Last year it was the oil price fall. This year, there is no doubt that the US dollar has taken centre stage, alongside the major rise underway in benchmark 10-year interest rates. As 2016’s Chart of the Year shows: The US$ Index (black) has risen 12% since May against other major currencies (euro, yen, […]
It is now just over a month since India introduced the biggest currency reform the world has ever seen. In a country of 1.3bn people, it abolished the 2 main banknotes (worth $207bn), that accounted for 86% of all cash in circulation. At 20:15 hours on 8 November, the government announced that the 500 and 1,000 […]
Markets are becoming increasingly chaotic, as the world’s major central banks each try to devalue their currencies. They have created a traders’ paradise, with oil on a particularly wild ride. But this has not been based on supply/demand fundamentals. Instead, it has been due to hedge funds jumping back into the commodities market. They don’t […]
What we “assume” can make an “ass of u and me“, as the proverb says. And that is certainly true of the way central banks have manipulated the major currencies since the financial crisis began in 2008, as the chart shows of the US$’s movements versus the Japanese yen and the euro: It shows the change […]
More than $2.3tn was wiped off the value of global stocks last week as China’s slowing economy and currency depreciations spooked investors around the world, leading to the worst start to a year for markets in at least two decades. This is the Great Unwinding of policymaker stimulus in action. Worse is likely to come. […]
Media hype over the potential for a 0.25% interest rate rise by the US Federal Reserve is well underway. But as often happens these days, this is missing the bigger picture. The issue is simple: developments in China are far more important to the global economy than anything the Fed might, or might not, do […]
The blog will publish its fifth annual Budget Outlook next weekend. As usual, it is therefore time to review last year’s Outlook. Past performance may not be a perfect guide to future outcomes. But it is one of the best that we have. The blog’s 2008 Outlook ‘Budgeting for a Downturn’, and its 2009 ‘Budgeting […]
Super-fast computers continue to increase their role in financial markets. They first came into prominence in H2 2009, when the ‘correlation trade’ began. Their role is nothing to do with price discovery, the traditional market function. Instead, they trade on algorithms. Their aim is trade arbitrage opportunities between markets on a nano-second by nano-second basis. […]
If you only read one newspaper article this year on the economic outlook, then the blog would recommend Martin Wolf’s recent analysis ‘Why America is going to win the global currency battle’. Wolf is a former EPCA speaker, and he sets out very convincingly the rationale for the US Federal Reserve’s planned move to restart […]
The US Fed’s decision to keep cutting interest rates is causing a major change in Asian investment behaviour. This will slow world economic growth quite significantly, and is bad news for chemical industry sales. It also means that the informal Bretton Woods II system of currency management has broken down.