The Bank of Japan (BoJ) intervened to sell the yen this morning, sending the currency from a post-WWII high of JPY75.57/US$ to JPY79.20/US$ at the time of writing. This is the fourth time in just over a year that Japan has intervened to cap yen strength, which has continued in the face of such official… [Read more]
Recently re-elected Argentine President Cristina Fernández’s decision on October 26 – three days after her electoral victory – to require oil, gas and mining firms to repatriate all export revenue and tighten the regulatory environment for foreign exchange rules, in order to stem capital flight, reinforces our belief that the government will not devalue the… [Read more]
European policymakers have reached a breakthrough in negotiations over how to stop the eurozone sovereign debt crisis from escalating further, significantly reducing the risk of a ‘disorderly’ default by Greece any time soon. Moreover, announcements of a bigger role for the IMF and ECB in dealing with the crisis, as well as plans to increase… [Read more]
As part of recent US legislation aiming to reduce volatility in markets, and in the shadow of the 2007 spike in commodity prices, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has approved new caps on the extent of speculative activity in commodity markets. BMI sees both advantages and pitfalls to the policy. The financialisation of commodities… [Read more]
Business Monitor’s Head of Africa Country Risk and Financial Markets Lisa Lewin shares her impressions after a recent trip to Nigeria and Ghana in late October.
We expect the Italian government to push further on its reform agenda, following the European Council meeting held in Brussels on October 23, where Italy’s economic fragility was put in the spotlight. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy explicitly asked Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to do more in an effort to… [Read more]
The Brazilian central bank’s decision to again cut interest rates on October 20 extends a trend towards monetary easing in emerging markets that we see accelerating heading into 2012. Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, and Israel have already partially reversed prior rate hikes and since August the number of countries still tightening policy has dwindled to a… [Read more]
