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from Global Investing:
Weekly Radar: Watch the thought bubbles…
Far from the rules of the dusty old investment almanac, it’s up, up and away in May after all. And judging by the latest batch of economic data, markets may well have had good reason to look beyond the global economic ‘soft patch’ – with US employment, Chinese trade and even German and British industry data all coming in with positive surprises since last Friday. Is QE gaining traction at last?
Well, it's still hard to tell yet in the real economy that continues to disappont overall. But what's certain is that monetary easing is contagious and not about to stop in the foreseeable future - whether there's signs of a growth stabilisation or not. With the Fed, BoJ and BoE still on full throttle and the ECB cutting interest rates again last week, monetary easing is fanning out across the emerging markets too. South Korea was the latest to surprise with a rate cut on Thursday, in part to keep a lid on its won currency after Japan's effective maxi devaluation over the past six months. But Poland too cut rates on Wednesday. And emerging markets, which slipped into the red for the year in February, have at last moved back into the black - even if still far behind year-to-date gains in developed market equities of about 16%!
Not only have we got new records on Wall St and fresh multi-year highs in Europe and Japan, there’s little sign that either this weekend’s meeting in London of G7 finance chiefs or next weekend’s G20 sherpas gathering in Moscow will want to signal a shift in the monetary stance. If anything, they may codify the recent tilt toward easier austerity deadlines in Europe and elsewhere. But inevitably talk of unintended consequences of QE and bubbles will build again now as both equity and debt markets race ahead , even if the truth is that asset managers have been remarkably defensive so far this year in asset, sector and geographical choices ... one can only guess at what might happen if they did actually start to get aggressive! Perhaps the next pause will have to come from the Fed thinking aloud again about the longevity of its QE programme -- so best watch those thought bubbles!
Next week's big data and events:
G7 finance ministers and central bank governors meet in London Sat
EBRD meeting in Istanbul Sat
Pakistan general elections Sat
Bulgaria parliamentary elections Sun
China April Industrial output/retail sales Mon
France/Italy bond auctions Mon
Euro group meeting Mon
US April retail sales Mon
Indonesia rate decision Tues
EZ March industrial production Tues
German May ZEW sentiment Tues
ECOFIN meeting Tues
UK 5-yr gilt/Japan 30-yr JGB/Dutch DSL auctions Tues
EZ/DE/FR/IT flash Q1 GDP Weds
UK April jobless Weds
Iceland rate decision Weds
Greek PM Samaras in China Weds
Japan Q1 GDP Thurs
UK 30-yr gilt/Japan 5-yr JGB auction/German 2-yr auction Thurs
Spain’s Rajoy meets with unions on pension reforms Thurs
Draghi speech Milan Thurs
US/EZ April CPI Thurs
US April housing starts/permits, May Philly Fed index Thurs
Turkish rate decision Thurs
Turkey’s Erdogan in Washington Thurs
G20 sherpas meeting in St Petersburg Sat/Sun
from India Insight:
Ponzi scheme in West Bengal flames out, embers linger
Suicides, thousands of duped investors, hundreds of laid-off journalists, bickering politicians, protests slack regulation, one suspected mastermind arrested: it's Ponzi scheme time in West Bengal, and it looks likely that little will change after the drama ends.
The latest fleecing of poor and middle-class investors brought in an estimated $730 million, according to media reports, though public interest litigation filed in the Calcutta High Court by one lawyer says the amount is as high as Rs. 300 billion. ($5.5 billion) The head of the Saradha Group and accused mastermind of the scheme, Sudipta Sen, was arrested in Kashmir on April 23 after two weeks as a fugitive. He has maintained his innocence, and reportedly threatened suicide, saying he might not be able to repay investors.
from Global Investing:
Weekly Radar: Second-guessing Japan flows as global growth slows
Figuring out what was driving pretty violent market moves this week was trickier than usual – and that says something about how much the herd has scattered this year, with ‘risk on-risk off’ correlations having weakened sharply. Just as everyone puzzled over a potential "wall of money" from Japan after the BOJ’s aggressive reflation efforts, the bottom seemed to fall out of gold, energy and broader commodity markets – dragging both equity markets and, unusually, peripheral euro zone bond yields lower in the process. As dangerous as it may be to seek an overriding narrative these days, you could possibly tie all up these moves under the BOJ banner – something along these lines: the threat of a further yen losses pushes an already pumped-up US dollar ever higher across the board and undermines dollar-denominated commodities, which have already been hampered by what looks like yet another lull in global demand. Developed market equities, whose Q1 surge had been reined in by several weeks of disappointing economic data and an iffy start to the Q1 earnings season, were then hit further by a lunge in heavy cap mining and energy stocks. The commodities hit may also help explain the persistent underperformance of emerging markets this year. What's more the lift to Italian and Spanish government bonds comes partly from an assumption any Japanese money exit will seek U.S. and European government bonds and relatively higher-yielding euro government paper may be favoured by some over the paltry returns in the core ‘safe havens’ of Treasuries or bunds. The confidence to reach for yield has clearly risen over the past six months as wider systemic fears have receded – something underlined in dramatic style this week by a huge lunge in gold, now lost almost 20 percent in the year to date.
While all that logic may be plausible, there have been dozens of other reasons floating around for the seemingly erratic twists and turns of the week.
from Unstructured Finance:
“I’m from the Treasury, and I’m here to help”
Ronald Reagan famously said that the “nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'” But according to a report from SNL, the government may actually help banks when it forces them to add directors to their boards. Every bank CEO's worst nightmare is having the government name directors to his or her board. Usually, banks pack their boards with clients or prominent people that offer prestige and potential business leads, but little substantive oversight. At the smaller banks that SNL is focusing on, that often amounts to people like the owner of the local car dealership, or the owner of the local golf equipment seller. (For a stereotypical example of a community bank’s directors, consider the board of Smithtown Bancorp, which was sagging under the weight of failed loans before being taken over by People’s United Bank in 2010.)
The Treasury, on the other hand, tends to appoint people with actual banking experience, who can do what board members are supposed to do: keep an eye on management for the benefit of shareholders. The government only does so for banks that have lost their way: the Treasury has the right to name directors to boards of banks that received bailout money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and that missed six quarters of dividend payments. Typically, these appointees are bankers with more than 20 years of experience.
By SNL’s reckoning, the banks with Treasury-appointed directors have racked up median stock gains of 50.38 percent since taking on the new board members, compared with a median gain of 28.22 percent in an index of bank stocks.
Of course there may be other reasons for this outperformance - for example, it may be that small bank stocks in general have outperformed larger bank stocks over the relevant time frame, or that relatively weak banks have been in greater demand from value investors betting on an improving economy. But it may also be that the government has found a fix for the principal-agent problem at banks that have stumbled into trouble.
from MacroScope:
Firefighting in the euro zone
Money markets largely braved Cyprus’s bailout saga last week, but figures showing liquidity conditions are tightening suggest sentiment may not be as resilient the next time around.
Data from CrossBorder Capital, an independent financial firm that specialises in analysing global liquidity flows, shows the euro zone saw its biggest capital outflow in March since late 2011 – around the time the ECB injected liquidity into the financial system.
from Global Investing:
Weekly Radar-”Slow panic” feared on Cyprus as central banks meet and US reports jobless
US MARCH JOBS REPORT/THREE OF G4 CENTRAL BANKS THURS/NEW QUARTER BEGINS/FINAL MARCH PMIS/KENYA SUPREME COURT RULING/SPAIN-FRANCE BOND AUCTIONS
Given the sound and fury of the past fortnight, it’s hard not to conclude that the messiness of the eventual Cyprus bailout is another inflection point in the whole euro crisis. For most observers, including Mr Dijsselbloem it seems, it ups the ante again on several fronts – 1) possible bank contagion via nervy senior creditors and depositors fearful of bail-ins at the region’s weakest institutions; 2) an unwelcome rise in the cost of borrowing for European banks who remain far more levered than US peers and are already grinding down balance sheets to the detriment of the hobbled European economy; and 3) likely heavy economic and social pressures in Cyprus going forward that, like Greece, increase euro exit risk to some degree. Add reasonable concerns about the credibility and coherence of euro policymaking during this latest episode and a side-order of German/Dutch ‘orthodoxy’ in sharp relief and it all looks a bit rum again.
from Breakingviews:
Potemkin Dell fight would have optical merits
By Jeffrey Goldfarb
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Even losers could emerge as winners from the Dell takeover battle. Blackstone Group, Silver Lake Partners, the Dell board and founder Michael Dell could stand to benefit from the impression of a hard-fought auction. A Potemkin fight, if that’s what it turns out to be, just may not help shareholders quite so much.
from Edward Hadas:
Banker-think in welcome retreat
For once, investors have got it right. In 2008, their panic turned a financial crisis into a long multinational recession, but they have mostly yawned right through the drama in Nicosia. They hardly twitched at a stream of warnings from investment banks and pundits: bank deposits are no longer sacrosanct; the European Union has been exposed as despotic and incompetent; the Russians are coming; the Russians are going; capital controls will destroy everything; “bail in” (taking losses on loans that cannot be repaid) is the end of the world as we once knew it.
Such talk was out of proportion. Cyprus is a small country - its GDP would put it at 116 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest quoted U.S. companies - with a financial sector that had expanded excessively for two decades, almost entirely by attracting flight capital from Russia. A national financial collapse was both insignificant and merited. Besides, the EU and the International Monetary Fund had a plan to deal with the collapse: a combination of financial help from other countries and managed pain for depositors in Cypriot banks.
from Unstructured Finance:
Cash is king in housing
By Matthew Goldstein
It's no secret that housing in the U.S. has become an investors market, especially if it's an investor with cash to burn.
For more than a year now, we and just about everyone else in the financial media have been writing about how Wall Street-backed firms are looking to buy-up the wreckage of the housing bust on the cheap and rent out those homes until the time is right to sell them for a sweet profit. And it should come as no surprise that much of that buying is being done with cash because it's the easiest way for an investor get a deal done quick.
from Global Investing:
After disappointing start to 2013, how will hedge funds catch up?
Despite the early-year rally in equity markets, some hedge funds seem to have had a disappointing start... yet again.
JP Morgan notes that the industry's benchmark HFRI index was up 2.8% by end-February, well below the 4.6% for MSCI All-Country index.
