In 1990, then-Treasurer Paul Keating famously said that the country's economic downturn was the “recession that Australia had to have.”
Although Keating was responding to a poor GDP print and doing his best to control the narrative, at the start of the rate hiking cycle in mid-2022 most in the market spoke of an impending recession with almost as much certainty. As it stands today, said recession is yet to materialise.
So, what happened? And perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for investors?
In explaining why a recession hasn’t occurred, Sebastian Mullins, Head of Multi-Asset, Australia at Schroders points out that both the Australian and US governments pumped money into their respective economies—something we hadn't seen in a long time.
“During the GFC, you had targeted programs to bail out banks and stimulate the economy, but on average, you had a very, very loose monetary policy and very tight fiscal policy to preserve balance sheets – i.e. improve the fundamentals of both corporate and government balance sheets”, says Mullins.
“This time around, it's the reverse. We're hiking rates but the government's stimulating aggressively. So that has offset quite a bit of it”, says Mullins.
Regarding America, where most of the recession indicators have been flashing red, Mullins adds that the US went into the current downturn un-levered – at least compared to previous episodes.
“If you think about what the pillars of the economy are, you have the consumer, you have corporates, and you have the government”, notes Mullins.
The US consumer de-levered after the GFC, reducing their amount of debt to GDP, as did corporations. “You'd expect higher interest rates to crack corporates”, says Mullins, but that hasn’t happened.
And while the government has been hurt by higher rates due to the bigger interest payments on its debt pile, “If the two pillars of the private economy are fine and the corporates are all fine, then there's no recession”, says Mullins.
Great, no recession. What about inflation?
So, how are you investing?