By Naomi Rovnick and Dhara Ranasinghe
LONDON (Reuters) -Investor unease about an increasingly uncertain environment is rising, as Norway’s shock rate cut on Thursday highlights how U.S. tariffs, Middle East conflict and a shaky dollar make global monetary policy and inflation even harder to predict.
Norway’s crown slid roughly 1% against the dollar and the euro in a sign of how unexpected the move was. And Switzerland, which cut borrowing costs to 0% on Thursday, confounded some expectations among traders for a return to negative rates in the deflation-hit nation, as its central bank warned of a cloudy global outlook.
Just a day earlier the U.S. Federal Reserve kept rates on hold and chair Jerome Powell said “no one” had conviction on the rate path ahead.
The conclusion for markets: monetary policy uncertainty is one more headwind to navigate against a backdrop of geopolitical and trade risks.
Global stocks pulled away from recent peaks, a gauge of expected volatility in European equities touched a two-month high as stocks across the region fell and government bonds, usually geopolitical risk havens, sold off.
“We’re at a moment of considerable policy and macro uncertainty,” said BlueBay chief investment officer at RBC Global Asset Management Mark Dowding.
“We can’t see a clear trend on interest rates,” he added, which meant he was holding back from active market bets across the group’s investment portfolios.
Volatility was set to rise, some investors said, because a choppy dollar and oil prices whipped around by geopolitics meant that central banks were far less able to provide markets and investors a clear route map for the future.
“You cannot just take your cues from the central banks anymore as they are facing a harder job of reading the economy themselves,” T.S. Lombard director of European and global macro Davide Oneglia said.
BROKEN MODELS
Rate-cutting European central banks are not just diverging from the Fed, which is grappling with the inflationary risks of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
They are also struggling to navigate a new era where the dollar, the lynchpin of world trade, commodity prices and asset valuations, has turned weaker and more volatile under trade war stress and government debt anxiety.
“That’s a massive, massive fundamental shift in global markets that everyone is trying to assess,” Monex Europe head of Macro Research Nick Rees said.
“All of those standard economic rules of thumb we use for forecasting are completely broken right now.”
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