By Matein Khalid So Boris Johnson was elected the leader of the Conservative Party by 66% of the Tory membership and thus he, not Jeremy Hunt, will go to Buck House to present his credentials to Her Majesty the Queen. This increases the risk of both no deal Brexit and a potential Tory vote of no confidence in parliament, led by Mrs. May’s Chancellor of the Exchequer […]
By Matein Khalid The S&P 500 index trades at 2990 as I write. The risk-reward calculus on the broad index no longer flashes a buy signal to me. The economic data around the world has deteriorated at an accelerating pace, as the decline in global PMI’s, 9% fall in German factory orders and $13 trillion in in government debt trading at negative interest rates attest. Commodities prices […]
By Matein Khalid Citigroup, the third largest US money center bank, owns subsidiaries in Latin America whose pedigrees go back almost a century. For instance, Banamex, Citi’s subsidiary in Mexico, is the second largest corporate/retail bank south of the Rio Grande. So it was no coincidence that Citi shares got sandbagged to a recent 61 as President Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico’s $350 billion exports […]
/By Matein Khalid/Are we on the precipice of another spasm of intercontinental contagion in the emerging markets like 2018, or the Asian flu, tequila crisis, Russian rouble default or the Turkish banking crisis in the 1990’s. Yes. The Shanghai Composite Index has plunged 12% and (17% fall for Shenzhen) since Trump got nasty on the tortuous US-China trade dialogue. The IMF cut its global growth forecast to […]
The Euro has been a disaster since its birth in 1999. Its monetary pathologies led to youth unemployment rates of 50-60% in Greece, Spain and the Italian Mezzogiorno. It gave a trillion-dollar windfall to German exporters at the expense of the hapless Club Med and amplified Berlin’s diktat over the lands once occupied by the Third Reich. It created the milieu for Brexit, the gilets jaunes riots […]
|By Matein Khalid| The post Lehman decade was defined by the Federal Reserve’s “lender of the last resort” strategy to stabilize the global banking system. The American central bank expanded its balance sheet from $900 billion to $4.5 trillion. This led to a collapse in money market rates, Treasury bond yields and asset market volatility. Bull markets are born in panic and die in a frenzy of […]
|By Matein Khalid| 2018 has been a difficult year for GCC and Dubai real estate. Rents and capital values continued to fall in the third quarter, albeit at different rates in specific segments and micro-markets. The Federal Reserve’s latest monetary tightening at the September 26 FOMC means the six months Emirates Interbank Offered Rate (EIBOR), the bellwether rate for floating rate home mortgages in the UAE is […]
|By Matein Khalid| Crude oil prices plunged by 7% in two sessions as Saudi Arabia and Russia confirmed that they would release 1 million barrels a day in the wet barrel markets. Speculative froth in the oil futures markets vanished, to be replaced by a new trading calculus based on the realities of supply and demand – as well as the unknowable (and unquantifiable!) arc of […]
|By Matein Khalid| I had written an article titled “six reasons to be bullish Saudi equities in 2018, published in the KT on January 28. Yet I was surprised to see Saudi Arabian equities become the world’s second best performing stock market in 2018 after Egypt. The Saudi equity index fund (KSA) I recommended in my column is up 18% at a time when the MSCI emerging markets […]
|By Matein Khalid| I had projected a bloodbath in the US Treasury bond market since late 2016, when it was obvious that Trump’s tax reform would double the US budget deficit at the same time as the Federal Reserve prepared to “normalize” or shrink its balance sheet by $470 billion. Fiscal stimulus is often a policy ballast amid a depression, as in the early 1980’s or 2009, not […]
|By Matein Khalid| US and global equities surged on news of the US House of Representatives pass the tax reform bill, Cisco and Walmart posted blowout earnings and a potential bidding war emerged for Fox’s media assets. The rally on Thursday followed a week of carnage in the US high yield debt markets, flattening of the US Treasury yield curve and losses in the major stock market indices worldwide. […]
|By Matein Khalid| The financial markets finally cottoned on the increasingly sordid political realities created by the Trump White House. Trump could well be impeached for obstruction of justice if he tried to pressure FBI Director James Comey to drop an investigation on disgraced General Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russian intelligence before the election. The appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the scandal means Washington is […]
The Federal Reserve is actively considering a profound change in US monetary policy, in effect the reversal of quantitative easing (QE). In its March meeting, the FOMC discussed its strategy for the future run down of its balance sheet, and said that further debate would take place in upcoming meetings. The FOMC has already concluded that “a change in the Committee’s reinvestment policy would likely be appropriate […]
Just hours after the Fed’s March “dovish” rate hike, when stocks paradoxically surged to all time highs and yields tumbled, Goldman found something strange: “surprisingly, financial markets took the meeting as a large dovish surprise—the third-largest at an FOMC meeting since 2000 outside the financial crisis, based on the co-movement of different asset prices.” Even more surprising is that according to Goldman, its financial conditions index, “eased […]
Monday UN focus on migrants The UN will meet in Geneva to address the “human rights of all migrants, social inclusion, cohesion and all forms of discrimination, including racism, xenophobia and intolerance”. Organisers say they are working towards an ambitious global policy on migration, an issue high on the political agenda after the Mediterranean migrants’ crisis and US President Donald Trump’s clampdown on migration into the US […]
“Something is off,” warns RBC’s head of cross-asset strategy Charlie McElligott in the introduction to his latest market noting that the swing in US fiscal policy optimism is coming at a critical time as the China’s liquidity tightening is spooking the reflation story. SUMMARY: Movement on US fiscal policy is currently driving US rates and equities higher, counteracting the tremendous negative implications of this ‘Chinese tightening / […]
Besides the upcoming FOMC meeting on May 2-3, and French & Italian politics – the decisive runoff round of the French election takes place this Sunday – this week’s releases are dominated by US payrolls expected to come around 170k. The busy release calendar continues with Norges bank and RBA meetings as well as global manufacturing PMIs. The market’s focus during the week of 5/1 will begin […]
Emerging market equities have been the darling asset class de jour in 2017, mainly in Asia and Latin America, despite the March FOMC rate hike, a US Dollar Index at or above 100 and a mini-swoon in crude oil after a Saudi-Russian output cut spat. Earnings growth (India/Thailand) a stabilized currency (China), policy reforms (India, Brazil, Indonesia) local interest rate cuts (Brazil) and lower US protectionist policies […]
TOKYO Asian shares edged up to near their highest in two years on Thursday, while the dollar benefited from waning expectations that the European Central Bank was poised to end its easy policy. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS was 0.2 percent higher in early trade, pushing against its loftiest levels since June 2015. Japan’s Nikkei stock index .N225 was down 0.2 percent, while […]
Want to beat Warren Buffett’s investment returns? Don’t want to spend a lot of time working at it? Bloomberg’s macro strategist Cameron Crise has just the investment process for you… Last week I wrote about a simple model that is surprisingly effective at profiting from the rebalancing tendencies of passive investors. This in turn brought to mind another well-known instance of behavioral herding that has led to […]
At the start of March we showed a fascinating chart from Rystad Energy, demonstrating how dramatic the impact of technological efficiency on collapsing US shale production costs has been: in just the past 3 years, the wellhead breakeven price for key shale plays has collapsed from an average of $80 to the mid-$30s… … resulting in drastically lower all-in breakevens for most US shale regions. Today, in […]
Key points ● Treasury yields have fallen, with the 10-year yield lower by 9 basis points to 2.50 per cent● Market expectations for at least four Federal Reserve rate increases this year dipped to less than one-in-five● Wall Street has extended gains, S&P 500 gaining as much as 0.9 per cent to 2,387.23● US dollar falls across the board, with the dollar index down 1 per cent […]
It is fitting that just a few hours until the Fed’s second rate hike in two quarters, and one day after Goldman downgraded global stocks to Neutral for the next 3 months, not to mention with the results of the anticipated Dutch election due shortly, that global stocks as well as S&P futures are higher, while crude oil has finally managed to stage a rebound as the […]
|By Matein Khalid| Janet Yellen confirmed the Wall Street consensus that the Federal Reserve will raise its overnight borrowing (Fed Funds) rate at the March FOMC. Wage growth, inflation, crude oil, asset prices, economic data momentum and Trump’s fiscal stimulus all reinforce the dual mandate logic of a rate hike. Only a really awful February non-farm payroll shock (consensus is 200,000 jobs) will avert a rate hike […]
