The 2027 liquidity turn
Money flowing through world markets has already peaked, on Michael Howell’s clock. He puts the bottom in mid-to-late 2027. Ed Yardeni has the S&P at 10,000 by then.
The everything bubble is still being fueled. Michael Howell’s point is that the fuel is already running down. CrossBorder Capital, the London shop he founded, publishes a global liquidity index — a measure of money moving through world financial markets. On his telling that index is the key driver of asset prices, it has already peaked, and it is more than halfway through the down-cycle.
The dated call is mid-to-late 2027. Not this year. An earlier concertina rebound is possible. He does not treat it as the base case. “The liquidity cycle per se is unlikely to bottom within the next six months,” he told Macro Voices. If the path holds, the next year-plus is risk-off and lower-beta, not a new high built on a 2026 trough.
This everything bubble will inevitably come to an end and you’re starting to see signs that liquidity is rolling over. And therefore we’ve got to accept the fact that after every bubble comes a bust.
Michael Howell, Macro Voices, August 2026
The liquidity may have been triggered by central-bank easing, he says, but it is now running out of their control. A White House that wants cuts sits on the other side of that clock. The fork is open.
Howell’s clock
Schematic of Howell’s wording. No peak month is dated, so none is plotted. The 65-month periodicity is his own charting.
Gold is a China story
Howell does not treat gold as a war hedge. In his account the metal is rising because the People’s Bank is printing to cheapen the yuan at home — a China story running on a different clock from the US cycle. Historic Chinese debts, an internal devaluation, and a gold price that tracks PBoC liquidity rather than the Strait of Hormuz.
The other landing
Ed Yardeni, a veteran Wall Street strategist who has been structurally bullish since 2009, has the opposite arrival in the same window. No recession through the end of 2029. The S&P at 10,000 on $500 of earnings times a 20 times multiple — the same multiple Nick Colas uses to justify paying up, because earnings have been steady enough for fifteen years to earn it. Year-end 2026 arithmetic, on Yardeni’s numbers: $403 times 20, about 8,250.
The United States, on that telling, has been hit with a pandemic, a supply-shock inflation, a Fed funds rate from zero to 5.5%, tariffs, and a war, and real GDP is at an all-time high. AI, in the housecleaning version of the same story, is not taking earnings from the future. It is an evolutionary step in a digital revolution that started with 1960s IBM mainframes, and it forced companies to freeze hiring and walk the floors. Information technology and communication services are already 45% of the S&P. Those firms, Yardeni says, do creative destruction better than anybody else, so margins trend up rather than mean-revert to 1985.