Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe decided to dissolve Japan’s parliament and call a general election for 22 October. PM Abe is seeking to take advantage of an improvement in opinion polling following his robust objections in international media to successive missile tests by North Korea. Earlier in the year PM… Read More »
“Technological innovation should give us hope, not despair”: in the I-7 Chair’s Summary the conclusions of the I-7 group, summarized into four themes – training and education, technology, ethics and society, jobs and income. The I-7 group met and discussed for a day the multiple challenges that innovation poses and… Read More »
At the FOMC meeting on September 19 and 20, members charted the central bank’s so-called dot plot of expected rates for the years out to 2020, involving one interest rate hike in 2017, three in 2018, two in 2019 and only one in 2020, leading to an end figure of… Read More »
As expected, German voters endorsed the ruling “Union” (CDU/CSU) as the leading party for the fourth time in this weekend’s parliamentary elections, with their coalition parter, the Social Democrats (SPD), coming in second. The Anti-EU and anti-immigration party Alternative fu?r Deutschland (AfD) becomes the third-strongest faction and for the first… Read More »
Ricardo Garcia, Paula Patzelt -
Following the SPD’s decision to go into opposition, Angela Merkel will have to find a way to make a Jamaica coalition (CDU/CSU/FDP/Greens) work. However, Merkel will try to convince the SPD to continue with a grand coalition, so that an SPD comeback cannot be excluded. Given the complexity of a… Read More »
The Eurozone is returning to health. In an era when unlikely political events have often upset the status quo, some viewed Europe’s equity markets as a risky place to invest. Yet today the clouds are lifting. If Angela Merkel wins the German election, there are five reasons why Europe’s recovery… Read More »
Much attention has been brought to the low levels of volatility, either realised or implied, within financial markets currently. Within this report, we address whether this stability is likely to persist and assess the impact that central bank balance sheet reduction may have on markets. Volatility remains abnormally low. Is… Read More »
Despite a very strong Q2 earnings season, equity markets halted their march higher in August, amid renewed geopolitical tensions. Meanwhile, the economic cycle is sound and synchronized at a global level. In the US, there are no signs of imminent recession, even though we are probably reaching the late stage… Read More »
As if the stellar returns of bitcoin this year weren’t enough, the cryptocurrency gained more attention as JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon called it a ‘fraud’ that will eventually blow up. The most significant innovation in Bitcoin is not blockchain, nor the fact that it is a non-state-backed electronic currency.… Read More »
Equifax (EFX) announced a hacking incident that could affect 143 million U.S. consumers as well as consumers in Canada and the United Kingdom. While data breaches are increasingly more common, the scope of this one is unprecedented. We have decreased our fair value estimate as we incorporate the potential impact… Read More »
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