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John P. Bryson

Hello and welcome to the Portfolio Intelligence Podcast. Today is April 10th, 2025, and I'm your host, John Bryson, head of Investment Consulting and education savings at wait for It. Manulife John Hancock Investment Management. That's right. We've rebranded here at John Hancock for the last 20 years John Hancock, we've been a proud member of the Manulife organization. Rebranding reflects our commitment to leverage the global strength and scale of Manulife while continuing to deliver the exceptional service and investment options advisors and their clients have come to expect from us. As Manulife John Hancock Investments, our clients benefit from our extensive resources and insight into global capital markets as one of the largest wealth and asset management companies in the world, with more than 875 billion in assets, serving 19 million investors across five continents.

As you know, our multi manager platform enables us to offer a broad investment capabilities ranging from fixed income to equities to alternatives to private assets delivered through a diverse suite of products, providing flexibility to tailored investment solutions based on our clients’ needs. But most importantly, we remain dedicated to providing exceptional service, partnering with advisors to help solve investment challenges, and offering award-winning practice management programs, and investment consulting services.

One of the services we provide is bringing great and timely insights to you. So I've invited Matt Miskin, our co Chief investment Strategist here at Manulife John Hancock Investments, to the podcast to talk about what's going on in the world today. Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Matthew D. Miskin

Thanks for having me, John.

John P. Bryson

You got it. Hey, besides the new brand, anything going on in the investment world, do you think we should talk about it?

Matthew D. Miskin

Yeah, a lot of … a lot of moving parts, a lot to talk about. And I'm happy to be here with you to discuss it.

John P. Bryson

Yeah. I'm going to jump right in and talk about tariffs. Like I said, it's April 10. The situation is fluid. But what is the latest?

Matthew D. Miskin

So, the latest is that we have seen a pause … a 90-day pause on retaliation of tariffs. There is still a lot of unknowns here. Policy is changing nearly daily. But what we've seen is that China tariffs are still very elevated. Those have not come down. But what we have seen is other countries have seen a reduction in tariffs all in because China is such or … is seeing such high tariffs.

The tariff rate as now, as of now is still very high in a historical context. So, with equity or just the market response to all this, so we have seen, you know, a drawdown of nearly 20% in the S&P 500. It then rose about 10%, on the news of a delay of the tariffs. And we are now, seeing a bit of choppiness here.

But so, a positive development and that there's a delay, there's some softening of the trade war. Yet, there is still this big unknown as it relates to China and how this evolves in the coming days, weeks and months.

John P. Bryson

That’s it will have to stay tuned with that. I know you're going to be putting out a lot of information on our website and LinkedIn to keep people posted. But let's continue the conversation. I want to talk about the impact that this can have on inflation because we know that's a big driver of investor behavior and expectations. What kind of impact do you foresee this, having short term, medium term, long term on inflation.

Matthew D. Miskin

So if the tariffs are set in stone, which that we would not think of it that way because, again, they can change on a daily basis ... and one thing that has been consistent is that they are moving around. But if they were set, the import of goods from China would go up significantly. This would be a cost borne at first at the company level, and then the company would then have to decide, do we change where we get our imports from?

They could potentially choose to move that, supply chain. It's a very expensive and time intensive, or it takes a while, to do that. So we do think that would be unlikely. They could pass that on to the consumer, or they could eat into the margin, basically. So if they have a higher input costs, they could see weaker margins or lower margins as of that.

Or they could see if the consumer will … will have a higher price. These are generally inflationary. But as I think about this, you got to step back and look at it across all markets and you got to think about inflation more broadly. It's almost like a Facebook relationship status. It's complicated. Because with oil prices falling and we just got actually a CPI report for March, it came in very benign.

Only 0.1% on core CPI. And year over year it was 2.8% on core. That's the lowest since 2021. Headline CPI actually dipped 0.1%. And so lower oil prices are happening. Broader commodity prices are down. That's helping. And then the biggest wildcard on inflation isn't actually about us buying stuff from other parts of the world.

It's … it's actually housing. Housing … and they call it shelter in the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation readings. Shelter made up about two thirds of inflation last year. It's about 40% of core inflation just as a starting point. And then it was so big because the housing prices haven't slowed much. In terms of its size of gains.

So that's been the biggest driver inflation. If housing prices slow either from elevated mortgage rates, which we're seeing the least affordable housing market in the country … country's history, which is what we are at today. Or greater supply hitting the market. And we're seeing that in some of those hotspots like Florida. We think housing prices slow.

So, we actually don't see this inflationary backdrop that the markets are as concerned about. It doesn't mean that they can't scare the bond market. It doesn't mean they can't keep the Fed on hold because they're going to be waiting, waiting to see if it shows up. But in our view, the broader inflation picture is actually more disinflationary because nearly two-thirds of inflation is services. What the tariffs are really hitting is goods. That's a third. And the other sides with again falling gas prices or commodities in general. That's likely not to cause a big spike in inflation.

John P. Bryson

That's really helpful. Especially the part about the housing impact and how we're seeing good numbers posted and hopefully that continues. Hey, so let's talk about the additional impact. What impact do you see the tariffs situation. You know, it's causing generally uncertainty. How is that uncertainty impacting corporate earnings? How do you … walk me through the trickle effect.

Matthew D. Miskin

All right. So there's a lot of moving parts on this one. And so one of the anecdotal stories we're hearing from companies right now is actually panic buying. So companies are seeing an increase in demand. We've been calling this a pull-through end demand. And this had been happening. What seemed to be for weeks ahead of this, really after the election.

People were buying either cars or goods that they knew are being assembled in other parts of the world, are being shipped here. But that actually was even accelerated, just recently because, you know, the tariffs became more of a real prospect. So you could see actually earnings hold up a bit better because all of a sudden people are buying more stuff to get ahead of the tariffs, which creates better earnings because there's their margins are actually they can potentially raise prices.

The tariffs haven't really been fully felt on on the margins yet. So there's that piece. But then overall what we're seeing is this volatility is probably going to stop or diminish economic activity because investors or businesses, consumers are pausing. They're not either making that investment like they would or they're not buying that thing like they would, or a business is … is holding off on building a new thing because they're not sure of what to expect in terms of policy.

So what we've seen is that the analyst community that covers earnings and that provides kind of … forecasts. They started the year thinking it was going to be 15% earnings growth for 2025. That's now down to 11%. But that was actually chopped down before even the tariffs were introduced. And so there has been no further rerating in earnings estimates in the last week or so.

In our view, that's still optimistic. 11% growth to us, it would be … it would be awesome. I'm not saying, you know, it'd be good for stocks, but it does look optimistic. And we have earnings season coming up here in a couple days, for Q1. And everyone's going to be basically at the edge of their seat listening to CEO, CFOs say, hey, here's our new guidance.

The problem is they're pulling their guidance. They're saying, we don't … we don't even want to know or sorry. We want to know, but we … we don't know where this is going. And we're not going to give you much insight. It still can give you, though. Enough of a tell. And let's think about it like poker where … where you can kind of see you.

Can you get to play, the person playing the cards. And I think you're going to hear analysts start to write down some of the earnings estimates. The valuations have gotten cheaper. That's good. That's a great starting point in stocks. But we still have to find out how much earnings are going to be coming down over the course of 2025.

John P. Bryson

Okay. Now, in prior conversations with both you and Emily Roland, you have talked. I mean, you're talking stocks certainly here in the U.S. Focus on quality, quality earnings quality companies. Is that still the case? Any more, I guess, tweak to that commentary you'd add now.

Matthew D. Miskin

Yeah. So quality. You know, I don't like, saying, hey, this is what you've been talking about, and this is the worst performing part of the market. But unfortunately, that's what I've got to say here. So U.S. quality stocks are the worst performers within the U.S. equity market. So it's atypical that any sell off the companies with the best balance sheets, the best return on equity, the best profit margins are the ones that are sold off the most.

Now last year, quality did pretty well, momentum was better, and it was more of a mix of … kind of … high-flying stocks. Some of them weren't necessarily quality, but the fact that quality sold off the most means that quality got the cheapest out of all of them. And if anything, they've got the best fundamentals. And so that does not shake our call.

If anything, it makes it better in our view, in that you're getting quality on sale. You haven't gotten U.S. quality stocks on sale for much of the last …. well, really, 2022 was the last time and it was a great opportunity. We do have some value as well. I call it relative value. So kind of quality at a reasonable price.

We've been bar-belling those two things. And that value tilt at least has helped us, you know, mitigate some of the downside here. But if anything, the fact that quality has gone on sale, the valuations have gotten more attractive. We think it's going to be on a relative basis to global equities and just equities in general across cap or style. We think that actually opens up more of an opportunity for long-term investors.

John P. Bryson

Okay. And one more level deeper on the quality question, how much of that is correlated to quality tech versus, quality non-tech, if you will.

Matthew D. Miskin

Tech is a big part of it. There's no doubt. So quality factor … technology is a big part of that. They do typically have the best balance sheets … hundreds of billions of dollars. Cash on the balance. On the balance sheets, they typically have the best margins. They typically have the best return-on-equity. So tech is a big part of it.

There arehealth care companies, though. There's industrial companies, there's communication services companies, even some consumer discretionary companies. So it's broader based, But tech is the epicenter still. You know, to us, if if trade wars are something that's gonna be playing on the background, those companies that are more in the internet aren't going to be getting tariffs.

Now you could say, you know, if they're a hardware producer and they build in China, I get that at least that that could weigh on margins. They do typically have the best margins in in business. So the at least they're starting stronger. But what if these companies don't even have a symbol? If it's a software company or it's an internet company?

The tariffs, the fact that they all got sold off, even though they might not even get negatively impacted by tariffs, just shows you, that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater and that these companies are showing much cheaper valuations with probably much less of a hit on earnings. And that's again why we're saying, hey, this is … this is an increasingly attractive opportunity, for long-term investors.

John P. Bryson

Okay. The baby with the bathwater analogy was one that was rattling around in my head as you were talking. So I'm glad you brought that up. Hey, another … another topic that this is impacting is calls for or against a recession, right? One day we're hearing for calls … for others. it's swinging back. What's your take on the likelihood of a recession going forward, and how … how is that priced into the markets today?

Matthew D. Miskin

So the way we're looking at this is basically a very low-growth environment. Stepping back, the last several years, you've seen fiscal policy. That's usually government policy. That has been supportive to the economy. We saw student loan forgiveness to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. We saw generally continued stimulus post Covid that just kept going, from the Chips act, the Inflation Reduction Act, etc..

And so the government side had just been really supporting in every jobs report you saw nearly 50,000 new government jobs, prior … in the prior couple of years. And so every jobs report had a big influence or positive impact from government. That's all reversing. And then on top of that reversing, you do get just uncertainty. You do get volatility in markets, lack of confidence, all this other stuff.

And so we see and it's you know, it's interesting you saw the March … I was just going through this … the March economic data was awesome. The United States was actually in great shape in March. The PMIs were good. The jobs report beat, initial jobless claims were low, in the CPI report was just the icing on the cake with a nice low inflation number.

So we had good growth in soft inflation in March. And now, it looks like everything could change. So, you know, it's hard to call a recession with … with the hard data actually as of March showing the economy was doing great. But the markets are telling you that the recession odds are coming up. The bond market has not priced in a recession by any means right now.

The … the 10-year Treasury yield is basically up. Usually in recessions it down. High-yield spreads have wind up a bit, but still low in a historical context. And so to us, you know, it's one of these dilemmas where you're saying, okay, this is, you know, not … not terrible, but weaker growth. And what usually causes recessions, counterintuitively, isn't usually found within the economy.

It's found within the markets. You go back to 2000, it was actually, you know, whether it was MCI or Enron and then the stock market collapse. So fraud and then the stock market collapse in 2008, it was Lehman. It was mortgages. It was the housing market collapse. And now we're looking around and just trying to find out if there's a liquidity event.

That would be what could drive us into a recession. You know, the Treasury market was … was pretty volatile the last couple days. Equities have seen some pretty significant volatility. But it hasn't been enough yet per se to … to cause a recession. So our base case still is … is pretty weak modest growth. If the Fed could cut into this, that'd be great.

The problem is the Fed's still on hold. I'm sure we're going to get to the Fed. And so we're being patient and we're holding on to those higher-quality assets that usually do better in a weaker and weaker economic growth environment. And we think the … the macro regime has changed and the markets haven't really fully repriced that yet. And eventually though, we think that's going to come back, to these some of these high-quality, whether it's stocks or bonds.

John P. Bryson

Okay. Perfect. And … and you set me up. We've kind of seen the “Trump put” here. Questions will be out there around the Fed put. What … what are your thoughts on the Fed. And then I guess that I’d broaden it. What else haven't we covered that you think we need to make clients aware of.

Matthew D. Miskin

Yeah. So the Fed is in a really tough spot because the backdrop was one, you know, again, if inflation was slowing and economic growth was okay, that would have been actually a great thing for the Fed because they could have said, hey, we're going to cut some more, but we don't need to cut aggressively, and it's not going to make you too upset.

It's it's not an issue. It's just hey inflation's finally coming down. Now that we've got policy that could really or could show up in inflation. Maybe it doesn't, but the Fed doesn't know. So they've got to wait and they've got to wait. And this can cause them to call … it's called become behind the curve. Meaning that they are waiting and markets can move or the data or things could change.

And so the Fed's got to be patient. They probably have to look at number of CPI reports or inflation reports before feeling confident that inflation is coming down. Our view is that they're going to be on hold in the first half. They will be cutting in the second half and they might have to cut more than expected because they're waiting so long.

There's a time element and then there's a magnitude element. They're going to be probably waiting a bit to see if there's inflation. They have to wait for the hard data to show stuff, because the soft data hasn't given them really good signals. So they've got to, you know, I guess coming from around Boston, it's a Revolutionary War quote …

But, they're going to wait for the whites of the eyes of the data to really make a decision. And there's pros and cons with that. You don't make mistakes often if you wait that long. Because you know it. I guess. But there can be something that happens where you wait too long and then it's hard to catch up.

And so it is a challenging backdrop. But again, we do think lower rates are in store for this economy and market over time. We just got to be patient.

John P. Bryson

Okay. Got it. So Matt kind of put a bow on this. You know, obviously there's a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace and it's changing every day. You're out talking to clients. What are you recommending that clients do right now. And is there any silver lining that we're not thinking about, that we should be sharing with investors?

Matthew D. Miskin

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of bad news that has hit in the last week or two, and I think the bad news is pretty well known. Here's just some positives to consider. So one, the U.S. dollar is a lot weaker. The dollar just can't even get a bid. It's now down 6% for the year. Weaker dollar usually translates into better foreign revenues.

It can add liquidity to markets. It … it's generally beneficial. So dollar weaker, another one. Oil prices have plummeted. Oil prices are about $59 a barrel right now. Lower oil prices. And we often hear this stagflation risk. So stagflation is basically inflation up and the unemployment rate up. So the jobs market's weaker. And yet we're still getting inflation.

That is that's kind of like the worst case scenario. Stagflation historically speaking doesn't last long. And it usually is something that … just if the unemployment picture is worse, it's hard to have inflation because people are just not going to buy it. But if commodity prices spiked, that would be bad news. That would be stagflation. Very. Commodity prices have tumbled as of late.

That's disinflationary. That is going to reduce some of the input costs. So that's also good news. You know, I'd say otherwise, the good news is a bit more limited. But what we're, you know, thinking more broadly in terms of what to do now, we're not actually advocating much of a move. We made one change going into the second quarter.

And this was actually before all this. But we are more neutral on U.S. large cap. We're still overweight mid cap. And what we did was we said, in terms of a call was, you know, looking at some of this equity allocation and can we find income-producing assets that give us equity-like returns. But with lower risk profiles?

And so high yield is a place that we don't live within bonds. But relative to equities, high yield can be interesting. It is something that provides nearly an 8% yield. So that could actually be pretty competitive longer term for now for the equity market. It typically has a lower drawdown and a lower standard deviation than stocks.

And I know, you know, days like yesterday where the market's up 10% and high yields up 2% to 3%, it doesn't feel as good. But high yield was down a lot less than stocks. And over time, yields and income likely becomes a bigger driver of portfolio returns. So being thoughtful about managing risk, how can you turn capital appreciation that you used to receive into an income-producing asset? And that would be one of the ideas, to consider for portfolios.

John P. Bryson

Matt, you've brought some great insight in … you've brought, balanced point of view on what's going on in the world today. If I reflect back, you know, I try to be a market, a student of the market and a student of investor behavior. And we've gone through crises before, and we've made it out the other side.

I think in situations like this, couple things that help: Take a pause, don't invest emotionally, talk to your financial advisor, your trusted, resources to get a different point of view, and stay the course more often than not. With the … if your goals have been changed, we can … we can navigate this volatility. Staying the course is quite often the best approach.

Matt, I know you're all over this. I know you're going to be sharing videos and insight. It's going to be on our website at investments.com. It's going to be available on LinkedIn. If folks follow you, it's Matthew underscore Miskin. If you don't, please listen. And as always, keep coming back to John … to Manulife, John Hancock got more and more insights on our website, we share a number of different, points of view on investing business building ideas. And as always with the podcast, we're going to give you up-to-date information that you can put to good use. Matt, thanks for joining us, everybody. Thanks for dialing in. We'll talk to you soon.