If you had thrown a dart at a global stock market dartboard and hit the S&P 500 in January 2017, you'd be up 17 percent and yet "you'd be unlucky," said Jeffrey Gundlach, the CEO of DoubleLine Capital, speaking to advisors yesterday at the annual Schwab Impact conference.
The perception of a synchronized global expansion is an accurate one, he said, and many countries can claim they have better economies and equity markets than America—at least for now. Growth around the world isn't just expanding, "it's accelerating," Gundlach said.
His best investment idea at present is emerging market equities, particularly India’s. But he raised a number of concerns about trends surfacing in the developed markets that had caught advisors' attention.
Even Europe, often seen as the sick man of the global economy, is today posting strong manufacturing and retail sales gains. Germany's main business climate index, created in the early 1990s, is setting all-time records.
Yet the European Central Bank is maintaining negative interest rates while employing quantitative easing strategies more than eight years after the financial crisis ended.
It is particularly strange because the Fed is going in exactly the opposite direction, pursuing a "double-barreled" policy of quantitative tightening (QT) while raising interest rates. Gundlach described this central bank divergence as "kind of weird."
A few advisors in the room wondered, however, if the blatant lack of coordination between the world's two largest central banks might set them on a collision course and produce something far worse.
ECB chief Mario Draghi has said he plans to pursue his aggressively dovish policy until September 2018 and indicated that QE will remain in effect longer than that. Things could change if, as expected, the next ECB president is German.
Almost all economic indicators are "flashing positive," and there is "very little evidence" of a recession in the next six months. Yet Gundlach said all that can change very quickly.
One of his favorite recession indicators is the spread between junk bonds and Treasurys, which typically widens sharply in the months before a recession begins. Though these spreads have widened marginally in recent weeks, the moves are hardly significant enough to draw conclusions.
The general consensus among other investors is that U.S. and European junk bonds have become severely overvalued as yield-starved global investors bid up prices. Other recession indicators include the shape of the yield curve and commodity prices.
Gundlach pointed to several signals a global bubble could be percolating. A relative recently told his 86-year-old mother to sell all her assets and buy Bitcoin.