Trending with Institutional Investors
Global Macro
The articles on this page reveal the topics that are receiving the most traffic from investors inside RFPnetworksTerminal, within one sub-asset class.
Each article summarises the key themes that investors are researching based on their engagement with content and or their search queries for that topic. These can be early signals of portfolio changes or new searches.
What Happens When Liquidity Dries Up?
Liquidity Presents A Dichotomy
As liquidity in the financial system is removed, investors preserve cash to be proactive buyers from the inevitable forced sellers. But not all investors.
As central bankers raise rates across the globe in their fight against inflation, institutional investors are turning their attention to liquidity. In this new chapter of global political economy, a world drained of liquidity is a world where assets are no longer priced on fundamentals.
Being short liquidity means sellers of assets will by necessity take what they can get in order to meet their commitments. Or put differently, being long liquidity facilitates the purchase of quality assets at deep discounts to intrinsic value.
This presents a dichotomy for institutional investors:
An ALM driven investor will be guided by a series of strategic asset allocation benchmarks and associated risk budgets. Which empirically provide a confidence level that their assets will generate enough returns to cover their current and future obligations. So the tendency is to sit out the storm.
But there are hard core investors who see the removal of liquidity from the global economic system, as an opportunity to pounce. Their research inside RFPnetworks is crossing all asset classes. Searching each of the 11 feeds for terms such as "cheap", "intrinsic value", "discount", and "distressed".
We see danger ahead. Markets are still too high, and protection is expensive in an increasingly nervous world; common sense suggests one should invest conservatively, and in safe assets. In a world where people find themselves without the ability to pay commitments as they arise, forced selling drives prices. Among risky assets like equities, one of the counter-intuitive things in a liquidity crisis is that securities perceived as safest and most liquid go down sharply, because investors are forced to sell what they can, not what they want to. We therefore regard plentiful liquidity in the portfolio as overwhelmingly attractive; it allows us to make the most of the opportunities that arise in the aftermath of a crisis. But first we have to get through the storm.
Global Macro
The thought that central bankers can do much to change the broad sweep of inflation is, in my view, far-fetched. Lowering interest rates and keeping them down ensured that, in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, the world escaped a dislocative deflationary recession, and experienced instead a reprieve from deflation. Their actions, however, had an inevitable consequence: the onset of a virulent inflation. This was perfectly predictable at the time, and, indeed, we predicted it.
There was, however, no money to be made from the insight that money had lost stability post-2008 – the car would swerve maybe towards deflation, maybe towards inflation, but the final result would certainly be inflationary, because the authorities’ obsession was (and is) to avoid deflation. The game changer was to be rightly prepared for inflation, and for the last ten years, we have been. To call it too early is, in our book, to call it on time.
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