Brazil is a macroeconomic and political hot mess at the moment, experiencing a deep recession and a political quagmire reaching to the Presidency. Despite this, after a horrendous performance in 2015, Brazil’s currency the real performed best in the world for the first quarter of 2016 surging over 10% against the US dollar, and both equity and debt markets rallied…
Japan represents an anomaly among the world’s economies, and while its economic characteristics haven’t changed much over the last few decades, the performance of its various asset markets has definitely gone through major gyrations. The economy is unique in that it has barely grown for decades, suffers from an aging population and poor demographics, and has had near zero inflation…
Officials from the G20 – the group of twenty of the arguably most economically significant countries in the world – meet twice a year to discuss important global issues and to suggest possible policy responses. For financial markets, these events are often observed but are typically of little consequence to investors; by the time governments get around to meeting and…
Two weeks ago I traveled to South Africa, in order to create a two-year economic and investment roadmap. After seven days of meetings, I returned with a bearish view for the economy both cyclically and structurally. Unlike previous visits over the past decade, I could find very few glimmers of hope. Gloom is hard to trade on, as the timeframe…
Central banks are supposed to manage economies over the medium term - through business cycles that last at least months but typically run years. Today, the U.S. central bank (the Fed) tells us it thinks the economy is strong enough to warrant a tiny rate hike, and while inflation is low, people still believe it will be normal in the…
