Kommentar: Den er helt gal. Europæiske junk bonds har samme rente som amerikanske 10 årige statsobligationer, sandsynligvis på grund af de enorme obligationsopkøb fra den europæiske centralbank. Er der tale om en boble? Gæt selv
Fra Mauldin Economics om aktuelt investor survey :
Takeaway 1: Almost everyone expects a serious market correction before the end of the year. Most of the people I talked to were concerned about market complacency; and even if they were bullish, which many of them were, they were surprised that we’ve gone this long without a correction. Could one be starting this week? We’ll see…
Takeaway 2: In talks with people I seriously respect, I found more concern about valuations and spreads in the bond market than about valuations in the stock market. As I sat with a few people and “war-gamed” what the next recession will look like, a general agreement emerged that the credit markets will be far more volatile than they were last time, even though banks are better capitalized today than they were 10 years ago. The problem is simply that credit markets have no liquidity and valuations are extraordinarily stretched. And not just in the US.
Dear gods, when European junk bonds pay the same as US Treasurys do, there is really something out of whack in the world. Look at that spike in European junk in 2009 and the one back in 2002. European junk bond investors have never been more complacent. The reach for yield is staggering.
The participants in that market think that Draghi and the European Central Bank have their backs. If the situation starts to get volatile, they expect the ECB to step in. But the ECB would have to change its mandate in order to buy junk bonds, and that means getting the more conservative members of the eurozone to agree. I hesitate to bet on that. This could be the European equivalent of the Big Short in the next global recession.
Takeaway 3: Much of the private discussion centered around how much the Fed will tighten this year. Some thought the Fed wouldn’t raise any further, and some thought we would get at least one or two more rate hikes. The consensus seemed to be that a December rate hike is on the table unless we get some really unsettling data between now and then. It certainly doesn’t look as though we’ll see a hike in September, though. If there is one, it will be a surprise to everyone I talked to.
Takeaway 4: There was a conversation between a very serious Fed watcher and a former Fed economist. The question was, what would happen if the Fed’s balance sheet went negative, i.e., if they were selling their bonds back into the market at a loss? The answer was that the Fed is not required to record losses on asset sales against capital.
There is an agreement with the US Treasury that says the Fed can create a negative asset account, but at that point it withholds remittances until the balance sheet is positive again. The Fed would be technically insolvent, but that wouldn’t matter because it’s backed by the US Treasury.
Takeaway 5: One gentleman who has been coming to the camp for several years runs a fund and is an expert on frontier markets. Because I have been to 62 countries – many of them on the very frontier of the frontier markets, I’m always interested in talking with him. And now that I’m managing my own portfolio of managers, I’ve noticed that we have several different frontier-country ETFs in our portfolios. This piques my interest even more. So I always ask him what his favorite frontier market is, and what he sees happening in that space. For the last three or four years he has been consistently big on Vietnam.
This year he surprised me by answering “Serbia.” I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, as almost the entire Central and Eastern European sector is hot, hot, hot. When I asked why, he pointed out the country has really made itself investor-friendly but that plus is not all that easy to trade, so there’s a lot of undervalued potential in what is essentially a well-educated and growing economy. And he still loves Vietnam and also mentioned Myanmar and a few countries in East Africa.
As you might expect, he has to travel more these days and to places that really aren’t vacation spots in order to do proper due diligence. He has to do things that you and I might not want to do, which says that if you ever want to invest in those markets, you need to find someone like him to do your traveling and decision-making for you.
