‘We’re flowing toward the path’ similar to time before Great Depression, analyst says

He points to evidence of declining growth as well as that fall is a weak time traditionally for the U.S. economy as people return from vacation.

“[By the fall], we’ll have a lot more evidence of declining growth. Growth has been slipping,” he said.

However, it was not all gloom and doom as Yusko said the emerging markets were still strong places to invest.

“Growth is where you want to invest,” he said. “All the growth is in the emerging markets, the developing world. It’s really tough if you look around the developed world.” he said profits in the United States are the same as they were in 2012.

Yusko said at the beginning of the year “every single analyst” said emerging markets were going to underperform the U.S. “That hasn’t been the case,” he said.

Indeed, in 2017 the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (EEM) has been up more than 18 percent while the S&P 500 index has risen more than 8 percent.

S&P 500 (blue) vs iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (green) in 2017

Source: FactSet

He also sees trends that are going to push interest rates down, making growth harder to find and emerging markets more attractive.

Those trends are the killer D’s, according to Yusko: bad demographics in the U.S., Europe and Japan and too much debt and deflation.