Global Investing

The old lore about the best way to cure a hangover is with a few more nips of whatever it was you were imbibing the previous evening, commonly known as "hair of the dog."

The extension of this rally in stocks and just about every other asset identified with risk feels like a hair-of-the-dog situation. Between 2003 and mid-2008, easy flow of capital facilitated revelry in stocks, emerging markets, real estate, bonds, and high-yielding currencies.

REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

When investors invariably lost interest in an asset class where valuations could no longer be denied, they flocked to another - witness $150-a-barrel oil, $1,000 gold prices, and crazy gyrations in wheat and soybeans, of all things.

Then the hangover came. Major stock indexes were cut in half. Oil went to $30 a barrel, and investors fled for cover in the dollar and the safety of Treasury bonds.

With U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks cutting rates to nothing, money worked its way back into the markets, though.

By Jason Benham

It’s the property face of the Gulf’s business and tourist hub and the developer of palm-shaped islands visible from space – so Dubai will simply not allow property firm Nakheel to default on its huge $3.5 billion Islamic bonds which mature in December.

Just think of the bad publicity it would bring to the region, and there’s already been plenty of that. Another kick in the teeth is certainly not what Dubai needs. Plenty of critics have joined the ‘bash Dubai” bandwagon and several more are set to join the ranks at some stage. 

But any default would mark a failure for Dubai World, the state-owned conglomerate, and a castrophe for Dubai’s government, which has ploughed billions of dollars over recent years into making Dubai what it is today.

So who is right and who is wrong?The stock market has rallied by more than 50 percent in the last five months. But bond market yields currently hover around 3.4%, and while that's nowhere near close to the crisis-induced record low reached at the end of 2008, a graph of the 10-year note's yield shows that it remains lower than almost any point other than when prices spiked in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse.

Ten-year yields remain in a tight range.

Equity investors would rightly point to better housing data and stronger economic indicators as a sign that things are looking up. The bond market, meanwhile, continues to worry that the outlook remains grim. Yields have been bound in a range between 3.4% and 4% since late May, despite the dark warnings from those "bond vigilantes" that believe crushing U.S. debt will turn off our major foreign benefactors.

But a rally in both the bond and stock markets was a fixture of the financial scene for a number of years. Strong growth coupled with low inflation created the so-called Goldilocks scenario, where bond yields could rally, and stocks flourished in part due to lower borrowing costs.

Investors have been forced to contend with a severe pullback in consumer demand and the panic that overtook the banking sector in late 2008.

Since March, stocks are up by nearly 50 percent and investors have shifted into riskier fixed-income assets as well, but whether these rallies continue will hinge on whether investors are drawn to those purchases, not whether they're forced into it because nothing else looks attractive.

That's how Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive at bond fund manager Pacific Investment Management Co., put it when speaking with Reuters Television earlier today. He noted that investors in longer-dated Treasuries were moving in that direction, in part because of the desire by authorities to move them away from short-dated risk.

Reuters has taken its monthly snapshot of the investment choices of leading fund management houses across the world. At the end of July, the picture painted was one of investors embracing risk and shutting down their safest holdings.

Equity holdings as a percentage of a typical balanced portfolio were at their highest since the end of August last year, just a couple of weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed. Here is what has been happening to equity holdings this year: 

At the same time, cash holdings have been cut back drastically. They are now at a level last seen in May 2007.  Here’s what that looks like:

By any standard the second quarter of 2009 was remarkable. Here are some numbers to chew over as the third quarter gets under way:   

— World stocks as measured by the MSCI All-Country World Index had their best quarter since the benchmark was first compiled in 1988.

    — The world index gained 21.2 percent for the second quarter. Its nearest “competitor” was the fourth quarter of 1998 when it rose 20.66 percent.

Five things to think about this week:

BOND YIELDS 
- Nominal bond yields have risen across the curve, while term premiums and fixed income volatility are higher in an environment of uncertainty about how central banks will exit from quantitative easing policies once recovery takes hold. Bonds have turned into the worst-performing asset class this year according to Citi and none of the factors which markets have blamed for this are about to disappear. Curve steepening seen in April/May has started to reverse and whether it continues is being viewed as a more open question than whether yields head higher still.

RATTLING EQUITIES? 
- World stocks' are struggling to extend the near-50 percent gains seen since March 9 but they have yet to succumb to gravity despite a back up in government bond yields. Citigroup analysts reckon global equity markets can rally as long as Treasury yields stay below 5-6 percent but it might be the speed of yield moves that determines whether equities get rattled or keep looking past higher borrowing costs to the recovery story. 

INFLATION EXPECTATIONS 
-  Increases in the prices of oil and other commodities have seen the CRB index rise about 30 percent in less than four months and sustained gains will risk filtering through to prices and price expectations. Inflation reports are due out on both sides of the Atlantic next week but markets are looking further out and starting to price in the risks of a pick up in price pressures. Breakevens have turned positive all along the U.S. yield curve for the first time since autumn and euro zone breakevens have risen. Also, a Bank of England survey indicates public price expectations are up. Bid/cover ratios and tails at inflation-linked bond auctions will tell their own story on extent of demand for inflation hedges.

Five things to think about this week:

VOLATILITY
- World stocks’ near-50 percent gain since early March may be levelling off — investors have factored in much of the output recovery that is in the pipeline and fresh impetus could be needed from further improvements in economic indicators or the corporate outlook. With many fund managers yet to wade in with the cash piles on which they have been sitting, a bout of volatility looks more likely than a dramatic pullback.

GROUP OF 8
- Talk of green shoots of economic recovery has removed some of the threat of global economic meltdown and therefore reduced the pressure to come up with coordinated international policy response. The Lecce finance ministers’ meeting will test G8 nations’ commitment to putting up extra money for the IMF and an SDR allocation increase. The risk is that cracks appear on these and other issues (eg QE, fiscal stimulus, etc). Given expanded IMF resourcing was one of the planks on which the equity market/emerging market rebound was built, any signs of pullback could fuel volatility and throw up risks for the assets which have benefited most from that rally.

DOLLAR STANCE
- Asian reserve managers’ reassurance on Treasuries holdings came in the same week as rumblings of discomfort from some emerging market countries (eg South Africa, Israel) on the dollar’s slide and its fallout. Soothing noises from Asia about their dollar-denominated holdings and its FX impact risk being cancelled out by the chatter about international reserve currencies building in the run-up to the first BRIC summit later in June.

Analysts are starting to wonder if the International Monetary Fund will issue bonds denominated in its currency, Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), to boost the international lender’s capital. 

G20 leaders meeting today are said to be ready to agree a tripling of the IMF’s resources, to $750 billion. One source at the summit said the IMF might also tap international capital markets. 

BNP Paribas analysts like the idea of SDR bonds that could be bought by central banks reallocating portfolios away from the dollar. “Increased IMF firepower and the IMF likely to issue SDR-denominated bonds later this year will allow equities to move significantly higher,” they say in a client note.

The recent spate of shark attacks on Australian beaches could mark a turning point in global deflation and signal a change in fortunes for some beleaguered emerging economies, if Nomura strategist Sean Darby is to be believed.

Speaking at a Nomura investors forum, Darby said a chance sighting of a shark on Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach three weeks ago made him realise that prices of grain and other soft commodities — punished of late by global recession fears — could be due for a rebound.

“I actually saw a shark on Bondi Beach and that made me wonder about the impact of La Nina and how there’s a severe drought around the world at a time when many farmers are finding it hard to access credit,” said the Hong Kong-based analyst.