Global Investing

Victims of the dollar’s strength are piling up.

Total returns on emerging market local currency bonds dipped into the red for the first time this year, according to data from JPMorgan which compiles the flagship GBI-EM global diversified index of domestic emerging debt. While the EMBI Global index of sovereign dollar debt has already taken a hit the rise in U.S. yields, local bonds’ problems are down to how EM currencies are performing against the dollar.

JPMorgan points out that while bond returns in local currency terms, from carry and duration, are a decent 1 percent, that has been negated by the 1.3 percent loss on the currency side. With the dollar on the rampage of late  (it’s up almost 4 percent in 2013 against a grouping of major world currencies) that’s unsurprising. But a closer look at the data reveals that much of the loss is down to three underperforming markets — South Africa, Hungary and Poland. These have dragged down overall returns even though Asian and Latin American currencies have done quite well.

The graphic below shows South African local debt bringing up the bottom of the table, with the FX component of returns at around minus 9 percent  In rand terms however the return is still in positive territory, but only just. Hungary and Poland fare only slightly better.

Many bond positions are of course hedged. But as we wrote here yesterday  in an article on South Africa, escalating currency weakness can trigger exits from local bond markets.  And worryingly, JPMorgan notes that returns in local currency terms have plateaued at 1 percent over the past 10 days.

Fear of many years of stagnation in the major western economies has everyone fretting about a repeat of  the “lost decades” that Japan suffered after its banking and real estate bubble burst in the early 1990s. Indeed HSBC economists were recently keen to point out that U.S. per capita growth over the noughties was already actually weaker than either of Japan’s lost decades.

But in a detailed presentation on the impact of two years of soveriegn debt crisis on euro zone government bond holdings, Barclays  economist Laurent Fransolet asks whether that market too is turning into the Japanese government bond market — where years of slow growth, zero interest rates, current account surpluses and captive local buyers have depressed borrowing rates for years and turned JGBs into an increasingly domestic market dominated by local banks, pension funds and insurers. Non-residents hold less than 10 percent of JGBs, compared to more than 50 percent for the EGB as a whole, and Japanese banks hold up to 35 percent of their own government bond market.

But is the euro government market heading in that direction after successive crises have seen foreign investors flee many of the peripheral markets of Greece, Portugal, Ireland and even Italy and Spain? Fransolet argues that the seniority of substantial European Central Bank holdings built up in the interim (now about 15 percent of each of the five peripheral markets) may be one reason why these foreign investors will be wary of returning. Meantime, euro zone banks, who have traditionally held a high 20-25 percentage point share of euro government markets, withdrew sharply late last year amid balance sheet repair pressures but have  rebuilt holdings again sharply in early 2012 after the ECB’s liquidity injections — particularly in Italy and Spain.

Japanese people are generally regarded as saving a lot and not spending much, but in olden times when Tokyo was called Edo (until the mid-19th century), it was considered iki (chic or sophisticated) not to keep one’s earnings overnight.

The latest survey from the Central Council for Financial Services Information (part of the Bank of Japan) may suggest that people are going back to that tradition — although perhaps not for style reasons.

The survey, only available in Japanese so far, showed more than one in four households (consisting of at least two people) said they have no savings, the highest level since the survey started in 1963.

Anemic economic growth in the United States has sparked fears the country was entering a Japan-style “lost decade.” The comparison also has implications for government bond markets. Some traders see the U.S. Treasury market’s new, lower-yielding structure as eerily reminiscent of trading patterns seen in JGBs (Japanese government bonds). Says George Goncalves at Nomura:

There has been much debate since the start of the '08 credit crisis over whether the US is turning into Japan and if so how to trade it. We have spent a fair deal of time over the last two years developing a framework for how US rates investors can leverage these insights to "Trading USTs like JGBs.” […] One thing is clear: momentum trading starts to wane and narrower ranges will become the norm in a low yielding world with the Fed on perma hold meanwhile a lack of alternative fixed income products is still forcing investors to buy USTs.

This does not mean that investors can remain permanently bullish on Treasuries, however, Goncalves warns.