Today on the program, we welcome Portfolio Manager David Tulk back to the show. David and the Global Asset Allocation team manage many funds for Canadian Investors including $80B in assets across more than 20 funds. David comments on our current market environment, how the team is dealing with rising inflation rates, and what he sees the Bank of Canada doing for the rest of 2023. Although the Bank of Canada paused its tightening agenda from its last rate announcement, Statistics Canada’s August report on inflation showed a rise to 4% year over year. That is up from 3.3% year over year back in July. David’s initial reaction to rising inflation – he believes “we’re going the wrong way.” But that’s the type of landscape we’re dealing with, he adds. Going through the inflation stats, we can see there’s some wage growth and service level inflation, which all contributes to the underlying price pressure. Also gasoline is one of the biggest factors that pushed headline inflation higher. So are rising oil prices on a global basis good for the Canadian economy or to the central banks? He says it doesn’t change the trajectory of spending, but changes the composition and this is still a concern from the central bank’s perspective. David says the banks want the economy to slow down, but for Inflation to cool off, we need a period of economic weakness, mostly in the labor market. However, that part of the economy has yet to show any weakness at all. Companies are holding on to their labor due to the pandemic and are looking to keep labor instead of rehiring months into the future. For the GAA team, they are still leading defensively in all the funds managed. They have taken more neutral equity betas and are much closer to benchmark on equity allocation. In terms of currency, they use an underweight to the Canadian dollar to enhance the defensiveness of a portfolio. The team is hedging underweight Canadian equities and overweight to global energy.

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