US

A few weeks ago, JP Morgan skipped a call on one of its $1,000 par preference shares (“US Prefs”). The perpetual notes had a coupon of 6.75% payable until Jan’24, with a subsequent reset of 3-month SOFR + 404bps. Post the non-call, the coupon changed to 9.35% and will continue to reset every 3 months.

Yesterday was an eventful day for markets. We started off with inflation data in Europe, followed by an earnings release by New York Community Bank that showed large provisions in their commercial real estate loan book, before moving onto the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting

The long-awaited Personal Income and Outlays report for December was released last Friday. This piece produced by the U.S.’ Bureau of Economic Analysis contains information about personal income, savings rates and very importantly the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge of the economy.

The worsening US consumer credit data has largely fallen under radar. A few weeks ago, November 2023 data came in at $23.8bn representing a substantial increase from October’s $5.77bn and September’s $10.9bn.

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller gave a speech on November 28 titled: “Something Appears to Be Giving”, where he laid out the reasons why he is becoming more confident of the Fed’s ability to bring inflation down to its 2% target. 

December’s CPI inflation report showed numbers slightly ahead of consensus in the US. On a month-on-month basis, headline CPI came at 0.3% compared to a Bloomberg consensus of 0.2%, whereas core CPI figures were in line with said consensus at 0.3%.

We recently highlighted in our 2024 outlook our expectations of significant inflows into fixed income to be an important technical driver of performance in the year ahead.

The solid end to 2023 for financial markets has influenced a positive start to 2024.

The ECB's annual SREP results revealed a resilient European banking sector. Jakub Lichwa discusses that despite facing headwinds in 2023, the overall scores for 106 institutions remained steady at 2.6, with 71% of these institutions maintaining their scores, while 15% showed improvement.

Following October’s encouraging US CPI report and the subsequent comments from Federal Reserve officials, financial markets now anticipate that the Fed has completed its rate hiking cycle having reached terminal rates.

After a horrible year for financial markets in 2022, the macro-outlook for 2023 had a lot of consensus views, with most predicting a much better year ahead, helped by supportive rate cuts from central banks and positive returns from both government bonds and credit.  

The cuts are coming as the cycle of interest-rate hikes ends. In his latest blog, George Curtis discusses how falling inflation, weaker job reports, and signs of a European recession are reshaping expectations for interest rates.