At a time when investors need to pay European corporations for the privilege of lending them money, the degree of financial madness should have reached level 100. Governments around the world excused themselves from leading their own sluggish economies towards healthier states and central banks surpassed all known boundaries in replacing them on such a…
After a quiet August, we are back to business as usual, which is 90% about following central banks and 10% about following everybody else. Almost one decade after the peak of the financial crisis, global markets still rely heavily on central banks, with short-term volatility being fuelled by all kinds of speculation about expected central…
“Monetary policy has done as much as it really can and it needs to be complemented by fiscal policy and structural reforms,” – Catherine Mann, chief economist at OECD A new investment paradigm? We’re living in a year of extremes. Record high equity prices, record low oil prices, record low inflation levels, and even record…
One recent addiction to the already huge portfolio of investment possibilities is factor investing, which aims at revolutionising the way we invest. Until today, investors have been allocating the money in their portfolios into several asset classes: bonds, equities, foreign equities, real assets, commodities, currencies, and so on. But what if instead they could allocate…
Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have grown in popularity over the last few decades, as they offer a few advantages over other investment vehicles. In particular, retail investors can use them to achieve a much higher degree of diversification within their portfolios without incurring prohibitive fees, while also getting exposure to markets they wouldn’t otherwise be able…
I’m not really a bank investor but when everybody is pessimistic about European banks, the alarm bells ring in my head and I’m tempted to oppose the herd. If there’s profits to be made, it is often via the ugly improving to just bad and not so much via the good improving to even better.…
So here we are again at a junction where policymakers have only two choices: one leads to a merry-go-round that ends and starts at the exact same point; the other leads to a dead-end, forcing a return to the departure point. This has been the choice faced by policymakers over the last few years and…
Back in 2014, and mostly due to the slump in oil prices, Russia fell into a downward spiral that saw the value of its currency slashed and its economy enter a recession. Almost two years later, the currency and the stock market market have recovered, but the economy is still underwater, with GDP declining for…
If I were President Erdogan, I wouldn’t congratulate myself too precipitously upon the failed coup attempt. While his government survived the weekend’s military coup, his country’s future may have been compromised, as Turkey has just exploded the bridge that was guiding Turkey into the bosom of the developed world. This represents the regression of a…
As seen in the latest issue of Master Investor Magazine “The Federal Reserve Bank buys government bonds without one penny…” – Congressman Wright Patman, Congressional Record, Sept 30, 1941 Unlimited Intervention Over the last few years, investors have been trying to front run central banks by purchasing bonds, in anticipation of huge price increases…
