All equity markets from Europe to Wall Street to Asia have corrected between 2-4 percent on back of escalation of the trade war between the United States and China. After US increased tariffs on Chinese imports, China has retaliated and levied tariffs on US goods worth $ 60 billion.
The US has also banned six Chinese, one Pakistani, and five UAE firms from exporting US tech goods.
To talk about the impact of the trade war on global and domestic equities and whether this offers a buying opportunity, CNBC-TV18 spoke with James Glassman, senior economist, JP Morgan, Arvind Sanger, managing partner, Geosphere Capital Management, and Michael Every of Rabobank.
Glassman does not expect a fall in EPSs, growth for both corporate earnings and economy across the world because of the tariff war. He said: “This is exactly where we were a year ago when the first round of tariffs were imposed. The economic impact of these things is really negligible because they are offsetting things going on — the Chinese currency was weaker that tends to offset tariffs when it comes to selling into US markets. I think the Chinese have put in a lot of stimulus and the US had stimulus in place, it’s just not visible. I think the big problem for equity market is we are at very high value.”
Glassman added: “The markets don’t like this kind of uncertainty and we know there is going to be some kind of resolution some time but this is not helpful.”
Talking about weakness in Indian market, Sanger said there are three factors in play. First is the election uncertainty, the second is global risk-off due to flaring trade tensions and the third factor is the economic data from India is worrying in terms of signs of a slowdown and not so much the earnings.
“You are seeing consumer sales falling on the back of disastrous numbers in terms of auto sales and there is broad-based weakness in India. I am not sure of what all the factors are that is driving it but continued stresses in NBFC market cannot be helping. The broader economy is showing signs of stress,” said Sanger.
When asked if the fall in global equities presented a buying opportunity, Glassman said it is not as much a buying opportunity as it was earlier because we are still relatively high. "I think it would have to go down much more before it may look like a good buying opportunity", Glassman said.
Sanger said there is a big sell off both in some front line names and some midcap high quality names in India and so the opportunities are broad but one cannot pin it down to a single sector or area.
“We continue to look at bottom-up opportunities,” he said, adding, "Clearly there are stresses in the economy. So I would not rush into buying auto or two-wheeler names. We are not fans of companies in the consumer space because they still have high multiples but there is some value emerging in select NBFC and industrial names."
It is likely that this bout of weakness in India will pass and the economy will be back on, said Sanger.
Every said that the trade war between the US and China is bad for both the sides, much more for the Chinese side because they face rapid hollowing out of industry as companies flood into Vietnam, Indonesia, India and away from China that seems to be almost inevitable, the supply chains are going to be smashed and financial markets are going to be extremely volatile.
