< The 2016 All-Europe Research Team
Malcolm Barr, David Mackie & team
J.P. Morgan Cazenove
First-place appearances: 0
Total appearances: 15
Team debut: 1986
Last year J.P. Morgan Cazenove’s economists slipped from third place to runner-up, and now they rebound all the way to No. 2, recording the firm’s strongest showing on this roster since 1997. Co-captains Malcolm Barr, 44, and David Mackie, 57, oversee a team of six London-based researchers that is “well ahead of the crowd and aware of the latest news impacting fundamentals, while still being able to be concise and not annoying,” in the words of one portfolio manager. Although the researchers still believe that the region is well positioned to grow from a domestic point of view, they point out two areas of concern. One is the turn in the credit cycle in emerging markets, especially since it’s taking place in an environment of weak commodities prices and the U.S. Federal Reserve’s beginning of a modest interest rate normalization process, says Mackie, who characterizes emerging markets as “the key downside risk for the global economy next year.” The other consideration is inflation because “we just think core inflation isn’t going to be rising very rapidly, and that creates some questions in our minds about how quickly the European Central Bank will return inflation to its price stability objective,” he explains. That might not happen until 2018 or even 2019. “We don’t yet have anymore ECB easing in our baseline for next year, but I think there’s a reasonable likelihood that the ECB finds itself having to ease further, either because inflation just continues to disappoint or because some of the downside risks on the global side actually materialize,” Mackie concludes.
