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Welcome, Jim.

Hi, Danielle.

Hi, Jim. For those that are just tuning in, I'm Danielle Slavin, Senior Portfolio Manager with RBC Dominion Securities, and I'm here to interview Jim Allworth, Investment Strategist from RBC Dominion Securities. For those that haven't had a chance to hear Jim speak before, I'll give you a quick bio, and then we'll get into some questions.

But Jim was originally raised in Toronto, but he's resided in Vancouver with his wife Rojeanne since 1975. He is a graduate of Simon Fraser University with an economics degree. Jim has been in the investment business for more than 50 years as both a research analyst and portfolio strategist. For more than four decades at RBC Dominion Securities, Jim has developed investment policy for the firm and translated that into solutions for individual clients. He is one of RBC Dominion Securities' co-chair of the Global Portfolio Advisory Committee, as well as being our chief investment strategist.

So thanks so much, Jim, for joining us.

Always my pleasure, Danielle.

Great. So maybe to kind of kick us off, we're approaching the end of the year. 2021 has been another strong year for stocks, but it's been weaker for bonds as interest rates rose. On our team, we've generally been underweight bonds, which has helped portfolio returns, but I'd be curious to hear what are you anticipating from both bonds and stocks going forward into 2022?

Well, why don't we start with bonds? And a good place to start is to acknowledge that bond yields have been very low because they've been suppressed by central banks. We've had the Federal Reserve buying countless billions of bonds week after week after week, both federal bonds and corporate bonds. We've had the same in Canada, although it's worth noting that Canada dialed back on that quite quickly in this. We are still buying them, it's just we've already tapered-- if you like to use the usual nomenclature-- we've tapered a couple of times already. The US has yet to start. The Japanese central bank, Bank of Japan, has also done the same thing. And so has the European Central Bank, and so have the Bank of England.

All of them have had the effect of driving long-term interest rates down closer to short-term interest rates. Gradually, they're backing away from this policy, and all of them have either said they've got plans afoot right now to do it, or they're watching and waiting for an opportunity to do it. So it'd be fair to say we're going to have less suppression of long-term interest rates by that intervention when they're in buying bonds, which has been driving yields lower.

So I think it is not an unreasonable expectation to think that long-term bond yields are going to move up back to where they were, at least, before this exercise began as a response to COVID, which is certainly higher than where we are here and probably up closer to 2% in the case of the US 10-year bond. And really, a year before COVID began, that 10-year bond was more like in the mid 2% to 3% range. So I don't think it is a dramatic expectation to think that we're going to see longer term interest rates rise over the course of the next couple of years.

And on the one hand, a lot of us would welcome that, wouldn't we, in our portfolios? Because this part of our portfolio-- fixed income that we have usually relied on to provide at least some good cash returns in terms of coupons that help the cash generating capability of the portfolio-- has been really short of that for a long time here now. And it would be nice to start getting some coupon returns again. The downside, of course, is that higher bond yields mean lower bond prices. And so when we look at our statements, we'd see the market value of those bonds might be going down.

But I suspect that most people who are listening to us today intend to own those bonds to maturity. So marking bonds to market, in the short run, is a bit of an exercise that doesn't really hold with our portfolio realities. Those things are going to mature. They're going to roll over into a new issue somewhere out there, presumably at higher rates over the course of time. And we know that can count on it.

So I think that's a reasonable expectation, for sure. Could bond yields go well beyond those sorts of yields I talked about, somewhere between 2% and 3%? Sure they could. That wouldn't be out of the question, either. And probably the thing that would drive them is the thing that's been on people's minds, which is inflation, and maybe we'll get to that later on. And let's go to the stock market.

I think the stock market has two futures ahead of it. One of them is the one that is being driven by COVID and the policy responses to COVID, and that has produced a tremendous rebound in the economy out of a recession, which by the way, was the shortest recession on record-- it lasted less than three months in both the US and Canada. And the economy has been powering higher since. And it has, in both cases, regained all the ground that it lost in that terrible plunge in the second quarter last year.

And there remains a fair bit of juice in the tank, if you like. And maybe it's worth enumerating them. One of them is that fiscal stimulus just tends to operate with a lag anyway. The government talks about putting it in place. They kind of put it in place, but it really doesn't find its way into the economy for a while. And so there's always a lagged effect, which is probably still working for us. Some real indication of that would be something called excess savings, which people have started computing. They're looking at individual, personal, and corporate bank accounts out there and seeing how much cash there is in them compared to how much there should be or would be under normal circumstances. And what they see is a huge amount of excess savings. In Canada and the US, at the corporate and the individual level, it amounts to something close to 10% of gross domestic product.

Well, that money isn't going to get spent all at once. In fact, a lot of it might just stay in banks permanently. But central banks think at least 20% of it it's going to get spent, and that's probably already underway to some degree. So over this year and next year and probably into 2023, those excess savings are going to come down as people no longer need those precautionary balances and start to do the things that-- and spend on things that they weren't able to coming out of the recession in the COVID environment.

So that's a pretty good underpinning to consumer spending. And knowing that in addition to your income that you're earning, you've got some savings you're willing to spend. And the consumer is the biggest part of the economy-- 60% of the Canadian economy, 70% plus of the American economy. In many respects, the consumer is the only part you almost have to look at in the US. If you can imagine the consumer feeling confident enough to go out and spend money and having the wherewithal to do it, then it pretty well tells you where the economy is going. And both those things are in place-- the wherewithal and consumer confidence are both elevated enough to give us lots of confidence the consumer is going to be part of the game out over the next year or two.

So what we've got is an economy that's one, roaring out of recession, which usually produces some of the highest growth rates in any cycle. And then that spending's supported for a while longer by these excess savings and by a few other things. One of them is capital spending. Capital spending by business is growing quite rapidly. And that's in response to a few things. One, a very high level of corporate profits. Two, very low interest rates. And three, the need to add capacity because they have more orders for whatever it is they're producing than they can produce, and they need to put more capacity in place. And lastly, they would like to make their supply chains more resilient.

We've gone through a couple of decades where an awful lot of businesses became dependent on far-flung supply chains that ran all over the world, and that allowed them to drive costs down, but at a cost. And that cost came home to roost in the COVID experience where they felt very vulnerable. They've lost some business permanently because they didn't have goods on hand because their supply chains broke down. And a lot of them want to make those supply chains more resilient. And in many respects, that means building more productive capacity right in the market they're trying to sell into. And for many people, that's the US market.

So not only are US corporations spending money to build capacity in the US, but foreign corporations who want to access the US market are building more capacity in the US as well. And so capital spending is rocking, and it is, I think, in Canada to some degree as well. So all those things suggest to us that there's more juice in this recovery tank.

But at some point, those things will no longer be as effective. And the economy will go back to being dependent on the things that usually drive economic growth. And there are two principal things that drive economic growth. One of them is growth in the labor force. How many more people are there working than there were last year? And the second one is productivity. How much more productive are all workers than they were last year? They still go in, and they work eight hours or whatever it is, but do they produce more? And historically, many certainly advanced economies and developed economies have been able to become incrementally more productive every year.

And without belaboring this point, I would just say that that will introduce an entirely different dynamic than we've seen for quite some time because there is a phenomenon happening around the world which people have not really been aware of. But it is that working-age populations are in decline in all the developed countries, including China. And now, interestingly enough, even in India.

Birth rates are very low. They're well below replacement rate. You need you need 2.1 children for every woman of childbearing years in your population to replace your population and keep it whole. And birth rates have been well below 2 in all the developed countries for quite some time-- as low as 1.2 in Spain and Italy, and only about 1.4 or 1.5 in Germany and in Canada. And very slightly more than that in the US.

So the birth rates are acting to keep a much smaller number than normal arriving in the labor force. And meanwhile, at the top end, people are aging and coming out of the labor force faster than they're coming in at the bottom. And working-age populations are in decline in China, in Japan, in Germany, and France, in Italy, in Spain, in the Netherlands. They soon will be in the UK. Canada and the US will fight this off for some time, mostly through immigration.

I think Canada can go on fighting it off for a long time. I think the US less so, because it's become less welcoming to immigrants over the last decade, for sure. And the same has happened in Europe, where a lot of Western Europe was welcoming of immigration, but the migrant crisis has turned everybody in Europe sour on the whole idea. They're becoming much more restrictive, which is a bit of cutting your nose off to spite your face because it would be the one thing that they could do that would offset this declining birth rate, and they've chosen not to do it.

So we're in for slow growth, and maybe I'll wait till we get closer to the end, but slow growth has implications for equity investing. And it's not that they're bad implications, necessarily. It's that they demand selectivity. It is more important than it has ever been that portfolios be populated with the best companies in each sector-- the companies that, if they're not already dominant in those sectors, have the great possibility of becoming dominant over the course of the next decade. And maybe we'll get to that as we conclude.

Thank you, Jim. That was a great overview. There's a lot of parts in there that I'd like to maybe expand on, but maybe I'll deal with the one that we seem to get the most questions about, which is on the inflation front. A couple of things he mentioned in there-- just lots of cash on the sidelines, the impact of consumers wanting to put some of that cash to work, and what that'll mean for rising prices. But also, supply chain. And I'd be curious about your thoughts on whether or not the supply chain issues that we're seeing can be resolved with some of the things that you're talking about in terms of having greater protection over supply chain. And what does that mean for inflation, both in the near-term, but also long-term? What's your expectation for sustained inflation?

Sure. Well, there are lots of parts to that. Some of the problems that we're getting are shortages caused by things that are not that hard to fix. For instance, there's been a shortage of shipping containers, and part of that is because when everything ground to a halt in the second quarter of last year, companies were very pessimistic about the future. And they canceled orders for raw materials and goods and things that they might need to put into the products they were going to sell on to the consumer.

And so there was mass cancellation of orders. And of course, the people they were canceling the orders from did the same thing. They canceled production plans and raw material purchases. And when people woke up three months later and realized the economy was not about to go into an endless spiral downward but was recovering, it still took them a few months to get confident. And when they finally got confident to start putting orders back in, they found that their suppliers were unable to meet the orders, that they, too, had cut back.

And so you have to get that back in gear, that's the first thing. And then when you try to get that back in gear, you run out of shipping containers because you're now shipping not just what you'd normally ship, but an amount on top of that to make up for what you didn't ship earlier. And so that's driven things through the roof. The same with available ships and so on. But all those things you know how to change. One, just getting through the bulge will change part of it. Two, it's not that hard to build more shipping containers, and people are. There's also a lot of shipping containers sitting around idle that could be put back to use, and they are being put back to use. It just takes some time.

And if you look at shipping rates out there, there's indexes of those. And one of the most widely followed, the Baltic Dry, went for something-- let's call it 800-- and spiked all the way from 800 up to 5,500. That's what would have happened to the shipping rates. They would have gone up more than six times in the space of just a few months. Well, they've already fallen from between 5,000 and 6,000 down to about 2,000, and so you start to see those pressures come off prices.

China ran out of coal and had to shut down factories. Much of those shortages have disappeared, and the factories are able to start back up. But they've been hit by shutdowns again because of COVID. You get all this disruption, almost all of it related to COVID extremes, and we know that they diminish as COVID becomes less of a driver of this stuff.

So I would say some of the big parts of what's produced shortage inflation is going to go away. And the question is how long? And one of the ones that's had a lot of publicity is the shortage of computer chips to go into cars. And people have-- generally, were too optimistic about how fast that could right itself. But even as we speak, this was a business that was dominated by one company called Semiconductor, at least in terms of the growth potential of the industry. And even as we speak, any number of other chip manufacturers are racing to be part of the solution for the auto industry. And while it may take some time, we know how that will get resolved. And it will get resolved.

So some of those things, I think, are clearly temporary, and that's one of the reasons why the Fed and other central banks have talked about much of this being transitory. We're also going to get people shifting spending from buying goods, which they were able to do with the exception of cars through much of the COVID experience, and on to spending more money on services which they were unable to do. So we're going to see airfares go up, and we're going to see hotel rates go up. And all kinds of other things related with the resumption of the service economy where we'll get lots of inflation because of all this money pouring back in, and there will be reduced capacity. There aren't as many restaurants open. There aren't as many planes available to get out there and keep fares down.

So I suspect we've got another wave of that to come. But again, I think it's a wave, and on the other side of the wave you get an ebbing on this. Now, at the moment, our view is just that. And the argument around inflation and whether it can peak and come down, and our expectation would go like this-- we think inflation still has some high months, some uncomfortable months of readings. We think when we get into the second half, we're going to start to see those scary numbers start to reduce and come down to something that's no longer heading up but is ebbing somewhat, and we expect more of that in 2023. When the peak comes, the date when you start things coming down, all those things are up for grabs, and questions, and you'll see people debating that all over the place. But the shape of that is kind of what we expect, and I think that's what central banks expect.

What we don't expect is a replay of the 1970s. And we may get some aspects of that that are worrying for a while. But I think there's one basic component that is not there that was a huge driver of inflation in the 1970s and on into the 1980s, and that was that the demographics. That was a period when baby boomers were leaving school and heading out into the real world where they were getting jobs, making money, and spending it on building their life. They needed places to live.

If you, like I did, grew up in Toronto, you knew that you could have gone out into Lake Ontario on a boat and looked back at the city, and this is what you would have seen. You would have seen a church in the west side of the city that had a very tall steeple on Bathurst Street, a church on the east side of the downtown of St. James that had a very tall steeple, and in between, you saw the Bank of Commerce building, which was the tallest building in the British Commonwealth at 30 stories, or 32 stories. And the rest of it was dead flat.

And if you went away and went to sleep for a while and got up, by the time you were in the early 1970s, you just saw a forest of high-rises that were all at the 20 to 25 or 30-story level. And then if you went back to sleep and got up another 20 years later, you saw they were all much taller. But you saw this huge demand for things that weren't there-- places to work, places to live, places to shop. And what you got was a lot of inflation that came along. So shortages took quite a while to dissipate.

We have the opposite today. We don't have the baby boom maturing, we have the baby boom retiring. And we have almost nobody coming in the other end of the pipeline, which says that, at least globally and in many parts of the country, if not all, that demand for real estate and many other things will be much more subdued than they have been, no matter what the real estate markets look like today. And if you want a good example of this, you can go and look at Japan, which has been experiencing this ahead of every other developed economy. And again, Danielle, I don't want to belabor this point, but I think it's worth having in our mind because I suspect that many of the people on the call might be-- like I do, can remember that period in the latter part of last century.

From the mid-1950s until the end of the 1980s, Japan was the poster child for fast economic growth. It grew faster than every other economy in the world for that whole stretch. It grew at about 6% per annum, adjusting for inflation, versus about 3% over the same stretch for the US. In the late 1980s, people kept asking the question, how long till Japan is the largest economy in the world? And they just kept extrapolating the growth rate in the prior 30 years or so out into the future, and the growth rate of the US, and they saw the lines cross about the end of the century, and they confidently predicted that by the end of the century, Japan would be the largest economy in the world.

Well, something happened on the way to that. And part of it was a collapse of the stock market, which at the time was trading at 80 times earnings and fell out of bed, and the same with the real estate market in Japan, which was insanely priced. If you think that the extremes that we see are high, they pale compared to what they were in Japan at the time. At the same time, the working age population was peaking and turning over and heading the other way. Well that crisis, which began in 1989, took them 10 years to regain their footing. But when they regained their footing, as we came into the new century, they had lost their growth momentum. And they have never regained it.

After growing at 6% per annum nonstop, and sometimes faster than that, for 35 years, since the beginning of this century they have never managed to grow at more than 1% per annum. They're a pale shadow of their former self. And the parts of the economy that have succumbed to this are everywhere.

So I have a son who lives there and I suspect who will go on living there for a long time, and he lives in a rural area in the south. And in that area, and in all rural areas-- this is not true in Tokyo, and it's not true in Osaka or the major cities, but everywhere else-- if you will go to the government and commit to live in that community for 15 years, they will give you a house and the land underneath the house for free because there are abandoned homes all over Japan because their population, not just their working age population, but their overall population has been in decline nonstop. And it's going to go on declining for the rest of this century.

So I would argue that the demographic background for developed economies is shifting in a way that's more like Japan than like other places, and that we are not going to have that kind of spiraling higher 10 to 15-year uncontrollable inflation that we went through. We're much more likely to see a peak much sooner than that, and maybe the other side of that hill as we get beyond it. And it hasn't been impossible, even in that challenged Japanese economy, to do well in the Japanese stock market. It's just taken a different approach than one you would take if the ship was always being driven higher by rapid growth of the economy.

Thanks, Jim. Maybe to build on that thought, one of the trends that's happened in the last couple of years, if we look at more the security side of things, is really been the divergence between more growth-oriented equities, but also with the more traditional kind of value or more cyclical kind of industries. And when I think about this longer term secular trend in markets and also what it would look like in a post-COVID world, what would be your thoughts in terms of portfolio positioning, but also in terms of that relationship between the more growth-oriented versus more traditional value stocks?

Well, I think there's value and there's value. And I think what you want is value with growth, if you like. There's two sets of businesses, I think, that have done well in this period. One of them has been tech, and I can make an argument that at least parts of tech are going to go on doing well even in the slow growth environment I talked about. All the more so, actually, because when growth is slow, the overall economic pie is not growing as fast as it used to, then you've got to work that much harder to maintain your share of the pie whether you're a worker or whether you're a business or not. And in order to stay competitive, what people, what companies reach for is technology to keep driving their costs down. So I think we're going to see successive waves of more spending on tech in order to drive costs lower.

And the companies in more traditional businesses-- that you and I would think of as more traditional value businesses-- in order to stay competitive in their own businesses, are going to have to embrace technology and adopt it. And some of them are better at that than others. You know, what we learned in the pandemic was that the companies that were ahead of the game in terms of digitizing their own business, that had already started working on that and that had digital platforms in place-- even though they might be selling sewing machines, but they were selling them much more online, if you like, to make it a simple example-- the companies that were way ahead in digitization were way more resilient in the downturn. And have done better and have usually done better as stocks, as well.

So I think value may do well. But I think it will be the more progressive parts of value, the companies that know how to take this technology and use it to make their businesses more competitive and more successful.

Yeah, and so maybe as we come close to wrapping things up, maybe you can just speak to the importance of dividends or cash flow when you're looking at companies and how you think that relationship will change as we move through this secular market.

Oh, sure. Well, I think dividends are important, very, because we've gone back and done all kinds of work that shows that over time, companies that pay dividends do better than companies that don't pay dividends. And they do even better than companies who were paying dividends but were forced to cut those dividends. So we'd rather have dividend payers than non-dividend payers, just generally speaking.

Now, there's a big distortion in that because there's been an awful lot of large tech companies that didn't bother paying dividends and did remarkably well. So in a way, what I guess I would look at is the ability to pay dividends. I would rather they actually paid me some dividends. But what I want to know for sure is that they have the ability to do it.

And so there's a couple of ways of being able to pay dividends. One of them is that your business is growing. And because your business is growing, your profits are growing. Because your profits are growing, you can keep on raising your dividends. The other way is to take a business that might be very conservatively financed, and instead, refinance it in a way that frees up cash flow for you to pay as dividends. But the price of that is that you've maybe built more risk into the balance sheet so that if you get in a downturn, you don't have the same flexibility and might come to grief. And I'd rather avoid those guys.

I want businesses where the top line sales are growing. I would like them to be growing faster than the economy. And I would put a hurdle rate on that over the next 10 years. I'd like to have businesses that have a pretty good chance of growing their sales, their earnings, and their dividends at a rate of somewhere between 4% and 6% per annum. And if you listed all the companies in the S&P 500 and all the companies in the TSX 300 and then started crossing out the names of the ones where you didn't have conviction they could do that, you'd get down to a much smaller list. But I'd like to get down to that list.

That is what we do. I know how you and your team run portfolios. And I know that's what you look for. But I know that even with the best of intentions, and even with all the capabilities that we as a firm have to do the examination and discovery to find out the companies where that's the likely possibility, we know that there will, at the end of the day, be some companies that we had great confidence could accomplish that, and they failed to do so. But if you're not selecting for that at the outset, if you're not selecting for not just the capability of paying your dividends but growing your dividends because your business is growing, I think you are building more risk into your portfolio if you're not selecting for that. And I think you're shutting yourself off from the best returns.

It's not dividend yield, to me, that matters as much, it's the capability to not only go on paying the dividend that's there but the high probability that you can raise the dividend from that point on. One of the things we saw through the financial crisis, which was a very tough time, was that the best companies, which were-- happily, many of them were in our portfolios-- even though their share price declined dramatically along with the market, the cash flow generated by those businesses kept rising, and their dividends kept rising. And that is, I think, a real comfort to know that you've picked businesses that have the capability of doing that.

I think that's a really important distinction. So I very much appreciate making that point. Very last question. I'd love to ask you more, but of course we've got to wrap up. But maybe just looking outside of North America, we haven't seen the same kind of lift in emerging markets or European markets this past year. Can you just speak to the opportunities you see outside of North America?

Sure. I think it's a great distinction to make, too, because it's very hard, isn't it, to pick up the paper and not read somebody telling you the market is hugely expensive and overvalued? And the next question, I think, right away would be which market are you talking about? And so we've got a US market, which has been trading above 20 times forward earnings-- In other words, above 20 times the earnings they're expected to earn in the coming 12 months-- for quite some time. And 20 times earnings has always made people jittery and look back at history and say that can't last and so on. But then, when you go and look at the Canadian market, we're not trading at 20 times forward earnings, we're trading at about 16 times forward earnings. And then if you go and look at Europe, it's even cheaper than the Canadian market probably at somewhere between 14 and 15 times. And go to the UK and it's remarkably cheap at 12 to 13 times. And Japan is cheap and looked at the same way.

All those other markets are trading either at or slightly below their long-term PE multiple in relation to forward earnings. The US market is trading three to four multiples above it. And then when you dig into those markets, you find out why. The US market has a very large exposure to tech and large cap tech, especially, and all the other markets don't. They have comparatively small exposures to that. And it's been large cap tech which has been driving that market, and why not? They're the businesses that have been enjoying very strong sales and earnings gains all through this piece. And the market is heading towards the guys who are performing the best, as you might understand.

So I say that there's two things. One, I don't think you can make a case for the market being in some sort of valuation bubble. And even if you could, bubbles go on inflating for a long period of time. So that's another thing I've learned over 50 years. But I'm more inclined, when I approach markets outside the US or Canada, to really focus on the businesses rather than on the geography.

Here's what a sensible risk management is. First of all, you have a portfolio that's balanced, somehow or other, in some intentional way between fixed income and equities. That's the first risk management tool. The second one is in equities themselves, you diversify across the various sectors of the market so that if one blows up, that it isn't the one that you're totally committed to. You have some diversified exposure. And then inside each sector, you're looking for the best businesses in that sector. And I don't think you should care very much where they live.

So for example, for years, Nokia was the leading handset maker in the cell phone business, for years. And of course, it's based in Helsinki. I don't think anybody cared very much what the Finnish economy was doing or even the European economy was doing when they were making a decision about whether or not to buy Nokia. And you could make the same argument for all kinds of businesses-- from Unilever through BMW, through any number of others. Their home market isn't what matters to them, it's their ability globally. You want the best businesses in each sector you can find.

Thomson Reuters lives at Queen Bay in Toronto. It's the largest electronic publisher in the world. It doesn't give anything away for free. You can only get what they have, which is mostly a legal and business side, by paying, and paying large fees to them. It's a wonderful business. It's a global business. They're the global leader in what they do. They do less than 3% of their business in Canada. So I say bring me more Thomson Reuters. Find businesses, no matter where they live, that have some real claim on the global consumer or business buyer.

Thank you, Jim. Thomson Reuters is another company that we like as well. So it's always appreciated to hear your support of it too. So that's great. Well, we'll have to wrap up there. But Jim, thank you so much for joining us. This has been fantastic. And all the best to you and your family over the holiday season.

And to you Danielle. Thank you.

Thank you.

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Welcome, everyone, to our video recording and market update. We are so pleased to have Jim Allworth here with us today. Jim is the Portfolio Strategist from RBC Dominion Securities. Thank you for being here, Jim.

My pleasure, Danielle.

Some of our clients may have seen you speak in the past, but for those who haven't, Jim has been in the investment industry for over 50 years, both as a research analyst and portfolio strategist. He's been with RBC for over four decades now, I believe. And in Jim's main role as our investment strategist is, of course, to develop a strategic view about the expected direction for major financial market. So welcome, Jim. And we've invited him here today to share all of his thoughts with all of you.

So, Jim, let's dig into it. You've seen a lot of different market conditions in past recessions. And as portfolio managers we're used to looking at a number of different economic variables to predict the condition for markets. But in this case, we've had also pay close attention to the case numbers globally for COVID-19, and also the progression and spread of the virus. It's led a lot of people to say this recession is different.

Can you comment on that? Like what does history tell us? And how does the virus itself impact, or does it, the way that we should be evaluating businesses that we're investing in? So where are we now?

Sure. Well, I think the most important difference to begin with is that this is a recession that arrived in an unconventional way, very unconventional way. Virtually every recession prior to that had been the result of the arrival of tight money and tight credit conditions, interest rates that were high enough that they were slowing the economy down. And that has always been our principal focus.

Our investment stance is pretty simple. Stay invested in equities until you see a recession on the horizon. And we watched many things to see the arrival of recessions. And while they were a lot closer to signaling a recession was coming than they had been any time in the last decade, they really were not yet saying a recession was coming. So it's COVID that gave it to us.

The other side of that is that we weren't in the tight money position and the Fed recognizing that panic was about to seize up financial markets stepped in and removed that risk. So we've never had tight credit in this at all.

Mm-hmm.

And that would normally, if you didn't have tight credit, would probably mean that a recession would be shallower or not last as long as most. But it remains to be seen in this case. So it's definitely different, right? And as you say, we're focused on the number of cases that are out there. And I think, first of all, it's worth remembering that this has all happened very, very quickly.

Mm-hmm.

And it might go on happening quickly. That is to say, all the developments in this might just all be coming at us rapidly week by week and month by month. So in January and February, COVID was no issue. It was a problem for the Chinese, everyone else's problem.

And then when it arrived and we acknowledged that it arrived, then we had to go and listen to the scientists who said this thing is going to take off, and it might be dangerous in taking off, and that it might overwhelm the health care services. But whether we do something about it and try and slow it down or whether we just let it run, the chances are the number of cases are going to peak somewhere in April and May. And they're then going to start turning down. And as they turn down, people are going to think more aggressively about reopening economies and getting the economy back to normal, if possible.

And in fact, that is what happened. In most places, the number of new cases peaked in March and April. And some have had problems since, but most have not. And the number of new cases have been falling steadily ever since. And the number of people in hospital and in intensive care in hospital has been falling even faster. And the number of deaths have been going down.

And yes, the talk about reopening economies has gone beyond talking and many economies in North America and in Europe have reopened, partially, perhaps, but on a road towards becoming more normal. Well, if you looked at the trajectory of the economy in all this, the second quarter was terrible. And it was terrible because the economy had been shut down.

Mm-hmm.

And the economy in the third quarter will be better because the economy is reopening. The question is what happens after that. And there are people out there who think this is a V shape and that it's not going to be stopped, that we're just going to see a steady progression in improvement of the economy, and it's going to be rapid.

And there are others who think that there's much worse to come, that the economy is going to fade again and head down into something more difficult. And there's probably where we are, which is we think the economy is going to keep improving, but it's not going to be comfortable. So [AUDIO OUT] steps forward, one or two steps back. And give you concern from time to time. And we think that's highly likely.

But I think this is a time to remind ourselves of some history because there is a lot of history to this.

Mm-hmm.

And we've lived through probably 120 years at least of pretty reliable historical data that we have to go back and look at. And over that 120 years, there have been a whole variety of things from pandemics, of which there have been quite a number. World wars, lesser wars that were still important-- Korea, for example. Vietnam, et cetera. Financial crises, nuclear disasters, all manner of things, and each one of those things at the time they were happening made people say, oh, my gosh, the world is changing for the worse and it's never going to get better.

And the victim of that was very often stock prices, which went down as if there was no future coming that was worth having. And that was always the wrong view to have. The economy in all cases recovered and recovered faster than people understand. And I don't want to take too long at this, but I'll mention two that come to mind right away.

The first one is the Spanish Flu. And I'll mention it because it was a pandemic. It follows on the heels of World War I. It was infinitely worse than this one. It killed 40 million people worldwide before it was done.

Wow.

People it killed were largely young adults between the ages of 18 and 35, unlike today's which preys on older people. And that was following on the heels of World War I, which had killed the same age group in the tens of millions. So if you were sitting there in 1920, you could have been forgiven if you came to the conclusion that having seen all these young adults massacred in two fell swoops that the economy would be a long time recovering.

And you would have been dead wrong, because a year and a half later the economy was running, and running hard, and went on running hard right through the 1920s. And the thing that ended all that, of course, was the stock market crash and The Depression. And I'm going to talk about The Depression for a moment because the word depression has come up in all this. Because as the market was sinking and the economy was sinking, people were worried that we were headed into a depression.

Well, one of the reasons they were worried about it was that in their minds The Depression was something that lasted for a very, very long time. Here's what people think. If you ask the average person what happened in The Depression, this is what they'll say-- even people who lived through it, this is what they'll say. They'll say, well, the stock market collapsed at the end of '29 and right after that the economy collapsed all through 1930, '31, and '32.

And then after it collapsed, it just lay there on the ground on its back and didn't move all through the dirty '30s. And then, finally, World War II came along and World War II pulled the economy back into good health. And all that middle part is just completely wrong. The economy did collapse in 1930, '31, '32 dramatically. But it didn't just lie there.

Starting in 1933, but more forcefully in 1934, it started growing again. In 1934, the US economy grew by 16% in one year. In the next year, it grew by about 14%. In the year after that, it grew at around 11%, the year after that, around 9%. All of them, very high growth rates. And it would have gone on growing beyond 1937 except that the US Congress lost its nerve, and it put in a tax increase to try and eliminate its deficit in one fell swoop, and it sent the economy right back into the ditch in 1938, and the stock market fell in half again.

But it didn't just lie there waiting for World War II to come along. It, in fact, started growing again in '39, and '40, and '41. And remember, the Americans didn't even get into the war till the end of 1941. And long before that, the economy was growing rapidly.

So what it tells you is that the recession-- the Great Depression is exactly like every other one of these events that I talked about in the last 100 years. When it was over, it was over. And once the economy responded to the availability of low cost credit like it always had and started growing again, and quite quickly was growing at a rapid rate. So whatever happens in this, when this is over, it's going to be over. And the economy will come back and be growing at a potential rate.

I'm not saying the economy will look the same. There's plenty of parts of the economy that have signaled that they're in long-term trouble. And there's plenty of parts of the economy that say that they offer great long-term potential. And there will be a changing of the guard and there will be some businesses that do not make it through this in the form they were in before. And I understand that. But the economy itself will be growing and there will be opportunity in it. And if the economy is growing, corporate earnings will be growing. And if corporate earnings are growing, then in our view, share prices on balance will be rising.

So this is different in terms of how it arrived. It might be different in how we come out of it, but it's likely not to be different once we're past it. And we'll be past it at some point. So the virus can keep throwing curveballs at us, but so far it's throwing nice, soft lobs at us.

We've got the death rate down. We've got at least two therapies out there, not counting vaccines that are working. We have one that cut the average hospital stay by someone who has to be-- anyone who had to be hospitalized, if they received this drug for five days, their hospital stay was cut by 30% in length, which is huge if what you're trying to do is make sure your system doesn't blow up on you.

And laterally, that same therapy, by the way, has shown that it actually reduces mortality rates as well hospital stay length. And then another therapy came along, which was a steroid that has been around and used since the 1960s, so we know-- and widely used, so we know it's safe. And it has actually reduced mortality of people who are in hospital by about 30%, which is huge.

And now we have 138 different vaccines, at least, under development. And three or four of them showing quite promising early results. One of them that's being developed by AstraZeneca in Europe might be available for getting approvals as early as September or October. And the developers of that say that the results in early trials are very promising.

The other two are, or two of the others are also being developed by major pharmaceutical companies, one by J&J, and one by Pfizer. And the importance of having an AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and the J&J involved is that not only do they have the funds to keep this drug going, but they've all committed to pre-building out the manufacturing capabilities, so on the day they get approvals, they will actually have doses that have been manufactured, not just in the millions, but in almost three cases, in the billions, which will be available very quickly. So this is a big, right?

Mm-hmm.

And then there's just the fact that the virus itself has weakened, if you like, over [AUDIO OUT]. And we've seen this from three major sources. Italy, which was one of the biggest hot spots going, and New York, an especially the New York City area, where health authorities have essentially said that the virus is not the virus it was a month ago, two months ago, or four months ago. That the number of hospitalizations is down a long way, but more importantly, of the number of people being hospitalized, the proportion requiring intensive care or ventilation has dropped even further.

And so all these things suggest that we're right to expect that when this is over, it's going to be over. And it's reasonable to expect it can be over later this year or next year. Well, that leaves a road clear for the economy to recover. How it recovers and how fast it recovers remains an open question.

Mm-hmm.

Our own view is that we won't-- the economy won't get back to where it was when all this started much before the early part of 2022. And it won't get back to its old trajectory. In other words, where it would have been if none of this had happened and it just kept motoring along with the way it had been, it won't get back to that until 2023.

But if you're going to wait until everything is back to where it was, clearly the market is not waiting and the market has moved forward here. So to me, this is-- yes, every recession is different, but one of the things they all share is that once they're ended, it's wrong to expect-- look at-- think of the financial crisis. Think of the people who were scared skinny in the financial crisis. I'll put my hand up. I was.

But staying scared was a mistake. And people waited for years, thinking that what the financial crisis had signaled is something even worse was around the corner. And in doing so, many of them missed a good part of what was the longest economic expansion and longest bull market in history. And I think taking that kind of an extreme negative approach is a big mistake. And being invested is important. Being invested sensibly is also important.

Maybe to build off of about how to be invested sensibly right now, one of the things that you mentioned too is just some of the changes that COVID-19 has brought on to the business environment. We've certainly seen how individual companies have-- some of them have been able to adapt and change to the new environment better than others. And part of that has been a real disparity in how growth stocks have done relative to the more conventional dividend blue chip oriented stocks.

If we look at major market indices, we can see that difference. The more growth oriented NASDAQ is up here today at about 19%. In contrast, the Dow Jones industrial average remains down, kind of in the 5% to 6% range. And I think for us as portfolio managers, a lot of our clients need income from the portfolio or they'll eventually need income from the portfolio. So it seems inappropriate to only buy growth stocks, especially given the valuation differences that have happened.

So our solution's been sort of a barbell approach where we've got dividend oriented stocks, but we've also integrated some growth stocks. Can you comment on what this has done to what companies are leading the pack and that positioning?

Sure. There's a lot of ways to approach this. But there's a lot of data out there that shows that in the long run, dividend paying stocks do better than stocks that don't pay dividends, in the long run. And that companies that have growing dividends do even better than stocks that just pay dividends. And that the stocks that do worse are the ones that cut dividends or eliminate your dividends. So there seems to be a balance that says dividends are a good thing.

Let's imagine for a moment that you're in a world where companies don't pay dividends. They never have. They don't do that. Then, in order to get income if you own those businesses, you'd have to sell some stock every year. And because everyone did that, it wouldn't seem abnormal, right? At the moment, it seems abnormal. Right?

So there's-- a lot of this a state of mind and psychology. It's up here in how you think about it. What I care about, I would prefer a company that pays dividends. I like that commitment. But what I really care about is that a company can pay dividends. That it's generating inside its business more cash flow than it needs to keep its business running and growing. After it's built its new plant, or whatever it's going to do, and repaired all its machinery, and given everyone a raise, and all the rest inside the business, there's still enough cash flow available to pay a dividend.

If it chooses not to because it sees such great growth opportunities that it wants to keep investing inside the business at its high internal rate of return, so be it. But I need to know that it's got the potential to pay dividends. And looked at the other way, I don't want a company that just pays dividends, but doesn't have the money to do it. And there are companies that are borrowing money in order to keep their dividend. And I'd rather not be there.

I want somebody whose earnings prospects justify my confidence. And I prefer some to come as dividends, but I don't have to have it coming as some of those dividends. I think your approach gets you there. Because, in fact, I'm sure that in the companies that you've got that are paying dividend, they're still quite good companies that have good prospects, and [AUDIO OUT].

And so I have no problem having the combination of some yield and lesser yield. What I'd like to think is that I could look at all those businesses three, four, or five years down the road and see, given from how they're performing now that they're going to have even more earnings available to pay out in dividends down the road. That's, to me, the ideal.

Yeah, I think that definitely connects with how we've been looking at the businesses that we've been owning. And just I think with COVID, an opportunity too to increase quality in the companies that we own, and making sure that everybody we've got on the balance sheet has good cash flow and good prospects for the future. So alignment there.

Maybe to kind of go back to something you mentioned earlier, which is this recession didn't come as a result of a breakdown in credit markets, in large part because of the stimulus that came out from governments. And it's hard not to worry a bit about what that government debt load looks like in the future. I think in Canada right now we're sitting to project about a $340 billion deficit this year. What does the increased debt load mean for our future? And is it really a problem for another day?

Oh, don't be such a worrywart, Danielle.

[LAUGHING]

Yes, well, if it is a problem, it's a problem for another day. It's not a problem today. That is to say, government-- I'm not talking about government debt. The debt that's been taken on to bring us out of this an to some extent corporate debt, too. I don't believe it's a problem in the short run. And the problem in the long run to an extent that it's probably less than I think people understand.

Here's one of the reasons why. One of the reasons why is that everybody is doing it. This isn't a case of-- if it was Canada or Spain that found themselves in some economic pickle, it was a real problem for them. And their way of getting out of it was to just go crazy, and borrow money, and pour it into their own economy to try and get them out of the difficulties they were in.

Then other people around the world would take a look at that and say, uh-oh, they really are having trouble and they want to borrow our money to get out of it. I think we're going to demand a higher rate from them and our interest rates would go up. And people would lose confidence in our currency. And our currency would be dropping. And we'd be in a full-scale crisis.

That's just not true for us, or for Spain, or for anybody else because absolutely everyone is doing it. You can take whatever billions that we're doing and compare it to the size of our economy, and then go take the billions that the US and everyone else is doing and compare it to the size of their economy, and essentially we're doing about what they're doing. So I don't see that as a problem.

The second problem is that people imagine somehow or other that governments are like households. And to use the common phrase, they have to take care of their financial affairs the same way. Well, a lot of that is, again, just psychology.

Canadians are culturally thrifty people. We're not as thrifty as people in Japan or people in China, who save 30% of their income, but we're thrifty people. And we generally have always viewed things like mortgages as some sort of a necessary evil that we have to take on to buy a house when we were young, but we certainly intended to pay that mortgage off. I have to tell you there's lots of people around the world who don't share that view and have not been in trouble because they didn't share that view.

Americans look, and talk, and sound a lot like us, but I haven't met very many American colleagues who haven't felt the need to pay off their mortgage. Remember, they get 30-year mortgages down there at the fixed rate and they can always renegotiate if they choose to. And if they can get a rate that's low enough, they put the pin in, and they got that payment for 30 years, and they're fine with that. That doesn't seem to be our mentality.

Mm-hmm.

So governments are not like people. They don't depart this world. They don't have to get their affairs in order before they leave. There's always a new taxpayer coming along. And assuming they can manage their economies reasonably, they can go on doing that indefinitely. And I frankly think Canada is in better shape than a great many countries to do that. Mainly because we were in a much stronger shape, certainly federally, an even provincially, our finances were in much better shape than every developed country, but Germany, going into this.

So I'm-- I find it hard to ring my hands and worry about it in a dramatic way. The issue out there, I think, that could have an impact if it's not managed properly, and it's not so much our ability to pay or service the debt, it's whether we are disciplined in the way we do things beyond that. And the way that could show up would be inflation down the road. And that's certainly not [AUDIO OUT] be in the near term at all, but it could be down the road.

Because we have engaged in money printing here, much more so than we did after the financial crisis. And too much money, if it's chasing too few goods, gives you inflation. That's the classic definition of inflation coined by Milton Friedman. He won a Nobel Prize for it. Inflation, he said, is always the result of too much money chasing too few goods.

We've got, arguably, too much money. Governments have printed huge amounts of money to stave off this COVID crisis. What we don't have is too few goods. There's excess across every industry around the world. Before we're going to get inflation as a result of all this, we're going to have to have that excess capacity used up. That's going to take at least two years, much more likely three or four years.

So if inflation is something that could be a problem, it's a problem for a number of years down the road. And I don't think is worth concerning ourselves about right now in terms of the way we invest.

I think-- thanks, Jim, for that. And we're getting close to time to wrap up. I'll maybe ask you one more quick question and then get your final thoughts. But I couldn't depart without talking a little bit about the US presidential election coming up this fall.

Originally, the polls were indicating that Trump would get a second term. It's now shifted where now it's looking more likely that the Democrats get in. Can you comment on the impact that either one would have on markets? It certainly connects to the idea of potentially more debt, higher taxes, depending on either outcome. What are your thoughts?

Well, in my long term-- I think the long-term impact is not big. The short-term impact conceivably could be. There's an old saying out there that the market doesn't like it if somebody wins. And winning in this case is defined as somebody sweeping to victory. So if Biden wins the presidency and the Democrats keep Congress, keep the House, and take over the Senate, then I don't think the market would like that.

And if the opinion polls, which are kind of showing that right now, persistent showing that after the conventions, then I think the market would find that as perhaps an excuse to pause for a while. And if that actually happened, I think on the next day the market wouldn't like it and it probably wouldn't like it for a few months thereafter.

If the Republicans swept, the market would probably be happier for a while because an awful lot of guys on Wall Street are Republican enough. A lot of CEOs are Republican. And they somehow or other [AUDIO OUT] are going to avoid-- that if the Republicans got in, they wouldn't get higher corporate taxes, and they wouldn't get a wealth tax. But I think a few months down the road, they would change their mind about that because they'd start seeing that a government that can do anything it wants might actually do that. And that's what they don't like. They like gridlock.

So I think either party sweeping could potentially have some negative impact on the market, but I hasten to say I think that negative impact would have run its course within a year. That of all this stuff, all the worries about virus, all the worries about elections, all the rest of it, are small potatoes compared to the credit cycle and compared to the long-term re-emergence of the things that drive share prices and corporate values higher, which is the growth in global population, the growth and prosperity, and the growth in productivity, a factor really since the Industrial Revolution began.

So I'm a-- I remain resolutely long-term optimistic. I'll take my comings and goings in the short term and know that I can't predict them. But I believe focusing on finding great businesses whose future prospects look good is the way to approach this.

OK. Thanks so much, Jim. We're basically at time. But thank you so much for your time. And thank you to all of you. And we'll check in later. Thanks, Jim.

Thanks, Danielle. It was my pleasure.