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  • Hello, and welcome back to The Note.

  • We appear to be having yoyo markets in stock markets around the world at the moment.

  • And a bad day for the S&P it's now back negative for the year, cancelling out the very strong day it had yesterday.

  • However, if you take a look more broadly, you can see a couple of themes or trends that are very clearly defined, and unfortunately downwards.

  • Let's start by taking a look at bank stocks, and specifically at Deutsche Bank.

  • which I am choosing because it's such an extreme example.

  • This is Deutsche Bank's share price over the last quarter of the century,

  • denominated in constant euros, obviously it was denominated in Deutschmarks early on in this period.

  • And you can see that it's lower than it's ever been over that entire period.

  • Now, that's really, quite remarkable.

  • You normally only see a dive like this in periods of extreme financial stress,

  • such as long-term capital management crisis in '98,

  • or the great financial crisis of 2008.

  • Why are we seeing the sell-off in the bank that is far too big to fail - it's the biggest bank in Germany,

  • it owns the Old Bankers trust franchise here in the States,

  • which is one of the core franchises in Wall Street.

  • Well, negative interest rates in Europe.

  • The promise of low interest rates for a long time to come here in the U.S.

  • are bad for bank's profitability, bad for their bank's business model.

  • And that's created great concern around the banking sectors as a whole, not only Deutsche Bank.

  • Now if you want to see a further example of how there are limits to how much low interest rates can be used to bail everyone out

  • take a look at Japan.

  • This is the exchange rate of the Japanese yen against the Chinese renminbi.

  • China is its biggest competitor in export markets,

  • and arguably its biggest customer of the US dollar.

  • And you can see that in the last few months, Japan's yen has appreciated very greatly.

  • eroding its competitiveness.

  • Why?

  • Probably stems primarily back to the decision at the end of January,

  • when the bank of Japan shocked everybody

  • by announcing it was moving to negative interest rates,

  • that wasn't expected, but the response was widely taken as showing that it couldn't cut rates any further.

  • It had such a negative effect on markets as a whole, particularly on banks

  • that there is now a bet that there is nothing the bank of Japan can do to fight the markets, to force its currency down.

  • We've heard finance ministers, the officials in Japan saying that trading in the foreign exchange market at present is one-sided,

  • that has been a tell in the past that they're planing an intervention.

  • But the market is evidently fighting the BOJ,

  • and betting that it won't be able to push down the yen even if it wants to.

  • Now if you want to see what a kind of an effect that it has on the stock market,

  • you can see that, if we take a look at this next chart,

  • that's the yen moves remarkably in line with the Nikkei 225 with Japanese stocks.

  • There are plenty of stocks tradable in Tokyo, which don't rely on exports at all.

  • But as far as the investors are concerned, as far as the index is concerned,

  • the Japanese market is treated as though it's one giant exporter,

  • and moves perfectly, almost perfectly in line with the currency.

  • As a result, Japanese stocks are in a bear market down more than 20% from their peak last year.

  • Further pressure on the yen will mean further pressure on Japanese stocks.

  • All of this ultimately shows that there are constraints.

  • The ease from the Federal Reserve putting everyone on notice that they're really not going to raise rates as much as people were thinking,

  • has eased a lot of pressure in the world system.

  • It's eased pressure on emerging markets, in particular, it's allowed the oil price to regain. It's helped many stock markets.

  • But there are constrains on this, and that is shown both by the banking sector and by Japan.

Hello, and welcome back to The Note.

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