History & Geopolitics

K.C. Chan, Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, highlighted the fundamental strengths that have contributed to Hong Kong's unique positioning in the global financial marketplace.

Because many emerging markets are either commodity producers or exporters, it seemed likely to me that emerging markets would be beholden to the health of the developed (importing) world — which of course has massive excess debt. While this is certainly true for some markets, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the scope of opportunity in emerging markets is much larger than I had expected.

The new "China 2030" report may be capturing news headlines, but a complex mosaic of change in the world's second largest economy suggests that China is already moving to fulfill its greater promise as a political and economic superpower.

Economics professors Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff document that the public and private debts of industrialized nations have grown to unprecedented levels relative to their GDPs. They find that a large public debt burden slows macroeconomic growth, even without explicit sovereign debt default.

Tse Yung Hoi discusses the possible influence that the Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) and RMB Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) schemes will have on the progress of RMB internationalization after Vice Premier Li Keqiang’s recent visit to Hong Kong and the role that the RMB will play in the global monetary system over the next 5 to 10 years.

Wend Guo, CFA, recently sat down with Tse Yung Hoi to discuss the basic concepts, background, and key milestones of renminbi (RMB) internationalization, as well as lessons to be learned from the internationalization of the Japanese yen.

The famed hockey player Wayne Gretzky once said, "A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be." Frontier markets — especially those in Africa — are where alpha is going to be.

Modern banking system bailouts fly in the face of the ancient capitalist philosophy of losses signaling market risks. In addition, financial bailouts tend to escalate in size and damaging effects with time.

A major and ancient tenet of capitalism is the importance of losses to preserving the efficiency of markets. Yet modern banking system bailouts fly in the face of this perennial philosophy.

As a former portfolio manager, I know that practitioners often pay too much attention to the micro-level issues of individual securities and not enough attention to the broader macro-level context. Investors often reach for a microscope when they should… READ MORE ›