LONDON | Another day spent with the euro area teasing markets’ anxieties, another voice in the background alerting of a wall of trouble building up on the other side of the Atlantic. The US budget deficit is reaching a size many feel uncomfortable about: in Wednesday’s fundamentals briefing, Legal & General Investment LGIM suggested that the outlook for US debt is actually worse than most people currently believe. “Not many…
MADRID | Equity trading in Bolsas y Mercados Españoles BME dropped by 25% year on year in March. Total equity volume traded reached €176.935 billion during the first quarter of 2012, which represents a 28.5% fall, too. But analysts at Bankia Bolsa say we should put things in context before letting ourselves go with the flow of hopelessness that has lately surrounded everything economic and Spanish. Where is the key…
By Tania Suárez, in Madrid | Manuel Sousa Andrade is head of investment services and trading at Saxo Bank. Sousa proposes that if we want to get out of the current crisis, it’s necessary to get rid of the wrongs of the past and to change investors’ habits. Regarding the public debt, you say that investors want to ‘protect themselves’ and that’s why they ask for ever higher yields. Can…
LONDON | For all the mayhem some peripheral countries of the euro zone are meant to be causing nowadays, a few investor notes circulate throughout the City with eager eyes looking into opportunities in the European Union. For instance, at investing house Fidelity, analysts pondering about equity income say that the euro region’s debt crisis appears to have gone into a period of remission after the combined impact of a…
LONDON | Although under threats of a possible sovereign debt rating downgrade, the UK’s government showed how to take advantage of the little margin for manoeuvre available when presenting the 2012 budget. Some pro-business measures would boost growth, said investing management firm Schroders, but they will not be enough to avoid a return to the Bank of England’s monetary expansion programme. Schroders released its viewpoint over the coming months and pointed…
LONDON | The volume of business in the financial services sector grew for the eighth quarter running and at well above the average pace in the three months to March. A CBI/PwC Financial Services Survey reported this week green shoots in the City, with the first rise in optimism among financial services firms (+32%) in a year and an unexpected increase in employment in the sector (a balance of +19%). Ian McCafferty, CBI…
AFI analysts duly noted on Friday that markets have again focused their irritation on Italy and Spain. Corrections have shown a measure of the punishment investors are willing to inflict on those euro zone member countries seen as the weakest link unless Brussels gets its act together, since domestic solutions will necessarily be patchy. “Spanish and Italian sovereign debts have this week become protagonists, particularly over the short section of…
NEW YORK | US media coverage of Spanish general strike was scarce in the morning, and increased during the day, never making the biggest headline. The online edition of major generalist or business newspaper didn’t include it among their main subjects, or did only briefly. NYT kept it in a low position. WSJ reported on it only on its World section, and the strike wasn’t even the leading headline there….
NEW YORK | Yields on Greek bonds are the highest ever. Spanish and Italians are pretty good also. If they pay back, it could be a very sweet deal for every savvy investor. And private assets are on sale too. In 2010, Apollo Global Management bought a portfolio of distressed property loans owned by Credit Suisse for about $1.2 billion, a roughly 50 percent discount to the face value, according…
The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index (VIX) is a key measure of market expectations of near-term volatility conveyed by S&P 500 stock index option prices. Since its introduction in 1993, VIX has been considered by many to be the world’s premier barometer of investor sentiment and market volatility. And analysts at Morgan Stanley pointed out on Wednesday that it is at is lowest level in the last five years.