Putting Excess Cash to Work

Putting Excess Cash to Work

As rates have increased in 2022, short term fixed income yields are the highest they’ve been in nearly 15 years. The Federal Reserve has been aggressively tightening monetary policy to bring down inflation by increasing the Federal Funds Rate. The actions of the Fed and other central banks around the world have resulted in significant volatility in equities and in interest rates.

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Emerging Markets & State Owned Enterprises

Emerging Markets & State Owned Enterprises

About 43% of world’s market capitalization is found outside of the United States. Said another way, if you were to take every stock in the world and multiply its total available shares outstanding by it’s price, you would find that roughly 43% of that value is outside of the US. You may be surprised by this statistic given how much attention is paid to the US economy and markets. It’s understandable given most of our business and financial decisions are focused to events happening within the US. However, when it comes to investing, a global perspective is needed. For the purposes of this paper, we are focusing on one area of international markets: Emerging Markets.

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Equity Income as Bond Alternative Given Inflation Expectations

Equity Income as Bond Alternative Given Inflation Expectations

As we make our way through 2021, bond investors continue to face the challenge of finding income/cash flow in a world of low interest rates. While the 10yr US Treasury bond rate has had a meaningful increase to start the year from just under 1% to about 1.6%, this interest rate is still at extremely low levels compared to historical context. Bond investors have seen yields drop for close to 40 years now. The drop in yields over these 40 years has resulted in amazing returns for bond investors because as market rates fall, bond prices rise. This inverse relationship between bond prices and interest rates is known as interest rate risk and is defined as the risk a bond’s value could change due to movement in prevailing market rates, shape of the yield curve, and various other interest rate relationships. In addition to interest rate risk, bond investors also face credit default risk, which reflects the borrower’s ability to repay the loan over time. In this piece, we will focus on where to find income and the asymmetric interest rate risk bond investors face today.

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