The interventions of central banks have been a major topic over the last year, aside from the surging stock markets and Covid-19. This is certainly justified, as the scale of the interventions are enormous. The common measure of lowering interest rates was not sufficient, and quantitative easing in form of money printing and purchases of treasuries went way further than the during the GFC. Figure 1 shows the liquidity injections of central banks across the world. These injections were certainly one of the core reasons why the stock markets surged to that extent. Figure 2 shows the extent of the liquidity provision of the FED during the outbreak of Covid-19 from March 1st to April 20th in 2020. Within almost a month, the FED bought bonds worth almost $2tn. These interventions caused the FED to now being the largest holder US Treasuries. As emphasized before, this development applies to many other countries, albeit to a lesser extent. In Figure 3, it shows the holders of UK gilts over the last 30 years. Starting in 2008, BoE started buying UK gilts and is now as well the largest holders of them.
Alternative Markets Update February 2021
Hedge funds did not do that well in January 2021, as they could not continue their strong upward trend from the last quarter in 2020. Equity-related and fund of hedge funds strategies were down between 0% and 2%, whereas fixed income strategies ended the month slightly positive. Global macro strategies were in between the equity and credit strategies. Our most profitable strategies in January were crypto-related strategies, one of which is up almost 100% in one month only. This was driven largely by the growth in altcoins, in particular smaller ones. February 2021 is likely to affect equity strategies badly, as last week, stock markets dipped, due to profit taking in technology stocks and somewhat larger concerns about inflation. The inflation concerns are rising, as interest rates are increasing at the longer time horizon. In particular in the US and the UK a yield curve steepening is happening. This is further increased by the development in the central banks’ balance sheet, which have strongly grown. Figure 1 shows the central bank balance sheet over the last 15 years including a projection until the end 2022, which implied that the G4 central banks’ balance sheets will almost double since the start of 2020. Moreover, according to Figure 2, global debt has skyrocketed as well since 2020, as the global debt increased from around $220tn to $270tn at the end of 2020 and is expected to grow to close to $300tn at the end of 2022.
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