Risk on, but why?
Send for the
rally monkey? The FTSE 100 is on course for a sixth straight session of gains, while the S&P 500 closed above its 200-day for the first time in a nearly a month.
(Other markets are up too: oil has gained nearly 8 per cent in the past week and the CRB futures have recorded seven days of gains.)
But why? It’s not as if the European periphery jitters have gone away, as Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid pointed out on Wednesday morning:
Our Peripheral CDS and bond monitor widened 18bp and 21bp respectively yesterday. After a good week last week the last two days have helped send our equal weighted 5 member EU peripheral bond index to its widest level (vs Germany) in this crisis outside of the four days leading up to the weekend EU/IMF bail-out announcement. Greece 5yr bonds (widening 64bps to Germany yesterday) were the main driver but Ireland (+25bp) and Portugal (+13bp) were also weak
And as we noted earlier this morning, the 10-year Spanish/German bond yield spread has widened to a lifetime high following (
firmly denied) reports that EU, IMF and US Treasury officials
were drawing up a liquidity plan for Spain.
China is still talking about
tightening credit conditions, and
recent newsflow hardly suggests the US economic recovery will be self-sustaining.
Yet, the equity market seems very relaxed, something that wouldn’t have been the case a couple of weeks ago. So what’s the answer?
Perhaps, it’s a case of eurozone news fatigue.
Perhaps investors have managed to convince themselves that the problems in the eurozone won’t derail the global economy.
Perhaps it’s the World Cup and those
traditional African horns (made in China) providing a welcome distraction.
Perhaps the EuroTARP is working, says Gregg Gibbs of RBS:
While bank funding costs have lifted since late-April, they have stabilised over recent weeks and eased by some measures. Some banks in Europe are no doubt finding funding tight, but stronger banks globally are probably still operating fairly normally, able to obtain funding as required, albeit at somewhat higher rates. The chart below shows one measure of funding stress. It shows USD 3mth LIBOR and the implied 3mth LIBOR rate in the EUR/USD fx fwds. Both have risen since the peak in equities on 23 April, the later by more, raising the spread between the two. However, since late April, LIBOR has stabilised and implied LIBOR has eased back, narrowing the spread between the two. At the same time equities have stabilised and recovered.
It is probably fair to conclude that the liquidity measures and quantitative steps employed by central banks and waiting in the wings if conditions deteriorate should reduce the fear of a Lehman’s style seizure in the global baking [sic] system.
Or perhaps the equity market is wrong, and it’s the eurozone bond market we should be looking at.