Opinion

The Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) is working relentlessly to further build a financial system that is safe, transparent, and reliable. To achieve this goal, the supervisors of the Luxembourg financial sector collaborate closely with their peers in the EU and globally.

Powell opens the door to a 50-basis-point rate hike, interest rates shoot up and equities crash. And yet, at the time of writing, the VIX index is below 20, raising the question of whether equities are not a bit complacent.

You can probably already hear a little from my tone what my answer is going to be. Still, there is a good reason why implied volatility looks relatively low.

My column last week, titled ‘Cash is king,’ showed that both cash and bonds are again competing with equities. After years of being saddled with TINA - There Is No Alternative - there again is something for investors to choose from.

Investing is a game of relative things, at least if you do it right. Whether you have a short or long horizon, somewhere the question arises as to which asset classes are actually the most attractive. And since central banks have made it a sport since 2008 to keep inflating their balance sheets, the answer to that question was rarely, if ever, cash. Until now!

I show two charts below that show the amount of ‘yield’ for the main asset classes, adjusted for duration (interest rate sensitivity) on the one hand and volatility on the other.

There you are with all those fancy indicators like yield curves, ISM Manufacturing, and housing markets. They all point in the same direction, down! But the incoming US macro numbers are in no way pointing to a recession, nor to a soft landing. Spend it!

This week’s adoption of the updated EU regulation for long-term investment funds, known as Eltifs, raises hopes and expectations, both at a European level as well as on the ground in Luxembourg. Now it’s up to the industry to deliver. The fund ecosystem in the grand duchy is keen to embrace this opportunity.

The US economy created more than half a million jobs in January. That was almost three (!) times more than expected. Most importantly, such a job growth figure does not fit with a coming recession, but neither does it fit with a much hoped-for soft landing. On the contrary.

It indicates that the US labour market is still glowing even after 450 basis points of tightening.

During my student days in the late 1980s, I was one of the few students who had access to an Apple II computer. A big difference between Apple’s word processor then and the average word processor on a PC was WYSIWYG, acronym for What You See Is What You Get. On the screen, the document was visible just as it was printed. Even then, Apple was way ahead of the competition. 

The latest ‘chart of the week’ shows a difference between market expectations of what the Federal Reserve will do and what the central bank wants, a fascinating development, says True Insights’ Jeroen Blokland. The Fed as well as the European Central Bank will update their views on interest rates later this week.

Forget about all those bars of gold that are heavily guarded because they are incredibly valuable. Credibility is the most valuable asset for a central bank. It is the monetary version of what goodwill is to a company. In this respect, the ECB could learn a lot from the Fed. An analysis.

The more credible a central bank is, the more effective its policy is. With high credibility, a central bank needs to do less actual work to achieve the desired result: bludgeoning inflation. More words, and less action, so to say.