Commento parecchio bearish di Wood, Strategist di CLSA:
The New Year has begun on a deflationary note with the US 10-year Treasury bond yield declining by 12 basis points to 3.9 per cent, notes CLSA’s Christopher Wood in the new year issue of his client newsletter, Greed & Fear.
The “Fed model” remains broken, which is one of the themes of what Wood calls the new Asia Maxima: The demise of “credit”.
The main theme is that a credit crisis is spreading globally with its epicentre in the Western world. Expect continued aggressive monetary easing in 2008 led by the US Federal Reserve, says Wood. Indeed central banks will panic as the easing will not be that effective. There is a crisis of structured finance, of which “subprime” was only the catalyst. Meanwhile, the risks to US, European and global growth remain all on the downside.
As for Asia, the region remains in a secular bull market.
The risk to the region remains tactical, namely collateral damage from recent events in the West. This is why, in Asia, investors should continue to favour interest-rate sensitives and domestic demand stocks over those geared to external demand.
Wood also believes that investors should continue to hedge their Asian equity exposure by remaining short Western credit spreads and Western financial stocks. This trade has already worked extremely well, he notes. “Indeed the underperformance in 2007 of the S&P Financial index against the S&P 500 was the greatest since the data series began in 1976,” he notes.
Still despite the obvious risk that all the financial problems are discounted, Greed & Fear would keep the trade on. The reason is that there is no historic data on what happened to US financial stocks relative to the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the 1930s. The crisis in structured finance is a similar deflationary wipe out.
The only issue is what the authorities try to do about the crisis, and how effective their actions are. On this point, he notes, Hank ‘the Hunk’ Paulson’s “Super SIV” proposal has already been abandoned.
Meanwhile, Wood has a gleeful swipe at the FT’s decision to name ECB President Jean Claude Trichet “Person of the year” for 2007, complaining that it implied Trichet had already “solved” the credit crisis, which is “clearly not the case”.
The key fundamental point, again, in Wood’s view, is that this is a crisis of structured finance, of which “subprime” was only the catalyst.
As for “Person of the year” in 2007, Wood prefers Time magazine’s controversial choice of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “For all the criticism in the West, Putin has so far made Russia a much better place to live in for ordinary Russians. He has also been bullish for investors in Russian stocks,” notes Wood - although millions may not agree with him.
Back to Asia, however, and Wood’s point that “the worse the newsflow becomes from the Western world in 2008, the bigger becomes the long-term buying opportunity in Asia and the rest of the emerging world - given that this is the next bubble in the making”.
Greed & Fear’s long-term view remains what it has always been since Nasdaq peaked in 2000. This is that Asia is in a structural bull market and America is in a structural bear market; though the extent of the downside in US equities will be determined in the longer term by the relative strength of the US dollar.
As for Asia currencies, the story is much clearer. They remain in long-term bull markets, just like the region’s stock markets