Cash levels ticked down and growth expectations rebounded tentatively from an eight-month low, helping to push a survey measure of professional investor sentiment higher for the first time since June.

That’s all according to the September installment of BofA’s closely-watched Global Fund Manager survey.

The bank’s Michael Hartnett attributed a hodgepodge of marginal improvements to the perception that the Fed’s on the verge of pulling off the fabled soft landing.

As the figure above shows, the soft landing consensus reached a record high at 79% of responses on the eve of the first Fed cut. Hard landing’s still polling above “no landing,” a reflection, in party anyway, of the deteriorating US labor market.

Driving the soft landing consensus in the US: Strong household and corporate balance sheets. “Corporate profit and household wealth are at record highs, leaving them less vulnerable to economic shocks,” Bloomberg mused on Tuesday.

(Narrator: The benefits of current domestic macro dynamics in the US are accruing disproportionately — and in some cases almost exclusively — to the “haves” with very little or nothing at all left for the “have-nots,” both on the household and corporate side.)

Over half of panelists in the BofA poll said there won’t be a US recession in the next 18 months, as illustrated by the figure on the left, below.

And yet, a US downturn retained its spot at the top of the “tail risk” list (figure on the right).

Responses appeared to evidence a pronounced rotation to bond proxies and away from cyclicals. The utilities Overweight was the highest since 2008, for example, and commodity allocations receded to seven-year lows. Commodities have struggled of late. If you’re the “tactical” type (i.e., if you’re the kind of person who suspects, against all evidence, that you can beat the market by timing it), Hartnett offered this: “The bigger the Fed cut, the better for cyclicals.”

Needless to say, the share of survey respondents who said monetary policy was too restrictive rose again, reaching another “since 2008” high.

Think of that as an anecdotal version of the FFs/2s chart I’ve highlighted on several occasions (the inversion there is among the largest in history). Nine in 10 BofA panelists expect the curve to steepen (bull steepen, obviously).

“Investors are best described as ‘nervous bulls’,” Hartnett went on. Risk appetite in the poll, defined as the share who said they’re taking higher-than-normal risk, hit an 11-month low, as a net 23% of investors expressed taking lower risk than usual.