians starved to death.

The world has had 15 years since the previous food crisis to prepare its emergency response, including agreements to minimise export controls. It hasn’t done very well. The Global Trade Alert monitoring service reports food export curbs more or less doubling since the middle of 2021. By now there’s another story every few days of governments restricting food sales abroad.

It’s a global prisoners’ dilemma: it’s in everyone’s interest to keep exports flowing, but no one wants to run short by being the only country that does. During the crisis of 2007 to 2008, India and other countries panicked and banned exports of rice despite no evidence of global shortages, resulting in huge price rises. In response, governments created the Agricultural Market Information System (Amis) to promote transparency in production. That’s fine when there are no shortfalls, but doesn’t guarantee co-operative policy reactions if there are.

Despite discussions at the World Trade Organization, there are no binding agreements between governments to eschew food export restrictions. Export bans are illegal under WTO law, but cases would almost certainly fail under the exception for temporary restrictions “to prevent or relieve critical shortages of foodstuffs or other products”, a loophole you could drive a fleet of combine harvesters through.

Governments can try stimulating output in the short term, as Ireland and the EU are doing. The US will do the same, though it’s already pumping out huge production-distorting handouts to compensate farmers for retaliation from Donald Trump’s absurd trade war with China, and US wheat is often already too expensive to compete globally.

One-off support schemes to turn unused land back to growing basic crops are worth trying if they don’t get baked into permanent production-distorting subsidies. But they should represent only a temporary reversal of the sensible longer-term direction of encouraging farmers to go up the value chain. (The EU is actually a net exporter of food, including selling wheat abroad, but it’s disproportionately high-end stuff: Brussels could put on export restrictions to keep its food at home, but even Europeans can’t live on Gorgonzola and champagne alone.)

In any case, the increase in supply is not likely to be dramatic. It’s not generally high-quality productive land that farmers have allowed to go fallow. And time is short: Ireland’s farmers had better get a move on before the barley planting season ends in a few weeks. Digging for victory isn’t a major short-term solution. More helpful would be cutting tariffs to ensure that what grain there is ends up where it’s needed, backed up with rapid aid disbursements to developing countries to give them more purchasing power. Australia, where the government is handing out export credits to wheat exporters, has surpluses to sell, as does India. For both substantive and signalling reasons, the EU should quickly push through the preferential trade deals with Australia and New Zealand once the French presidential election is done and Emmanuel Macron doesn’t have to strike agricultural protectionist poses any more. As well as Australia’s wheat, New Zealand’s fruit and vegetables, grown in the southern hemisphere summer, will be welcome when the northern winter comes.

Even during food crises there’s generally enough to eat in the world as a whole, but it’s in the wrong places. You can try producing more, or you can move it to the right ones. In the short term, the second of those may be politically harder but it’s more likely to be effective. alan.beattie@ft.com