The Great Debate

Ever since Goldman Sach's Jim O'Neill came up with the idea of BRICs as an investment universe, competitors have been indulging in a global game of acronyms. Why not add Korea to Brazil, Russia, India and China and get a proper BRICK? Or include South Africa, as it wants, to properly upper case the "s" - BRICS or BRICKS?

Completely new lists have also been compiled -- HSBC chief Michael Geoghegan has championed CIVETS to describe Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa (ignoring the fact, as Reuters' Sebastian Tong points out here, that a civet is a skunk-like animal blamed for the spread of the deadly SARS outbreak in Asia).

Fun though some of this is -- and no one can argue that BRICs has not had an impact -- there is a danger that the acronym could become more relevant  than the actual countries involved. For example, imagine Mexico, Uruguay, Panama, Philippines, Egypt, Turkey and Sierre Leone being lumped together because they spell MUPPETS.

With this in mind, the Spanish bank BBVA is now arguing that what is needed is a more dynamic concept, one that can remain in place acronymically,  so to speak, but allow for new entrants without the need to rewrite everything. Enter BBVA's EAGLEs -- an Emerging And Growth-Leading Economy, defined by its incremental GDP rather than absolute size. The founding 10 are China, India, Brazil, Korea, Indonesia, Russia, Mexico, Turkey, Egypt and Taiwan.

But BBVA reckons that is not enough. It also has an EAGLE's nest, which included fledglings that might soon grow up to soar -- Nigeria, Poland, South Africa, Thailand, Colombia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Argentina, Peru and the Philippines.

In a thoughtful article published this week in the Financial Times, PIMCO Chief Executive Mohamed El-Erian and Columbia Economics Professor Richard Clarida explore the implications of a shift in the shape of investors’ and policymakers’ expectations about the future.

“It seems that, wherever we look, the snapshot for ‘consensus expectations’ has shifted: from traditional bell-shaped curves — with a high likelihood mean and thin tails (indicating most economists have similar expectations) — to a much flatter distribution of outcomes with fatter tails (where opinion is divided and expectations vary considerably).”

They do not go quite as far as Bank of England policymaker Adam Posen, who suggested in a recent speech that the distribution of outcomes has inverted and become U-shaped. But their focus on a bell-curve with fatter tails agrees with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s characterisation of the economic outlook as “unusually uncertain” at present.

Hard to imagine with financial markets still buoyant and newspapers full of tales of bonus greed, but there is still the possibility that captialism will end.  At least there is according to prestigious investment consultants Watson Wyatt in their latest study called "Extreme Risks".

The firm listed the demise of the system of private ownership as one of 15 threats to investors and the global economy that probably won't happen but which it reckons are worth worrying about anyway. The idea behind the report is that such things as climate change, the break up of the euro zone and war are always worth being included in an investment risk management process.

As for the future of capitalism:

In our view, the most likely scenario is moving along from one end of a spectrum where market is king (minimum regulation) towards the other end, where we could see more onerous regulations and government intervention in, and control of, the economy. The extreme risk, however, is the demise of the capitalist system and the end of the market as the primary means of resource allocation.

-Kully Samra is branch director at Charles Schwab, UK. The opinions expressed are his own.-

The economic crisis that has prevailed over the global markets in the last 12 months has undoubtedly rattled investors worldwide, but rather than leaving their heads in the sand, seasoned investors have continued to search for opportunities amidst the instability.

One such opportunity that seems to have been overlooked by UK investors is that of overseas share ownership.

– Mark T. Williams, a former Federal Reserve Bank examiner, teaches finance at Boston University’s School of Management and is writing a book on the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers. The views expressed are his own. —

In the real world, outside the Washington Beltway, when someone does a bad job they do not get more work.  The Council of Institutional Investors and the CFA Institute Center for Financial Market Integrity task force report agrees with this fundamental point:  Don’t give the Fed the new job.  As an ex-Fed examiner, I applaud this conclusion.

Creating an independent Systematic Risk Oversight Board (SROB) to monitor firms that pose significant risk to the market would inject new honesty to regulatory supervision.  This sound proposal comes at a time when Treasury Secretary Geithner would like to give his former employer, the Fed, additional regulatory duties even if they have failed to earn this right.  The report also is critical of previous light-touch regulation.  The SROB would provide a firmer approach, not repeating the mistake made by the Fed of coming with a knife to a gunfight.

The problem with being a private equity investor is that you're subject to long lockups for withdrawing money--sometimes up to 5 years.

That wasn't much of an issue back in the halcyon days for PE firms--say three or four years ago--when investors could regularly look forward to high double-digit rates of returns. But today those long lockups are feeling like balls-and-chains, with PE firms having to take writedowns on their portfolio investments and investors seeing returns sag. 

Of course, one way an investor can try to get out a PE fund is by selling his or her limited partnership interest at a discount in the secondary market. But the trouble with the secondary market is that a PE firm's masters must sign-off on any transfer of an ownership interest. In good times, PE firms usually don't object much. But in hard times,  the PE overlords are reluctant to approvate partnership transfers--especially if they are sold at a considerable discount.

– Alexander Smith is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Volumes may be down, but there are green shoots appearing in the M&A market after the frozen winter of financial distress.

This doesn’t mean a return to the boom years of a few years ago. It could take years for deal values to reach the dizzy heights of the second quarter of 2007, given falls in asset prices. But the number of deals is recovering fast. This fell off a cliff in Q1 of 2009 and at just over 8,000 deals was the lowest global tally since Q3 2004.

– James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Our brains are wired for bubbles, it would appear, and regulation and tight external controls are the only way to save ourselves from ourselves.

Bankers, traders and investors effectively became addicted to the pleasure that comes from making money, while at the same time increasingly losing touch with just how much risk they were taking.