Global Investing

Anyone expecting investors to start galloping back into riskier assets in a rush might have something of a wait, according to Kathleen Hughes, who runs money funds for JPMorgan Asset Management in Europe. They are more likely to wander back in.

“Risk appetite returns in stages. It leaves on a horse but comes back on foot,”  she rather neatly told a Reuters funds summit being held in Luxembourg.

There are nonetheless some signs around that show leather is getting some wear. Fund trackers EPFR Global says that although overall fund flows fell during the second week of March, there were some signs of growing risk appetite. Commodities, technology and energy sector funds as well as global emerging market equity and non-Japan Asia funds all saw net inflows.

Perhaps most noteworthy, money market funds, the bellwether for investor risk aversion, had net outflows of $381 billion in the week.

Hughes says she has seen something of the same. The size of the safest-of-safe segment of her money markets funds — the short-dated U.S. Treasury paper bit — has halved since the fourth quarter of 2008.

All the G7 countries outside the euro zone now have interest rates of 1 percent or less, prompting some grumbling in various financial quarters that the European Central Bank is being particularly stubborn in keeping its rates at 2 percent.

Now comes an interesting take on this from JPMorgan Asset Management which suggests the gap may have more to do with egg on the face than monetary policy. 

"There is a school of thought," it writes in a new note "that the ECB has been in a state of denial ever since it decided to raise rates last July.  An organisational behaviourist would observe a desire to preserve 'face' in the deliberate way by which the central bank has reversed its previous tightening stance."