Enrique Chang said monetary easing around the world – last seen on Sunday when China again freed up capital for banks to lend – had been slow to feed through to real economies.

Even the US, where growth had picked up in recent years, was only advancing at about 2.5 per cent despite six years of expansionary policy by the Federal Reserve.

Along the way, extreme forms of monetary policy such as quantitative easing helped inflate financial assets such as shares and housing, while low oil prices and job market slack had arrested price rises in the real economy.

Although "not seeing anything in today's data that says inflation is an issue", investors should be cautious of any shock that forced central banks to start suddenly lifting interest rates, Mr Chang said.

He said rather than deleveraging after the global financial crisis, the world had simply shifted its debt from households and companies to governments.

"The central banks are forcing the marginal investor into riskier assets," Mr Chang said on Monday.

"Short to medium term, that seems to be working for the markets.

"However, it has been less successful in generating any reasonable level of growth.

"So, don't fight the central banks in the short term to medium term, but be very wary longer term as to what this unique experiment in our financial history is going to do," he said.

Janus, which manages more than $US183 billion ($235 billion) across a range of equity, fixed-income, alternative and multi-asset strategies, uses a combination of bottom-up research to pick stocks and other assets while weighing the impact of macroeconomic changes such as the People's Bank of China's decision on Sunday night to reduce banks' reserve requirement ratio by 100 basis points.

Janus director of research and portfolio manager Carmel Corbett Wellso said the move by Beijing could be positive for banks.

Banks have been among the few corporate sub-sectors to have lagged the recent equity rally in China.

Concerns about slowing growth in the country and the possibility of a build-up in non-performing loans were behind investors' reluctance to buy financial stocks, she said.

"The banks haven't actually participated in the rally that we've seen over recent months," Ms Wellso said.

"This particular cut is definitely going to improve margins for banks and potentially increase demand for credit again," she said.

Like elsewhere in the world, the PBoC easing was aimed, ultimately, at stimulating the economy and creating jobs, Mr Chang said.

"China has a developing issue around labour and this is another signal to the markets to say 'we're serious about it'," he said.

Meanwhile, the US central bank had been extremely careful about telegraphing the possible start to its first tightening cycle since before the the global financial crisis, he said.

From bets that the first interest rate hike would come in June and be followed by a rapid succession of hikes, most Fed watchers expected the central bank to first hike in September and perhaps follow up with a second increase before the end of the year.

Although not as dramatic as earlier expected, the tightening bias still ran counter to most of the rest of the developed world, creating investment opportunities in divergence, Mr Chang said.

"The short answer is that we expect one or two rate hikes before the end of the year; although, if this does not happen, we will not be shocked," he said.

"What this is doing is that it is making other equity markets a little more attractive because their central banks are going the other way.

"We're not pulling out of the US equity markets, but if we were at normal weight, we may be a little bit underweight, with a little more in Europe and a little more in Japan."

He said while Europe and Japan remained more concerned with deflation than the risk of inflation, the Fed was keeping an eye on prices.

"We've had a different type of inflation, which is asset inflation," he said.

"The S&P 500 was at 650 points at its low; it's at about 2100 today.

"We've had inflation there; we've had inflation in commercial real estate. You might call it return, but part of it is due to liquidity.

"So, we're already had asset inflation, or asset returns, but we haven't had it in the input costs."