Zhu Haibin via Caixin | A recent government plan to invest 4.7 trillion yuan in over 300 infrastructure projects from 2016 to 2018 received wide attention and raised questions about whether this was another massive stimulus similar to the one rolled out in 2008 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
The way companies are behaving is creating distortions in the stock markets, particularly on the other side of the Atlantic. Share buybacks over there have increased by 20% in the first quarter of 2016 from end-2015 and by 31% in year-on-year terms, based on S&P Dow Jones Indices.
UBS | The recent credit market sell-off, spate of defaults, spike in Chinese yields and spreads, bond issuance cancellations basically reflect: 1) investors re-pricing credit risk and policy easing expectations.
AXA IM | Argentina’s 200-year history is rich in sovereign debt defaults. The sovereign issued its first bond in 1824 with a maturity of 22 years, but it defaulted four years after issuance. Resolving that default took almost thirty years. Since then, the sovereign defaulted seven more times, most recently in 2001 and 2014.
Caixin | Financial markets have been jolted by a number of defaults on corporate debt in recent weeks, with state-owned Dongbei Special Steel Group Co. missing a 700 million yuan repayment on May 5.
James Alexander | At first glance the abstract of this brand new research piece, The Macroeconomic Risks of Undesirably Low Inflation, from the Federal Reserve Board sounds rather dry and innocuous.
China’s Transport Ministry has announced a $770 billion three-year investment plan to improve the country’s infrastructures. For Bankinter’s analysts the investment may look very significant, but there are some uncertainties which call its effectiveness into question.
Benjamin Cole via Historinhas | Well, the web is an amazing place, and not even looking I came across this post by Adair Turner, former chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority and former member of the UK’s Financial Policy Committee.
UBS | Regulators are establishing a foundation to allow banks to deal with NPLs Regardless of the success of local asset management companies’ (AMCs) individual initiatives, debt-to-equity swaps or NPL securitization, the authorities are showing a resolve to create concrete structural change to allow banks to solve their NPL issues.
The US economy is trapped by outdated infrastructure. The big paradox is that financing it today is easy because of the overabundance of liquidity in the market.