You can get away with playing on sentiment but only for a time – and that time, for a lot of reasons, falls around springtime. Optimism, however, doesn’t fix what’s underneath, the reasons for the descending trajectory in the first place. It’s impossible to know why German Economists and bankers are a bit more positive in April 2019 about the future than they’ve been in a year. Given history, though, I’d wager it is more based on the Fed “pause”, the ECB’s aborted rate liftoff (along with, as a start, the upcoming third T-LTRO), as well as the usual mistranslation from Chinese over the PBOC doing a bunch of stuff nobody really takes a deep look at.
