For most investors, targeting foreign countries where there are high expectations for growth is a useful strategy.
After all, in the United States, Canada, and Europe, economies are mostly growing at about 2% or less per year. And while these developed markets are less risky to invest in, finding value can be tricky.
With McCarthyism 2.0 continues to run amok in the US, spread like a virulent plague by unnamed, unknown, even fabricated sources, over in France one day after his first meeting with French president Emanuel Macron, the man who supposedly colluded with and was Trump's pre-election puppet master (but had to wait until after the election to set up back-channels with Jared Kushner) Vladimir Putin sat down for an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro in which the Russian president expressed the belief that Moscow and Western capitals “all want security, peace, safety and cooperation
A few weeks ago, in what was described as one of the "worst-ever recorded attacks of its kind," the WannaCry ransomware virus spread the globe at an alarming rate, seizing control of private networks and demanding bitcoin payments to relinquish that control. As we pointed out then, and not terribly surprisingly, those pesky "Russian hackers," the same ones that lay relatively dormant for years then suddenly emerged from hibernation in 2016 to hack the DNC, John Podesta and the entire 2016 U.S.
Less than a decade after various complex, synthetic, squared, cubed and so on securitized debt structures nearly brought down the financial system, here come "Sovereign Bond-Backed Securities."
Moments ago, the FT reported that in a watershed event for the European - and global - bond markets, Brussels is pressing for sovereign debt from across the eurozone to be "bundled into a new financial instrument and sold to investors as part of a proposal to strengthen the single currency area."
Call it securitized sovereign debt.
For all the criticism of Trump's first foreign trip, he seems to have achieved something quite unprecedented: he has united Germany's political parties in a common fury (to avoid using a harsher word) aimed squarely at the US president.