Anyone hoping for a positive December global market report from Michael Every will be sorely disappointed.
Rabobank's Head of Financial Markets Research Asia-Pacific is known for his "doom and gloom" predictions whenever he catches up with The Country's Jamie Mackay, and today was no exception.
"What you're seeing now in the past couple of weeks, maybe even the past couple of months, is suddenly this rather delusional belief on the part of markets - or at least the bond market which I spend a lot of my time looking at - saying that everything is now suddenly OK and the world is sorted out.
According to Every, 2020 was shaping up to be a "pretty rocky ride for most of us in most respects".
Every insisted he wasn't an alarmist and that he was happy to report on good news, but he believed people needed to know the "unvarnished truth".
"I just try and get down to brass tacks and say what's really happening ... it's not always sugary and sweet. I don't write the headlines I just try and report what I see".
Although both world equity markets and commodity prices were high at the moment, it was due to "global markets in general have been living in la-la land for a very, very long time" said Every.
"The cost of borrowing is constantly being pushed down by all the big global central banks, which by the way, is a reflection of just how bad things actually are".
Every said so called "alarmists, like myself" had predicted at the beginning of 2019 that banks, like the Reserve Bank in New Zealand, "would be lowering rates rather than increasing rates because things were not going well on the ground. That's exactly what's happened".
Rabobank's Head of Financial Markets Research Asia-Pacific, Michael Every. Photo / Supplied
"The mathematical function of that is to push stock markets up. Actual corporate earnings in many key markets are actually starting to decline and the fundamentals that should be driving the market are really not good.
"But provided that those interest rates keep going down and provided that the biggest central banks, particularly in America, are doing policies similar to what we call QE, Quantitative Easing, which is just literally throwing money in to the market ... that money has to flow somewhere and it flows into stock prices and to a degree, also into commodity prices".
"So there is an answer for it, but the answer is not that things are doing well, its that things are doing so badly that the central banks are literally throwing away free money".
Listen below:
Although 2020 was going to a be a "rocky year for global growth full stop", there was good news for homeowners with lower interest rates on mortgages.
Every insisted it didn't have to be all bad news for New Zealand either.
"I'm not saying that Kiwi exports into China go off of a cliff in 2020 ... I'm talking about the big global picture, what's going to happen in the US, what's going to happen in Europe, what's going to happen in the UK, what's going to happen in China to a degree, where we expect growth to continue to get lower and lower and lower and lower and lower.
"Fortunately New Zealand is a small enough, niche enough exporter and China is a large enough country. It could well be that for those Kiwi exporters they can shrug all this off and they can be the silver lining in what is likely to be a very, very cloudy year.
"So that is possible. But I'm not going to try and sell a message that [in] 2020 everything will be right and that there's nothing but the usual sunshine and roses ahead".
Also in today's interview: Every explains why China's prosperity could actually be an "absolute mirage".
