Watching the news flow on the global economy is dispiriting. Ask an economist what springs to mind when they hear the word “Europe”. They will probably reply with thoughts about negative interest rates, deflation and debt concerns. It isn’t much better when you bring up the economic outlook for the US (“the upcoming election is a concern”), Japan (“the BoJ is at the limits of monetary policy”),…
Read the articleOne of the prevailing features of the last few years has been the increasing prominence of discussions regarding market liquidity and the seemingly downward trajectory it has taken across fixed income markets. This had led many market participants to question the resulting implications for market stability and volatility.
It makes sense then to try and understand the driving factors behind thes…
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During my free time in August I read the book that has taken the French political and economic landscape by storm (no, it’s not “Capital” by Thomas Piketty). Nobel Prize winning economist, Jean Tirole, has written a book entitled “Économie du Bien Commun” (or “economy for the common good”). The book is written in plain language and attempts to reach a large audience, including readers with ve…
Read the articleFor fixed income fund managers it was once the case that if you understood the evolution of the relative sizes of the various cohorts of the young, the working, and the retired in a population, you could predict bond returns. Lots of workers relative to the “unproductive” young or elderly meant low wage pressures, lots of demand for savings assets such as bonds, and lower government borrowing….
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When investors buy or sell financial assets they try to analyse likely outcomes. This basically revolves around three main issues.
The dramatic fall in bond yields means that this traditional approach to investing will have to be examined.
One way to do this is to model real world outcomes. …
Read the articleDemographic trends – once a guiding light for bond investors
There’s a great attraction in using demographics – i.e. trends in population growth, and changes to the composition of populations between the young and old – as an economic forecasting tool. This is because future demographic trends are largely baked in the cake, allowing us to make solid predictions. Like the famous basketball makin…
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In order to assess value in credit markets, bond investors usually make some assumption about the future path of corporate default rates. This assumption generally stems from macroeconomic forecasts (strong/weak growth = low/high defaults rates) or sector specific events (like oil price movements). Following this, it is possible to get an indication of whether investors are being over- or under…
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In 2013 I blogged about how financing conditions had tightened aggressively for small and medium sized corporates (SMEs) in peripheral Europe. Three years later, we’ve seen the introduction of targeted longer-term refinancing operations, QE, negative deposit rates and other efforts towards creating a financially united, cohesive, European banking union. Now feels like a good time to revisit thi…
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Now that the Bank of England has commenced purchases of gilts and committed to a programme of corporate bond buybacks, alongside similar measures being presently undertaken by the ECB, it is worth taking a step back and thinking about valuations in sterling fixed income.
Let’s take a brief look at what has happened so far in 2016 in government bonds. The ultra-long conventional gilt has returne…
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Guest contributor – Mark Robinson (Financial Institutions Analyst, M&G Fixed Income Team)
The Bank of England recently announced two new measures focussed on the banking sector, which are primarily designed to improve monetary policy transmission from banks to households and corporates and, indirectly, are probably intended to stimulate loan growth. In this blog post, I’ll examine these actions…
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