Buchanan on a Steve Keen's article

The Physics of Finance: Steve Keen on economic self-cannibalism: Great article by Steve Keen, reflecting on 40 years of change as traditional neo-classical economics has become less important and less inf...

Buchanan on Econophysics again

From time to time I will Reblogg posts from Mark Buchanan's The Physics of Finance:
The Physics of Finance: The Wall Street Journal weighs in on "econophysics...: Michael Casey has written a nice short essay in the Wall Street Journal on the topic of econophysics, and more generally the physics-inspir...

US dollar bull run

Big Data and stupidity may sometimes be positively correlated. But, and as long the analysis is good and robust enough, the data is certainly the best guide to decision-making in economic and markets settings. Following last week sell-off of the US Dollar it shouldn't be a surprise the bull run of this week, if only investors properly look at the recent economic data, and realize that everything is in favor of the Dollar appreciation. David Bloom, the global head of Forex Research at HSBC, rightly tell us in the presented conversation with  Authers Note of the FT that the Dollar story is the main driver of the Markets in pretty much any asset class, facts to be considered when allocating Capital for the near future.

EU Shadows

Confirming all that investors are thinking about the political challenge across the European Union, the recent influential voices correctly point the seriousness of the Political dysfunction of most of the European Countries composing the Single Currency Euro. Credit analysts in the Global Banks are rightly positioned to view this issue given the importance of Capital and Credit Markets for political and Economic developments in the Eurozone, and as Alberto Gallo from RBS tells John Authers in the video below the operational challenges are huge and specially so for Banks in France, Spain and Italy.

Transparent Investment Management

This is a kind of introductory post on Investment Management. It features a FT fm brief talk with Daniel Godfrey from the Investment Management Association.

Debt-fuelled World

In the John Authers video presented here is a fascinating work done by Principal Global Investors, joining a group of studies of investing for the long term and the Return landscape for Asset Classes ranging from Equity, Bonds, ETFs and so on. Quite interesting to note some of the conclusions of the Report, like the potential increasing allocation to Real Estate and Alternative Credit Markets and the potential for Institutional Investors other than Global Banks to take these Investments (really good from my point of view). Further it is instructive to learn that gold is an opportunistic short-term investment (besides the value it creates) that have high costs of holding, which explains poor performance. Finally ETFs turned from being a good beta (market exposure parameter) investment to being a tactical asset class and losing status from asset allocation to opportunistic. The brilliant Report and the accompanying video discussion can be downloaded here.

Bruegel: Europe must clean the banks!

The excellent video that accompanies this post is from the European Think-thank Bruegel. And it is a very clear vindication for the enforcement of a sound Banking system in Europe and in the Southern Countries of the Euro area in particular. Along the way it is proposed a few ways to financing Small & Medium Enterprises (SME), like the creation of fully Public backed Investment Banks or the granting of access to securitisation for SMEs (my preferred). The full report (pdf) can be found here, where you will check the source of the video as well.