MacroScope

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.

CENTRAL BANK POLICY 
- Futures pricing after the U.S. non-farm payrolls showed the ebbing and flowing of rate rise expectations in the U.S. and UK and a feedback loop is increasingly evident between markets, which are keenly attuned to every nuance of how QE exit strategies might play out, and policymakers, who are puzzled by what drove the dramatic swing in rate rise expectations and what is pushing up bond yields. Policymakers are treading a fine line between actions (pursuing QE) and anti-inflation rhetoric, and central bank reports (BOJ), policy meeting minutes (BOE, BOJ), and SNB policy meetings will shed more light on how they plan to manage this tightrope act. 

BRIC POWER 
-  FX reserve plans, IMF financing, and the nature of the new IMF bond are on financial markets’ radar in the run-up to the first BRIC summit that will be held in Russia this week. How much the big emerging powers can agree on and how much unity they show at their first such summit will shape expectations of how much they can influence international policy and the market fallout of any proposals they table.

Five things to think about this week:
    
PUTTING THE RALLY TO THE TEST
- The surge in risk markets has tapered off as investors take stock of recent weeks' rally and the data flow injects a dose of sobriety. The scale and duration of any market pullback will be the test of how much sentiment has really changed. Sluggish April U.S. retail sales were the biggest cause for pause and this week's flash PMIs will give more Q2 information.

FX FOCUS
- A pause in the recent recovery in relatively risky markets is shifting attention to the changing FX environment. Clear-cut correlations between moves in major FX rates and swings in risk appetite could be in the process of being eroded and some in the financial markets are wondering if and when relative economic performance will replace risk appetite as a driver for exchange rates. Investment flows will be affected if the dollar looks like it might resume a long-term downtrend.

QE EXIT STRATEGY
- ECB, BOE, Fed officials are making reassuring noises about QE exit strategies but no clear mechanism or timeframe has yet emerged and all indications are that balance sheet expansion is still the order of the day. Yield moves suggest bond markets are more enthused in the short term by signs they will kept on the QE drip feed than by concern about the potential price problems down the road. Central bankers have yet to address the back up in yields that would be seen if they were they to exit the market at a time when debt issuance is continuing to flood the market - as it will for some time to come.

Emerging market ministers, particularly those from the BRIC economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China — are painting this weekend’s G20 meeting as a victory in dragging them out of the shadows of global policy-making.

The finance ministers’ statement included the promise of more money for the International Monetary Fund and regional development banks, on whom struggling emerging economies rely for support.

It accelerated a review of IMF quotas by two years to 2011, which should give emerging economies more say in the running of the multilateral lender. It also suggested that the headship of IFIs — international financial institutions — would no longer be guaranteed to Americans or Europeans. 

Goldman Sachs has long been a keen advocate of the BRICs — Brazil, Russia, India and China – as a new power tool for world growth. Indeed, it is credited with coining the phrase.

In a note, the firm says that even though the group is being hit differently by the global slowdown — Russia suffering most,  India least — a uniform drive from the four will return as soon as the cycle starts to turn.

It is predicting big things as early as next year.  It says China’s economy is already the third largest in the world and it sees it eclipsing current No. 2  Japan as early as 2010. Furthermore, as a group, the four countries are set to be dominant.

Goldman Sachs is previewing the 2009 outlook from a light hearted perspective. “We hope readers take these thoughts in the spirit that they are meant and don’t take any offence at any of the contents,” reads the disclaimer.

The year starts with an interesting twist in the UK, where Chelsea Football Club releases a letter written to incoming US Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, asking whether if they signed David Beckham, would it make them eligible for TARP funds?

In February, Russian Prime Minister Putin declares that the American word recession would not be translated into Russian.