going into the rest of the year do you expect equities are going to rebase that around those lows we saw back in june or do you think theres still opportunities for gains given that you know on the balance earnings were terrible yeah i think it depends on your time horizon so if as you say if you look into the second half of the year or the remainder of the year i think were still going to see some pretty volatile times and maybe some further downside for equities in the short term really the rationale for that is that we still think that the fed is extraordinarily focused on high inflation despite a lot of indicators suggesting that inflation expectations are coming lower whether youre looking at market level market indicators inflation expectations or survey data we are seeing those come lower so the fed could argue that its winning but its not arguing that with inflation at where it is today so its focused on very short any any strong data any signs of life in the economy so its going to keep its its focus on hiking interest rates and trying to control that inflation property until its too late so you know that we do think theres a an elevated risk of a recession coming forward and that markets will be partially priced that risk but we could see some further downside before we see a bottoming out of equities steve you have that preference for gold tell us about what that says about i guess your risk profile at the moment and also your assumptions about the us dollar and that call yes so obviously you know gold has been precious since peaking in around february this year the strength of the dollar and rising yields with the fed massively revising up its own expectations of what it was going to do from a monetary policy perspective and from an interest rate perspective you know that there have been significant headwinds for gold in the past six months we do see those you know those being headwinds in the short term continuing clearly no signs that the dollar has peaked or that interest rates have expectations of peaked either but when we look forward on a six to twelve month time horizon we do think those things will happen so we think the dollar is sort of in the final throes of its rally and therefore were looking for opportunities to go short and that should be together with silver quite a volatile market environment and that the portfolio hedge characteristics of gold that should be positive for gold on a six or 12 month view asian markets asian central banks cheng yang ri who is the new relatively new head of the bank of korea i talk to him suggested that hes watching the currency closely he made the comments about watching inflation and having to maybe follow the fed keep up with the fed if i may paraphrase him i was just going to wash across all asian economies and markets yeah i think i think currency is gonna be increasingly important of course you know we were saying you know you mentioned korea but obviously european central bank is aware of its move in the euro as well and chinese authorities are trying to lean a little bit against the recent weakness in the chinese renminbi so all of these factors suggest that central banks are taking into account currency moves and maybe trying to lean against it so in korea that obviously means that interest rates at the outlook still is for higher interest rates and thats a thats a constraint for the domestic economy china its gonna be really interesting because you know they they obviously want to support the economy the economy is pretty weak at the moment given covid lock downs and obviously the property sector were seeing them trying to fight that through loosening monetary policy settings and also fiscal policy stimulus so the positives coming from that but obviously that wide interest rate differential is fighting against the renminbi at the moment so itll be interesting to see how the authorities try to address that and whether we start talking about that trinity of capital controls interest rate differentials and the outlook for the currency if we go down that road what does that mean for investors how defensive should you be how offensive so i mean the bottom line for us is that we do believe that china is off to a different stage of the economic cycle so so the us is sort of heading into weakness we think that the authorities and the authorities in the us are generally trying to fight any strength of the economy and see to bring inflation down we do see the reverse coming through in china so from that perspective if were looking at equity regions were overweight asia ex japan obviously that we had a pretty good second quarter weve seen some weakness coming through in the past couple of months but we do think were in a bottoming out phase as far as asia ex japan equities are concerned both from an absolute perspective but also relative to go with equities