Sovereign Debt by Country

Covid-19 and the urge to lockdown countries had a sudden economic impact never seen before. Some mentioned that the pandemic’s impact was sort of a combined impact of the Spanish Flu and the Great Depression together, and at the same time. On the other hand, there was a major difference when it comes to the economic impact, in that the Governmental and Central Banks’ response was much faster now than it was during the Great Depression.

May 28, 2020

Yield Curves: Visualization

The Yield Curve Flattening, Yield Curve Inversion, Yield Curve Control, Yield Curve Manipulation… Reference interest rates are good instruments for monetary policy and give us some insight on the state of an economy. However, the Yield Curve is a much more powerful tool to visualize the current state and future expectations about the economy’s growth direction, at a given time. Further to that, during the last years, especially due to the challenge on managing low interest rates by central banks, the Yield Curve has been granted additional importance.

May 17, 2020

Sell in May and Go Away

Every year when May comes, people start dreaming of summer holidays. Also, for those who follows the financial markets, it marks the date when writers remind us of the old saying: “Sell in May and Go Away”. The underlying is relative straightforward as during the summer months there is, typically, less trading activity. On the other hand, some of the late market crashes seem to have happened precisely after the summer holidays: the crash of 2008-2009 started in mid-September and the 2018 Global Stock Market Downturn started at the beginning of October.

April 22, 2020

Largest Stocks by Market Cap

In the last century, we observed a high growth in technological innovation which was later boosted by the creation of the Internet. The rise of the Internet was a Black Swan, which would then fuel a notorious bubble in the stock market: the Dot.com Bubble. Stock valuations for companies with businesses focused around the use of Internet became highly inflated and continued to grow as a sort of speculative mania for companies whose name finished with “.

April 13, 2020

Inequality and Wealth

Inequality Matters! The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is one decade past now, but now we are embracing a new challenging economic outlook due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2). Oppositely to what happened during the GFC, we saw now a fast response from Governments (Fiscal Policy) and Central Banks (Monetary Policy) around the world. The outcome of this effort is still to be seen as we are just in the middle of this new crisis.