At Schwab IMPACT 2020, Jeffrey Kleintop, Senior Vice President and Chief Global Investment Strategist, Charles Schwab shares his perspective on the state of global markets, the path to economic recovery, and key sectors to watch internationally.
Before the COVID-19 crisis, “much of the world was already on the threshold of a recession,” Kleintop explains, citing that six out of the G7 nations were experiencing stalled or negative GDP growth at the end of 2019. Flash forward to today, a plunging global recession in April and a mid-summer rebound was felt quite universally by most developed nations. Looking forward, Kleintop says that long-term recovery may be staggered from here, suggesting that there is not a clear cut correlation between severity of shut downs and economic recovery.
Across the board, shutdowns have been most restrictive on services based industries. In the meantime, as consumer demand has shifted, global economies focused on manufacturing have flourished. A country’s market exposure to manufacturing matters a lot to its performance, says Kleintop and encourages investors not to get so caught up in number of cases, shutdowns, and markets.
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