"New orders for manufactured goods are declining, suggesting a forthcoming fall in corporate profits," he added by email.
The housing market is also receding, with 400,000 fewer new residential construction starts than a year ago as real estate lending is "plummeting," Mr. Rosen noted.
In addition, while unemployment is quite low, job growth is slowing, while total commercial bank lending fell by some $104.7 billion in the last two weeks of March alone, the biggest such two-week decline since such data was first tracked by the Federal Reserve in 1973, he said.
For now, Mr. Rosen said the biggest near-term uncertainty for institutional investors is the growth of the economy.
"History and logic suggest that the latter half of the year will be weaker than the first half," he warned.
Should the economy slip into a recession when inflation is still well above the Federal Reserve's 2% target, it would present the central bank with "an unreconcilable choice of maintaining a tight policy to bring inflation lower while choking economic activity or accepting a higher level of inflation that may have to be addressed later with harsher measures."
For institutional investors, if the economy remains on a "gentle path of lower inflation and moderating growth" while avoiding an economic contraction, Mr. Rosen noted, the markets should prove relatively benign.
"But higher inflation and/or weaker economic activity will be harmful to valuations across asset classes," he cautioned.
Mr. Rosen said he sees the most weakness in sectors that are most sensitive to interest rates: real estate and housing. "But we also see softness in manufacturing, which is contracting, and in retail sales," he added. "So, broadly, the hard assets, the 'goods' parts of the economy, are where we see the most weakness."
But the most hopeful news for investors over the medium-term is the "pace of innovation that is occurring across industries that offer exceptional investment opportunities," including artificial intelligence, drug discovery and renewable energy. These are technologies, he noted, that "will transform our economies, societies and environment. Innovation is the ultimate source of wealth, and there has never been a more opportune time for investors in innovation than today."
The inflation that the economy has been facing, he explained, was caused by a combination of the massive fiscal stimulus and "monetary malfeasance" by the Fed, which he compared to a "drunk driver veering off the road and then swerving back the other way to avoid the cliff."
Angeles has $6 billion of assets under management.
