Despite the Federal Reserve (Fed) cutting interest rates and the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate falling from its high of 8% in 2023 to just over 6%, the U.S. housing market continues to face challenges. Sellers are facing tepid demand and seeing potential buyers back out. Affordability, despite recent improvements, remains far below pre-pandemic levels. Residential investment per household has not improved, and structural factors mean supply constraints and price pressures could continue even if the Fed lowers rates further.
Concerns are growing over economic activity, political tension and policy uncertainty in the U.S., creating a challenging investment environment. Headlines throughout 2025 and so far in 2026 underlined this uneasiness; foreign investors were reportedly leaving U.S. markets in droves amid currency volatility and tariff-driven fears, possibly spelling the end of U.S. exceptionalism as we know it. Adding to these doubts is the spectre of an increasingly deglobalized world.
For much of the past decade, emerging markets (EM) were viewed primarily as a high-beta extension of global growth. Allocators tended to treat the asset class as cyclical exposure, sensitive to dollar strength, commodity swings, and Federal Reserve policy shifts.