In today’s policy meeting and press conference the ECB took decisive action to loosen monetary policy. Although expectations were high, Draghi managed to exceed them by including a couple of measures that were not widely expected. As a result, financial markets reacted very (...)
Investors around the world face a dilemma of where to turn in today’s environment of low, or in some cases even negative, bond yields. Roughly 75% of the entire Japanese and German sovereign bond market is now trading at negative yields*. As a consequence investors are (...)
S&P Global Market Intelligence: With leverage ratios firmed up, attention turns to RWA density
Much heavy lifting has already been done to raise European banks’ capital ratios, as a new analysis by S&P Global Market Intelligence shows —data drawn from 30 European banks, both eurozone and non-eurozone, shows that these institutions reported at the end of 2015 fully (...)
Market volatility has increased again at the start of the year due to intensified worries over Chinese growth weakness, geopolitical tensions and a further fall of the oil price. Although a lot of bad news is already priced in, we prefer to maintain a cautious (...)
European bank stocks have collapsed so far this year whilst their credit default swaps have risen rapidly. Surely the credit and equity markets are telling us something? – Europe’s nascent economic recovery is over? Negative rates are killing net interest margins? They don’t (...)