Talking Heads – ¿Tensiones en 2025?

This is an edited transcript of the Talking Heads podcast episode 2025: How far can they go?

Andrew Craig: Hello and welcome to this first BNP Paribas Asset Management Talking Heads podcast for 2025. And we’ll start by extending our very best wishes for this new year to all our listeners everywhere. Talking Heads will bring you in-depth insights and analysis on the topics that really matter to investors. In this episode, we’ll be discussing three of the questions that would be among those at the front of investors’ minds as we start this new year. I’m Andy Craig, Co-head of the Investment Insight Centre, and I’m joined today by Daniel Morris, my Co-head and our Chief Global Strategist. Welcome, Daniel, and a happy New Year to you.

Daniel Morris: Thanks very much, Andy. Likewise.

AC: So, let’s start. If we cast our minds back, we’ll recall that the US equity markets rallied quite strongly immediately following Trump and the Republican Party’s victory. But then we saw a sharp selloff in the last part of December. Can you talk us through what happened? Do you think that the initial investor enthusiasm was misplaced?

DM: We certainly didn’t get to any kind of Santa Claus rally. A lot of investors were surprised by the selloff that we had at the end of December. If we think about what the drivers were, it takes us back to what happened with US Treasury yields. And we need to recall that in that initial rally for US equities, the assumption was we’re going to have higher growth in the year or so ahead and higher inflation and all of that should be positive for profits for US companies at least. But alongside that, you would anticipate likely higher Treasury yields to reflect that stronger growth, higher inflation and a US Federal Reserve that is less eager to cut policy rates. Now, initially, we didn’t see that much of a reaction in the US, but as we moved into December, we started to see a bigger move up in US Treasury yields. That has a negative impact on equity prices. If you look at the reaction of the different US equity indices, in particular the NASDAQ and Russell 2000, which are more sensitive to US interest rates, they’re the ones that sold off the most. So that leads us to the conclusion that what we had initially was optimism about growth, subsequently pulling back again a bit because of interest rates. So, it’s going to be that back and forth, that tug of war between the outlook for interest rates and inflation and growth.

AC: Well, that brings us to the broader question about the outlook for bond yields. What do you think fixed income investors have to look forward to in 2025?

DM: Well, we’re all reassessing what the US Federal Reserve is going to do. As a result, you’re probably a little bit less optimistic about prospective returns for at least US fixed income. Yields may not decline. They could conceivably rise or more likely than not stay within a higher range that we than we’ve had in a long time. If you look at corporate bonds, where you’re going to get an additional spread over that base Treasury yield, [that] arguably looks attractive if we think about investment-grade in particular where there should be less risk than you have in high yield.

Similar to the equity market, there’s just a significant degree of uncertainty about what exactly is going to happen. On one hand, if you have a significant increase in tariffs imposed by the US, that would have an impact on inflation, on growth. At the same time, we wonder about how immigration policies will change in the US and the impact there on labour supply and therefore wages. Finally, we also know there’s going to be a rewrite of US tax legislation and the impact on the US budget deficit. We simply not only don’t know what Trump is going to do. It’s difficult to assess the impact on Treasury yields.

AC: How do you see [the] prospects for other asset classes?

DM: Well, we are currently more optimistic about the outlook for US equities [in] our multi-asset portfolios. If we think about the prospects for other markets, we’re neutral, we’re not underweight. If we start with Europe, expectations for European equities had already been trending downward as investors took into account what seem to be ever weakening growth prospects. And now you have the risks to tariffs. We look at Japan. One of the impacts of Trump’s election has been a stronger dollar. A weaker yen generally tends to correlate with outperformance of Japanese equities.

Finally, for emerging markets and, specifically, China, the dollar really comes into play here. Generally, investors look at earnings for emerging markets in dollar terms because that’s more or less what they’re likely to receive, or at least if you’re a US-based investor. If we look at local currency earnings expectations, we actually see that rising. So, if we take China as an example, in local currency terms, earnings estimates for the MSI China index are rising, but because of the depreciation of the yuan, in dollar terms, [they] seem to be falling. Emerging markets, as always, is going to take some differentiation between the different markets. The story is not universally negative by any means.

Having to take into account the currency risk, the one other area where we’re optimistic for the outlook is gold. There are two arguments to support a positive investment case for gold today. On one hand, we saw quite strong returns in 2024, driven by worries about inflation, geopolitical risk, also purchases by many central banks of gold as a diversifier pf their holdings away from US Treasuries. We think that trend likely will continue. You can imagine if Treasury yields did increase significantly, that would not only be bad for fixed income prices, but also for equity prices. Gold might be one of the few asset classes to hold up.

AC: Daniel, thank you very much for joining me. We’ll be keeping our listeners updated on developments in the coming weeks and months. That’s it for this week’s episode of Talking Heads. If you’d like to learn more about our investment insights, please reach out to your BNP Paribas Asset Management contact or check out Viewpoint, our website for investment insights at Viewpoint dot BNP Paribas hyphen am.com. You’ve been listening to the BNP Paribas Asset Management Talking Heads podcast with me, Andy Craig, and Daniel Morris, Chief Market Strategist. Please do join us next week. Until then, take care.