“Investors are ill equipped for our unfathomable future”
Ein interessanter Kommentar aus der FT, der sich auf Aussagen des ehemaligen Bundesbankpräsidenten Axel Weber bezieht, die dieser am Rande der IWF-Tagung in der vorletzten Woche in Washington gemacht hat:
- “How can anyone make sense of today’s markets? That is a question many investors might ask. (…) one of the smartest answers came not from any finance minister or any IMF report but at a presentation privately offered on the sidelines of the IMF meetings by Axel Weber, former head of the Bundesbank, now chairman of UBS. (…) it provides a useful framework to understand events such as this week’s wild swings in sterling.”
- “(…) the banking system today is much stronger than a decade ago as a result of post-crisis reforms. ‚If you look at pre-crisis, you could run a global bank on 1 or 2 per cent of core tier one capital,‘ Mr Weber told Fox TV in Washington. ‚Now most of the banks are well above 10 per cent.‘ That reduces the chance of banks toppling over amid a macroeconomic shock; (…).” – bto: Sicherlich sind die Banken gesünder, aber weit davon entfernt, gesund zu sein. Zu groß sind die Altlasten!
- “(…) while the banking system looks healthier, markets do not. The issue that investors need to understand now is that many ‚markets‘ are not true, free, markets because of heavy government intervention. (…) It is evident in government bond markets, where the central banks of Japan, US and eurozone currently hold a third, a fifth and a tenth of the outstanding local government bonds.” – bto: Und das wird so weiter gehen!
- “Central bank purchases are distorting the price of European corporate bonds and Japanese equities, with knock-on effects in numerous other asset classes. ‚I don’t think a single trader can tell you what the appropriate price of an asset he buys is, if you take out all this central bank intervention, (…)‘ Mr. Weber warned.” – bto: Ja, aber es gilt ja die “greater-fool”-Logik. Hauptsache, ein anderer kauft es einem wieder ab.
- “(…) these distorted markets are increasingly hostage to unfathomable political risk. A decade ago, investors thought (or hoped) they could price western assets by analysing underlying economic values with spreadsheets; political risk was only something that emerging market investors worried.”
- “Now investors holding US, Japanese or European assets need to ponder questions such as: how much further can central banks take quantitative easing? Are the US and UK governments becoming anti-business? Does the rise of Donald Trump, as well as the Britain’s vote to leave the EU, herald new protectionism?”
- “(…) the real danger in finance is the not one that tends to be discussed: that banks will topple over (as they did in 2008). It is, rather, the threat that investors and investment groups will be wiped out by wild price swings from an unexpected political shock, be that central bank policy swings, trade bans, election results or Brexit.”
- “‚Investors have been driven into investments where they have very little capability for dealing with what is on their plate, (…).‘ Mr Weber observed. ‚You can nowadays see the entire return that you expect for a year being wiped out for a single day move in the market. And that is an unprecedented situation.‘” – bto: und eine Situation, die weiter andauern dürfte. Weber wird schon wissen, weshalb er sich aus der Bundesbank verabschiedet hat.
- “(…) it comes from a man who has been at the centre of the system for decades and is not a natural alarmist. Investors, in other words, would ignore this three-part list at their peril. So would Weber’s former colleagues — at central banks.” – bto: was sie nicht tun werden.
bto: sicherlich eine gute Beobachtung, doch wenig konkret. Denn, was die Alternative wäre, sagt Weber nicht.