Download PDF Introduction For the last 12 months, Central Banks worldwide have been under the limelight as market participants tried to decipher their respective rate paths after the conclusion of the global hiking cycle. In this article we attempt to decompose the key factors that central banks take into consideration Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Structured products are complex OTC derivatives which offer a glance into some of the deeper aspects of pricing; they are hedged with vanilla products where possible, almost always leaving basis risk, the management of which is the art of making markets in SPs. These products are very Read more…
Download PDF Introduction We continue our series on the impact of negative interest rate policies (NIRP) on various asset classes by looking at equities valuations this time. The years after the Great Financial Crisis have brought secular macroeconomic, policy and structural shifts, which have resulted in an unmatched collapse in Read more…
Download PDF US The US stock market edged higher after the announcement of another Covid-19 vaccine breakthrough led by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, yielding higher levels of efficacy than what regulators seek. This development reflected on the markets by a 0.6% rise in S&P 500, outrunning the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite Read more…
Download as PDF Introduction Interest rates have been persistently low across several advanced economies since the Global Financial Crisis. As short- and medium-term rates approached zero, central banks were compelled to turn to increasingly forceful measures in order to provide an adequate monetary stimulus. In 2012, the Danish National Bank Read more…
In mid-September, there has been a liquidity crisis in the money market of secured overnight borrowing. We have analyzed this in an article published one month ago, headed “Liquidity Squeeze: What is the Repo-Scarcity Premium?”. Since then, the Federal Reserve proceeded to inject more than 230 billion over the period Read more…
In a world of excessive liquidity, where open market operations by central banks are ineffective, unconventional and unheard-of monetary policies need sometimes to be applied. In this article we will briefly discuss of the overnight interbank lending market in Europe (and changes in how its respective index is calculated) and Read more…
United States The S&P 500 closed at $2,362.72, up 1.44% when compared with the beginning of the week, where opened at $2,329.11 following concerns about President Trump’s ability to secure the passage of the tax reform after failure of his healthcare reform. The other major U.S. equity indices, the Dow Read more…
United States The S&P 500 closed at $2,372.60, slightly depreciating when compared with the beginning of the week, where it was standing at $2,375.32, but still higher than the weeks’ low of $2,357.98. Similar was the fate of both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the NASDAQ, as they closed Read more…
United States The main news in the United States this week was the job report published on Friday which revealed that job gains of 156,000 jobs were slightly below consensus estimates of 175,000 in September. The key takeaways of the report are that the job growth is healthy even though Read more…
Euro Area annual inflation was -0.2 % in February 2016, down from 0.3 % in January 2016. Looking at the main components of euro area inflation, services have the highest annual rate in February (1.0 %, compared with 1.2 % in January), followed by food, alcohol & tobacco (0.7 %, Read more…
[edmc id= 3544]Download here the Weekly Market Brief[/edmc] United States S&P 500 began the week trading in the red but rose on rebounding oil prices, ending with a weekly gain of 1.6% to 1,947. Oil also ended the week up, with Brent up 6.3% at $35.10 per barrel, on the back Read more…
It is probably fair to say that central banks have become the most powerful actors in today’s financial markets. On the one hand this is due to governments’ reluctance to make use of fiscal policy measures in order to stimulate their economies in the aftermath of the Great Recession. On Read more…
[edmc id= 3290]Download here the Weekly Market Brief[/edmc] United States A flurry of US data came out this week. Consumer sentiment came in at 91.3 in November, below an initial reading of 93.1. New home sales rose to 10.7%, taken as positive despite coming in below consensus. Consumer spending increased 0.1% Read more…
[edmc id= 3279]Download here the Weekly Market Brief[/edmc] United States Once again, the discussion around the expected Fed policy decisions in December has dominated the week in the US markets. The minutes of the Fed October meeting, released on Wednesday, hardened expectations of an interest rate hike. They also hinted at Read more…