Don’t Bank On It

On April 13th, a financial pundit with a wide media following made the following (loosely transcribed) proposition about US banking stocks: Banks won’t rally because rates -long and short- are too low; Japan is our marker – banks there falling while their US/EZ peers rose pre-GFC and have not made any ground since; vis-à-vis their EZ peers, US bank returns have long been anomalous, ergo their out-performance won’t be repeated.  We demur in the main.

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Whatever it doesn’t take

On March 15th, the Eurozone branch of the Throw-more-money-at-it lobby were making themselves heard, calling for the ECB to run the printing presses for a limited (author pulls down lower eyelid with index finger) period as a supplement to the to the €120 billion in extra security purchases already made to that point. [NB total ‘assistance’ to April 17th had reached to €275bln in RP, €148bln in securities, and €126bln in FX swaps for a total of €550bln in five short weeks].We responded:-

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Utterly Negative

Mario Draghi emerged last week from the much-awaited meeting of the ECB Governing Council meeting clutching a fairly bland official communiqué which extended the envisaged freeze on interest rates out to the latter part of next year (aka, ‘forward guidance’), pledged that there would be no shrinkage of the Bank’s securities portfolio (so-called ‘quantitative tightening’) for some considerable period after that ended, and gave details of the terms on which the next batch of loan socialization can be refinanced under the aegis of its TLTRO III programme. [First Published June 7th] Continue reading

The Turn of the Tide

Have we finally reached the high-water mark of the current bull run? Is all the good news in – and the last, most shaky, marginal buyer along with it, inveigled in by the bounce from February’s brief Vol-au-Vent? If so, what are the implications? Where are the trigger points? How will any weakness manifest itself?  Continue reading

How the VIX Seller Lost his Shirt (updated)

Previously featured by the good folk at Real Vision, my look at how the narrative we construct around the events of the market is all important in determining how we react to it and, hence, what further ramifications these might involve.

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The CAPE of Good Hope

Though we have come to look a little askance at the seemingly ubiquitous CAPE measure – not least because of its gratingly unnuanced adoption by the Permabears – we can still utilise it to derive some broad sense of the market’s status once we attempt to adjust it for what we see as two of its bigger flaws: the seemingly arbitrary nature of the 10-year calculation period and its lack of regard for the effect of those wider asset valuations being expressed in the bond market that we have just touched on above. Continue reading

Where’s the Off Switch?

In our latest piece we look at the ECB’s overkill and all manner of possible over-valuations at work in different markets around the world – the two not being entirely unconnected, the reader might note! Continue reading

Once through with feeling

Some readers may be interested in putting a voice – and even a face – to the author. Below are links to three recent audio-visual publications in which I discuss US & Chinese macro as well as the interrelations between the three great asset classes of stocks, bonds, an commodities. Following on is a wider sampling of my views. Continue reading

Ten Years After

A little over 10 years ago, a hitherto obscure German institution called IKB – majority-owned by an arm of the German government – suddenly made headlines around the world.

On the last day of July 2007, a company which ironically had its origins in a foredoomed effort to ‘stimulate’ the German economy in the aftermath of the Weimar Republic’s disastrous by financing small businesses, but also by partaking of the contemporary, pre-Depression boom in real estate, revealed that, once again, it had been seduced by the lure of a property bubble. [A version of this article appeared as part of the inaugural edition of ETF StreamContinue reading

Doleful dollar boosts the Base

[An edited version of the following appeared in Moneyweek under the title, ‘What’s unsettling the US Dollar?‘]

Dollar makes worst start to the year since 1985,’  screamed the headlines a few weeks ago in a classic click-bait attempt to get people to read about what they already should know by using a somewhat artificial statistic – after all, since when did the world revolve around what happened specifically between Dec 31st and July 31st?

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