On this week’s Business Monitor Podcast, we revisit Central and Eastern Europe and our core macroeconomic strategy favouring Turkey and Poland. Has the region shaken off the structural imbalances which made it a focal point of crisis risks or is the positive convergence story no longer a core defining feature for [Read more...]

 

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BMI’s Justin Patrie cautions against premature excitement following the release of Q2 GDP data for several CEE and eurozone economies. Nevertheless, differentiation will remain key and the usual suspects (i.e. Turkey and Poland) continue to stand out as the ideal relative value play.

 

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The unsurprising landslide victory of the opposition GERB (Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria) party in Bulgaria’s parliamentary elections on Sunday (July 5) could prove to be the sea-change which many ordinary Bulgarians have been desperately waiting for. In the aftermath of the elections, I believe that the overwhelming support for the three-year old centre-right [Read more...]

I am becoming increasingly concerned about the rising threat of strikes and demonstrations in Emerging Europe. Business Monitor International (BMI) has long raised a number of structural problems in the region – endemic corruption, nepotism and flawed election procedures. However, with unemployment set to rise, the erosion of real wealth and governments’ perceived mismanagement of [Read more...]

Of the 32 sovereign states in the emerging Europe region, 19 maintain fixed pegs or heavily managed exchange rate regimes (eight others have floating currencies and five utilise the euro). Thus far, only five of the 19 have made significant devaluations despite a clear regional trend of capital outflows, slowing growth and rapidly declining export [Read more...]