Long-dated US Treasury yields climbed again this week to levels last seen before the financial crisis. Crude oil prices in the meantime eased into the quarter-end as Middle Eastern exports recovered, though Brent will still likely close September higher than it began, and equity markets have absorbed the move in bonds without much difficulty. Forecasters have followed these market moves rather than resisted them. The latest Blue Chip Financial Forecasts survey suggest that policy rates are now expected to be higher in twelve months' time in every major economy, with Japan moving furthest and the United Kingdom least (chart 1). The difficulty is that this repricing is taking place against a world economy that is arguably performing better than a tightening cycle would ordinarily permit. Demand for artificial-intelligence skills is rising in labour markets well beyond the United States (chart 2), world industrial output has accelerated even as core inflation across the G7 has fallen (chart 3), and capital goods orders across the G3 have turned decisively higher (chart 4). Wage growth has slowed in three very different labour markets of late without the increase in unemployment that earlier disinflations demanded (chart 5). Such a combination is rare, and it rests on conditions that may not hold. The constraint that eventually binds could be more physical than monetary, and it is already apparent in the cost of electricity in the regions where the data centres are being built (chart 6).
Introducing
Andrew Cates
in:Our Authors
Andy Cates joined Haver Analytics as a Senior Economist in 2020. Andy has more than 25 years of experience forecasting the global economic outlook and in assessing the implications for policy settings and financial markets. He has held various senior positions in London in a number of Investment Banks including as Head of Developed Markets Economics at Nomura and as Chief Eurozone Economist at RBS. These followed a spell of 21 years as Senior International Economist at UBS, 5 of which were spent in Singapore. Prior to his time in financial services Andy was a UK economist at HM Treasury in London holding positions in the domestic forecasting and macroeconomic modelling units. He has a BA in Economics from the University of York and an MSc in Economics and Econometrics from the University of Southampton.
Publications by Andrew Cates
Global| Sep 30 2026AI Productivity and Capacity Constraints
Artificial intelligence can lift productivity and sustain business investment. The scale and durability of the gains will depend on labour, energy, materials, finance and the policy response.
Introduction and summary messages The surge in artificial-intelligence investment is being driven by the technology's potential to raise productivity and corporate profitability. It is unfolding, however, in a world economy increasingly constrained by scarce labour, power, materials and capital. Those constraints make labour-saving technology more valuable, but they also limit how quickly the infrastructure supporting it can expand.
The initial macroeconomic effects can be favourable. If productivity rises faster than wages, unit labour costs fall. Firms can expand output without increasing employment at the same rate, supporting margins while containing underlying inflation. Stronger supply can therefore coexist with resilient demand and give monetary policy more room to accommodate growth.
The central risk comes later. Capacity and scarcity determine whether that favourable chain continues or reverses. Productivity gains can be diluted if electricity, grids, equipment, industrial materials or skilled labour become binding constraints. Inflation may then rise even before demand has weakened, leaving central banks to balance price stability against the investment needed to expand supply.
Backdrop Companies are buying computing power, software and equipment because they expect to produce more with fewer workers. Scarcity adds urgency to that calculation. Labour is expensive, trade is more fragmented and capital is no longer free. Governments are also investing in energy security, defence and domestic supply chains. Climate disruption and tighter immigration policies in some economies are adding to the pressure on energy systems, transport, construction and skilled labour.
Energy is where the tension is sharpest. Digital capital can be installed quickly; power stations, transmission lines and mines cannot. The most important price in the AI boom may therefore be the price of electricity rather than the price of a semiconductor.
The investment response is already visible. Orders for capital goods across the United States, Germany and Japan have risen for seventeen consecutive months, while Asian semiconductor exports tell the same story from the production side. Inflation-adjusted orders remain below their 2021 average, suggesting that the cycle is still relatively young.
The increase in investment is only the starting point. Its economic significance will depend on whether it produces measurable gains in output and productivity, how those gains are divided between labour and capital, and whether the expansion runs into physical or financial constraints. The framework below traces that transmission before the subsequent section considers what the available evidence suggests about how far it has progressed.
by:Andrew Cates
|in:Viewpoints
Global| Sep 24 2026Charts of the Week: Narrow Shoulders
Financial markets have spent this week weighing whether this year's energy shock has passed its peak, and have changed their minds more than once. Brent slipped below $99 as Hormuz shipments were reported recovering and Gulf leaders gathered in New York, only to recover above $100 within a day. The relief in the energy market has proved neither durable nor shared by the bond market. The Federal Reserve raised rates last week for the first time in three years, the ECB has tightened alongside it and the Bank of Japan has moved again, leaving ten-year Treasury yields at levels last seen in 2007 and Bunds at seventeen-year highs. This week’s flash purchasing managers’ surveys help explain the discomfort, with European supply chains lengthening once more as dry bulk freight rates climb (chart 1). The aggregate global growth picture has nonetheless held up better than the geopolitics would imply, though the latest Blue Chip consensus survey continues to suggest that this resilience is concentrated in only a small group of semiconductor exporters rather than shared across the world economy (chart 2). Part of the explanation for the wider containment lies in the oil balance, where a drawdown in stocks without precedent in the available record has substituted for the spare capacity that once cushioned disruptions of this kind (chart 3), and part lies in the character of the commodity shock itself, which now has at least three unrelated sources (chart 4). Labour markets are where the strain has begun to show, and it is showing very unevenly across the advanced economies (chart 5). In European bond markets, meanwhile, the consequences have turned political, with the premium demanded on French debt over German reaching levels not seen since the euro crisis (chart 6).
by:Andrew Cates
|in:Economy in Brief
- Global| Sep 22 2026
Oil: Running Out of Slack
Brent crude traded near $70 a barrel when the Strait of Hormuz closed at the end of February. It reached $138 in April and has since retraced part of that move while remaining well above its pre-disruption level. The macroeconomic response has so far been modest. Consensus forecasts for world output in 2026 have been revised down, but only very modestly.
The natural interpretation is that the structural sensitivity of output to energy prices has fallen, through lower energy intensity, more flexible product and labour markets, and better-anchored inflation expectations. There is something in each of these. But the evidence points to a more contingent explanation. The adjustment has been accommodated principally on the inventory margin rather than through quantity rationing or demand destruction, and the capacity to continue accommodating it that way is close to exhausted.
Implied global stock changes, derived from the EIA's world supply-demand balance, show a cumulative six-month drawdown roughly half as large again as the previous maximum in 2007. The initial condition matters here. Stocks were being accumulated rapidly through late 2025, so the disruption arrived with storage unusually full; the buffer was the incidental product of a preceding surplus rather than the result of deliberate precautionary accumulation. Commercial cover across the OECD has since fallen to around twenty-one days, and non-OECD buyers have begun to draw down the precautionary holdings built in the spring.
by:Andrew Cates
|in:Viewpoints
Global| Sep 17 2026Charts of the Week: The Price of Money
The cost of energy and the cost of money set the tone this week. Brent crude held above $100 a barrel with a major Saudi pipeline still offline, and the Federal Reserve raised the federal funds rate by a quarter point, its first increase since 2023. The projections accompanying the decision mattered more than the decision itself, and futures have since priced a policy rate by the middle of 2027 above anything the committee has pencilled in, with the ten-year Treasury yield through 5 per cent for the first time since 2007 (chart 1). But the source of that tightening is worth dwelling on, because American companies are not competing for credit. The non-financial corporate sector is generating more cash than it spends, and has been for most of the past four years (chart 2). Forecasters have meanwhile spent the summer nudging growth forecasts up and inflation forecasts down for this year, with Taiwan and Korea marked up by some distance the most (chart 3). Britain provided a counterpoint, with pay growth and vacancies both back at or below pre-pandemic norms ahead of the Bank of England’s decision (chart 4). China’s August figures showed industrial output accelerating while investment contracted more deeply (chart 5). And Korean customs data for the first ten days of September gave yet another reading of how much of world trade now runs through a single product (chart 6).
by:Andrew Cates
|in:Economy in Brief
Global| Sep 10 2026Charts of the Week: The Reflationary Turn
Financial markets have entered September in an awkward mood. Global equities have advanced, but long-term bond yields have risen towards multi-decade highs as the European Central Bank meets this week and the Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan prepare to follow. The common thread is a turn towards reflation: growth is firming while inflation remains stubborn. Growth surprises have improved relative to inflation surprises, supporting equities (chart 1), while policy uncertainty has retreated from its peak but remains unusually high (chart 2). Most major economies are now on the expansionary side of the growth-inflation cycle (chart 3). Yet supply-chain pressure is returning (chart 4), inflation has become more responsive to tight labour markets since 2020 (chart 5), and the rise in bond yields has been driven largely by higher real rates rather than inflation expectations (chart 6).
by:Andrew Cates
|in:Economy in Brief
- Global| Sep 09 2026
The End of Painless Disinflation
The latest round of inflation releases will help determine what central banks do next. A larger question lies behind the monthly numbers. Has inflation once again become more responsive to economic pressure? For much of the decade after the global financial crisis, falling unemployment generated surprisingly little inflation. That apparent flattening of the Phillips curve, the relationship between economic slack and inflation, encouraged policymakers to believe that economies could run hot at relatively little cost. Evidence since 2020 suggests that assumption is now less secure.
This argument complements, rather than overturns, the analysis in The age of abundance is over. That article argued that today’s inflation overshoot largely reflects scarcer labour, energy and productive capacity, none of which higher interest rates can directly replace. The evidence considered here makes a separate point. Even if supply constraints explain much of the current level of inflation, additional demand may now pass into prices more readily than it did in the 2010s. The source of inflation and its sensitivity to demand are related questions, but they are not the same question.
The evidence from the United States The US provides the clearest example. Comparing a real-time measure of economic tightness with inflation one year later reveals a marked break after 2020. Before then, a one-standard-deviation rise in the tightness measure was associated with an increase of about 0.4 percentage points in subsequent inflation. Since 2020, the estimated response has been roughly four times as large, at about 1.7 percentage points (Figure 1). Put simply, inflation now appears to react more strongly when demand presses against the economy’s capacity.
by:Andrew Cates
|in:Viewpoints
Global| Sep 03 2026Charts of the Week: The Turn Towards Tightening
Central banks dominated the financial-market narrative last week. In his first Jackson Hole address as Federal Reserve chairman, Kevin Warsh indicated that the next move in US interest rates was more likely to be an increase than a cut. The ECB, having raised rates in June, is also expected to tighten further. Government bond yields consequently remained under upward pressure across the advanced economies, with long-term yields close to their highest levels in two decades. Rising real yields weighed on equities and gold, while oil climbed back above $90 following US strikes on Iranian launchers near the Strait of Hormuz. The latest Blue Chip Financial Forecasts survey places this shift in a broader context. Panellists expect policy rates to rise over the next twelve months in Japan, Canada and the euro area, with more modest increases anticipated in the United States and Australia; the United Kingdom is the only economy in which rates are expected to fall (chart 1). At the same time, shipping costs and global supply-chain pressures are rising again (chart 2), with renewed inflationary pressure emerging at the factory gate (chart 3). US labour demand is also shifting towards sectors where supply constraints appear most pronounced (chart 4). Yet core inflation across the G10 is now relatively close to target (chart 5). The final chart places these developments within a longer-term shift: after declining for four decades, the real cost of capital has moved decisively higher (chart 6).
by:Andrew Cates
|in:Economy in Brief
- Global| Sep 02 2026
The age of abundance is over — and neither policy nor markets have caught up
Kevin Warsh used his first Jackson Hole address as chairman of the Federal Reserve last week to signal that the next move in US interest rates is more likely to be up than down. He is not alone. The European Central Bank raised rates in June and may go further, and several other central banks have turned hawkish. It is a puzzle. Growth has slowed, unemployment has drifted up, and core inflation across the advanced economies is not far above target. Why is the world's monetary tide turning towards tightening?
The official answer is that they are guarding against a shift in expectations. Supply-driven inflation need not persist; it does so only if firms and households come to expect it, and set wages and prices accordingly. Having misjudged the 2021 shock as transitory, central bankers are unwilling to take that chance a second time. So they are tightening not to reverse the shock, which no rate can do, but to keep expectations anchored.
That, though, is the lesser part of the story. The central banks are treating as a cyclical episode what is in truth a change of regime. For a generation the advanced economies enjoyed abundant supply and abundant capital: globalisation held down the price of goods, a global surplus of saving held down the price of money, and monetary policy had only to manage demand. Both conditions are now reversing, together. Supply has become scarce and costly; so has capital; and the two are related. The consequences are large. Inflation of this kind cannot be brought down by interest rates, only resisted at the cost of a recession. The real cost of capital has risen durably, not cyclically. And investors positioned for the old regime — a central bank that eases into every downturn, government bonds that hedge equities, real rates that subside to their former lows — are positioned for a world that will not return.
Supply has tightened on every front. In the past month alone the United States imposed 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods; American forces struck Iranian launchers at the Strait of Hormuz, returning Brent above $90; and a glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border destroyed a regional trade route. Each raised costs, and none can be addressed by a policy rate. To these has been added a contraction in the supply of labour. The administration's immigration enforcement, recently extended to withdraw work authorisation from more than a million people, has reduced the workforce available to construction, agriculture and services, and raised wage costs in those sectors. None of this is a temporary deviation from a stable trend. The real cost of energy has risen for a quarter of a century to a record; reshoring is reconstructing supply chains at higher cost; and demographic change was tightening labour markets before enforcement intensified. The cheap and frictionless supply of the globalisation era has ended.
The data bear this out. Decompose US core inflation into demand- and supply-driven components and the demand-driven part has fallen to around one percentage point, with supply accounting for almost the entire excess over target (Figure 1). Across the G10, core rates are grouped close to target, none much above two and a half per cent (Figure 2). The demand that monetary policy governs has already been contained; wage growth is slowing, and market-based measures of inflation expectations remain near target. What sustains inflation above target is supply.
by:Andrew Cates
|in:Viewpoints
Global| Aug 26 2026Charts of the Week: Resilient Growth, Restless Yields
A dominant anxiety in financial markets remains the level of long-term interest rates. It is worth beginning, though, with the real economy, where the news of recent days has been more reassuring. Haver’s proprietary calculation of world GDP growth suggests the global economy held up well in the second quarter, expanding at close to its long-run average pace and defying the sharper slowdown many had feared (chart 1). The August flash purchasing managers’ indices tell a similar story, with most of the major economies both in expansion and still improving — though, as ever, the composite readings conceal a more uneven picture beneath (chart 2). From South Korea, whose trade figures are among the world’s most timely, comes the same message, and a pointed one about the artificial-intelligence boom: semiconductor exports have continued to surge (chart 3). Yet the market’s gaze stays fixed on US yields, and a decomposition explains why they are being watched so closely — the rise has come overwhelmingly from the real component, not from any meaningful revival of inflation expectations (chart 4). That, one might argue, is not a passing technical matter but a structural one, rooted in who is willing to fund the US government. The rest of the world now funds a steadily shrinking share of its debt (chart 5), and the surplus nations that once recycled their savings into Treasuries are turning, instead, to gold (chart 6). It is against this backdrop that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's recent remarks that the government may intervene in the market to support its debt have drawn attention.
by:Andrew Cates
|in:Economy in Brief
Global| Aug 20 2026Charts of the Week: The Cost of Capital Climbs
Financial markets have been unsettled this week by a familiar cast of forces, though the balance among them has shifted. Renewed tension in the Middle East has nudged oil prices higher without seriously disturbing the wider tone, while in Japan the yen’s slide to multi-decade lows kept the authorities on intervention watch and the Bank of Japan under pressure to act. But the development that has dominated is the continued climb in long-term interest rates, which across the major economies now stand close to their highest in two decades — a move driven far more by real yields than by any meaningful revival of inflation fears. That the long end should be rising even as disappointing US data have led investors to pare back their expectations of further Federal Reserve tightening — the short end falling as the long end climbs — is a thread running through this week's charts. We begin with that near-term picture: a softening in US data surprises and the accompanying, albeit very modest, easing at the short end of the curve (chart 1), together with the fragile state of domestic demand in Japan that complicates the yen’s defence (chart 2). We then turn to the deeper forces pushing long rates higher. Rearmament is adding a large and largely non-negotiable claim on the public purse, with defence budgets across Europe climbing steeply (chart 3). The flow-of-funds accounts show where the strain comes to rest, with governments across the advanced world in deficit and drawing on a finite pool of saving (chart 4) — saving that is concentrated, more than ever, in China (chart 5). And beneath it all lies the question of whether the investment now under way will deliver the productivity gains needed to justify a higher cost of capital; the latest US figures give little comfort (chart 6).
by:Andrew Cates
|in:Economy in Brief
- Global| Aug 19 2026
The Contest for Capital
The world is being pushed to invest more than it has in decades.
A world on autopilot Every few months the International Monetary Fund publishes a projection of the world economy, and the Blue Chip panel of forecasters, along with other bodies, does something similar each month; together they help to set the consensus against which everything else is judged. It describes a world returning gradually to normal: global growth a little above 3%, inflation drifting back to target, and US policy rates continuing to ease from their peaks. Its most consequential feature is one that is easy to miss, because it sits in an accounting identity rather than being stated as a view: investment in the advanced economies is projected to remain close to 22% of GDP for the rest of the decade, essentially flat, with national saving tracking it (chart below). The large external imbalances — the US deficit and the surpluses of China, Germany and the oil exporters — are expected to persist more or less unchanged, and the real interest rate that balances saving against investment drifts gently lower. It is, in short, a forecast of continuity, and this piece argues that continuity may well be the wrong assumption.
by:Andrew Cates
|in:Viewpoints
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