Geopolitical clashes, not economic cycles, now drive market volatility: Viktor Shvets

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

«We exited a lot of the risk to outside the system, outside economic systems, I should add. So, in other words, it is much more in the politics, in polarisation, in geopolitics,» says Viktor Shvets, Macquarie Capital.

Nikunj Dalmia: Let me start with a very basic question. What is your view of the world given that there are so many permutations and combinations which are there. US interest rates are likely to go down. China is stimulating their economy. There is a problem in Middle East and yet India seems to be slowing down. So, there are a lot of trends within trends when it comes to the global setup.
Viktor Shvets: Well, my view of the world has not changed that much over the last four or five years. Effectively, the way I look at the world as in a twilight. We no longer have recessions. We no longer have recoveries. There is nothing to recover from. We live in a twilight somewhere between recessions and growth. Global growth rates are getting shallower and IMF is correctly highlighting that we are growing 50, 100 basis points less than we used to. But at the same time, we do not have the bad things. We do not have spikes in bankruptcies. We do not have spikes in bad debts.

So, in other words, my view over the last several years was that we have largely eliminated economic and capital market cycles. Now, do we pay a price for doing it? Of course, we do. One of the things is accumulation of inefficiencies, much shallower growth rates, much more volatile neutral rates, that is part of the reason why central banks