“Right now there is an economic regime change going on.” That is what APG's Thijs Knaap says in the business program Zakendoen on BNR Nieuwsradio, in response to the falling share prices of so-called 'corona winners' such as streaming services, meal deliverers and now also postal and parcel deliverer PostNL. “A company that does well in one economic regime, does poorly in another. That's not so strange. The question that you then have as an investor is whether all companies are doing badly. How is the average? And to my great relief I can see that the average is actually going quite well.”
Knaap, chief economist at APG, regularly joins the investor panel of Zakendoen. In Tuesday's broadcast, he also discusses the continuing turmoil in the financial markets as a result of the Federal Reserve's rate hike. “The Fed and the other central banks now have only one goal and that is to stop inflation as quickly as possible. So the rescue for the stock market is not going to come from them.” Meanwhile, gloomy clouds are looming on the economic horizon, in the form of the ongoing war in Ukraine and lockdowns in China. “That could just lead to things slowing down quite quickly, and then there is the risk that the central banks that are slowing down the economy will do so in a situation where the economy itself is actually slowing down.” With the danger that the economy will be slowed down too much. “And when that happens you have a recession and investors don't like that at all,” said Knaap in conversation with presenter Thomas van Zijl and Martijn Rozemuller, Head of Europe at VanEck.
Listen to the entire broadcast (Dutch) here.