Canada in 'top of the ninth' as recession looms: Rosenberg

A recession is looming for Canada, according to David Rosenberg.

“In baseball parlance, I’d say that we’re top of the ninth, with one out,” Gluskin Sheff + Associates’ chief economist and strategist told BNN Bloomberg’s Greg Bonnell in an interview on Friday.

Rosenberg also said the Canadian economy is more than 90 per cent of the way through the business cycle.

“The market action and all the volatility, the yield curve, the behaviour of cyclical stocks especially in the past six months, commodities – and, notwithstanding the knee-jerk bounce that we had in the opening weeks of this year – I think that the odds of a recession in 2019 are elevated,” Rosenberg said.

Pointing to the New York Federal Reserve’s recession probability index, which has now reached its highest level in 11 years, Rosenberg said investors should prepare their portfolios accordingly.

“I would say that whether or not you have a recession view, the real big thing to consider is that recession risks are on the rise, and your portfolio should be reflecting those rising risks, whether that’s your base-case scenario or not,” he said.

Rosenberg also said the headline takeaways of Canada’s jobs numbers, released earlier on Friday, were misleading.

“It’s a headline head-fake, because hours worked actually went down,” Rosenberg said of the Statistics Canada report, which posted record private-sector hiring.

“You can hire all the people in the world, but if you’re going to cut everybody’s hours at the same time, what matters most is the labour input into the economy.”