Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Feb 22nd 2021

The British pound has been the strongest major currency so far this year, contrary to Anatole’s expectations at the end of 2020. In this piece he outlines three reasons for sterling’s outperformance, but maintains that in the long term the pound will be forced lower.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Feb 02nd 2021

The fiasco of Europe’s vaccination plan and Brussels’ retreat from its standoff with the UK and AstraZeneca have has caused the euro to weaken. While this reaction makes sense, the euro is, in fact, unlikely to fall much more against sterling, while the euro-dollar exchange rate will depend on how politicians behave in Washington, more than bureaucrats in Brussels.

Gavekal Research

Cedric Gemehl

Jan 18th 2021

After a six-month respite, European political risk is back on the radar screen. Last Wednesday, ministers from the Italia Viva of former prime minister Matteo Renzi walked out of Italy’s cabinet in a dispute over how EU Covid recovery funds should be spent, leaving the coalition government of prime minister Giuseppe Conte scrabbling to survive. On Friday, the cabinet of Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte resigned over a scandal involving the over-...

Gavekal Research

Charles Gave

Jan 20th 2021

Charles revisits the idea of the Greek "logos", "idiotes", demagogues and citizens, and how the Greeks believed that those who controlled the logos—the language used to describe the world—ipso facto controlled the political system. Problems arise when a new, competing logos started to emerge.

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews, Cedric Gemehl

Jan 06th 2021

On Tuesday, Germany followed the United Kingdom by imposing fresh restrictions on activity and movement that in effect amount to a new lockdown comparable—and in some areas even stricter—than the anti-coronavirus shutdown imposed over the second quarter of last year. With infection rates across Europe stubbornly high despite the controls already in place, and with fears mounting about the spread of new viral strains, the risk is high that other...

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

Nov 19th 2020

European Union leaders are today sitting down for a high stakes summit. Poland and Hungary are threatening to scupper the EU’s budget and grandly-announced Recovery Fund if they are further penalized for becoming authoritarian and eroding the rule of law. The pandemic continues to demand leaders’ attention and Brexit lurks as the ugly beast in the background.

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

Nov 27th 2020

The balance of probability points towards a steeper US yield curve over the short to medium term as US short rates remain pinned at zero and long-dated US treasury yields push higher. One might think that higher US long rates should attract capital inflows, but what matters is the relative shift in gradients, notably between the US dollar and euro yield curves.

Gavekal Research

Cedric Gemehl, Nick Andrews, Anatole Kaletsky

Oct 01st 2020

Yesterday Cedric Gemehl, Nick Andrews and Anatole Kaletsky joined Tom Holland to discuss what's going on in Europe. Topics ranged from how the economy is fairing in the second wave of the outbreak, what that means for asset prices, and also where Brexit fits into all this.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Oct 22nd 2020

This week, Boris Johnson got what he needed politically: a bromide from Brussels that will allow him to camouflage the compromises he must make to secure a trade deal with the EU before the year’s end. But it will be a minimalist deal that will leave the UK’s service sector out in the cold, increasingly shut out of the EU’s markets.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Dec 18th 2019

We now know why markets reacted so nervously to Boris Johnson’s election landslide last Thursday. The lack of follow-through after that evening’s exit poll and the retreat when trading resumed on Friday morning was suspicious. But there were no clear explanations until Monday evening, when everything became clear. At 10.30pm Downing Street restated Johnson’s promise to finish negotiating a new UK-European Union trade deal within 12 months and...

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky, Cedric Gemehl

Oct 18th 2019

Boris Johnson has secured a revised Brexit deal and the stage is set for a key Saturday vote in the House of Commons. On balance, there is a 70% chance of the vote passing as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn seems unable to control his Brexit-supporting rebels, while Johnson looks to have persuaded his Brexiteer wing that it could be now or never.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Mar 13th 2019

Political commentators and European leaders are bewailing Britain’s descent into ungovernability after the UK parliament again rejected the new and supposedly improved Brexit deal. But markets reacted calmly. In fact, for investors, the seemingly chaotic Brexit saga is unfolding roughly along the bullish lines suggested here since early January.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Nov 23rd 2017

The British economy since the Brexit referendum is often likened to the suicide jumper who leaps off a 20-storey building, shouting “so far, so good” as he falls past the 10th floor. This comparison is unfair to suicides. The real message about economic performance from the government’s annual budget statement yesterday was “so far, so bad”. While a minority of economists and investors—plus a large majority of Conservative politicians—share...

Gavekal Research

Louis Gave

Dec 13th 2019

With the confirmation of a conservative victory in the UK election, and a long awaited trade deal between the US and China, the pieces are falling into place for a weakening of the US dollar and a continuation of the global reflation trade. Already, both sterling and the euro have strengthened in response to the reports of a Tory victory.

Gavekal Research

Charles Gave

Apr 08th 2019

With the Brexit deadline in the rear view mirror, Britain's leave voters have are left with the impression that they have been taken for a ride by the UK’s political class, and in particular by their representatives in parliament. So who is the real sovereign power in the UK? The people or parliament? Charles sees three possible outcomes.

Gavekal Dragonomics

Thomas Gatley

Aug 06th 2020

Chinese exports have outperformed expectations due to booming sales of goods related to Covid-19 and Chinese manufacturers staying open when their international counterparts were forced to suspend production. In this report, Thomas explains why China's export growth will continue to flatten in H2 as global trade catches up.

Gavekal Research

Charles Gave

Jul 30th 2018

On Friday, Anatole set out his view that a second Brexit referendum is likely, and that in all probability it will reverse the original 2016 vote. Exercising his right to reply, today Charles explains why no second referendum is possible, why a no-deal, hard Brexit is increasingly likely, and why this will present a great buying opportunity in UK assets.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Dec 11th 2018

The Brexit roller coaster seemed to come off the rails on Monday with Theresa May’s effort to prevent parliament voting on what looked like her doomed plan to leave the European Union. May’s decision, which had been denied by her most trusted senior ministers right up to the moment it was leaked to the BBC, initially looked like a typical case of the can being kicked down the road. Yet by the time she had finished her parliamentary statement,...

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

Jul 16th 2020

“Nothing,” Milton Friedman famously declared, “is so permanent as a temporary government program.” He was right, which is one reason Wednesday saw the euro climb to its highest against the US dollar since the first days of the international Covid outbreak in early March, while 10-year Italian government bond yields fell to their lowest. Investors are betting that the European Union’s €750bn “Next Generation EU,” proposed as a temporary facility...

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Jul 09th 2018

“Will the Brexit agony never end?” Anatole asked in mid-June. It now seems that the agony may end much sooner than expected. Following last Friday’s decision by prime minister Theresa May to blur all her “red lines” in negotiations with the EU, and—paradoxically—the subsequent resignation of hard-Brexiteer cabinet minister David Davis, the time to start buying cheap British assets may have come.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Dec 02nd 2019

Sometimes, markets just get things wrong. Since early January investors have been panicking about a “no deal” Brexit, and I have been urging clients to buy sterling. Not because I became less gloomy about the damage that will be done to Britain by any form of Brexit, but because a “no deal” rupture is the one version of Brexit that can be confidently ruled out.

Gavekal Research

Charles Gave

Sep 25th 2017

Listening to Theresa May’s speech last week in Florence, Charles thought the British prime minister sounded like an unfaithful wife attempting to achieve an amicable separation from the husband she cuckolded. Her approach is mistaken. May’s interlocutors in Brussels cannot be mollified with promises of continued affection. They are ideologues, and they are out to punish the UK for daring to challenge their ideology.

Gavekal Research

Charles Gave

Jun 13th 2016

The UK political class is all in a flutter as the latest European Union referendum polls show an apparent rising tide of support for “Leave”. Having orchestrated the great and good into warning of catastrophe should a Brexit materialize, it would seem that “project fear” is not cutting through. I tend to have strong political convictions and perhaps for this reason I have a lousy record of guesstimating election outcomes. Since the UK referendum...

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

Dec 06th 2015

Nick Andrews discusses the possibility of a "Brexit"

Gavekal Research

Charles Gave

Dec 19th 2019

In 2017, as the Brexit negotiations between London and Brussels got going in earnest, I wrote a paper explaining why the European Commission’s officials and their counterparts across the continent were going to do everything in their power to make the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union as difficult as they possibly could (see May’s Misguided Brexit Speech). And over the next two years, they did just that.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Sep 20th 2017

Anyone who doubts that interest rate expectations are the main driving force of currency movements, got a wake-up call last week, when sterling surged from US$1.32 to US$1.36 in response to the Bank of England’s bluntly hawkish statement that “there may need to be some [upward] adjustment of interest rates in the coming months”. Nevertheless, I remain a denier.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Aug 23rd 2016

Exactly two months have now passed since the Brexit referendum. It is now an appropriate time to review what has happened, and what hasn’t, since June 23. As a quintessential member of the elite that was angrily repudiated by a majority of British voters, this referendum was a profound emotional trauma. Therefore, my initial reaction turned out to be completely wrong.

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

Jan 31st 2020

Despite a worsening coronavirus situation and worries that a Brexit bounce could be short-lived, the Bank of England defied the expectations of many by not cutting interest rates. The UK’s weak medium term growth outlook and difficult impending trade talks with the EU means that policy will remain dovish and sterling’s upside prospects are likely capped.

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

May 15th 2017

The consensus is for a tortuous few years of negotiations between the UK and the European Union over the terms of Brexit and any subsequent free trade agreement. Following up on today’s Daily, Nick argues in this video interview that a deal may be easier than most people think. Moreover, the template for an FTA may already be in place.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Jan 18th 2017

Since the June referendum the only real choice for Britain has been Hard Brexit or No Brexit. The No Brexit option disappeared as soon as Theresa May became prime minister under the slogan “Brexit means Brexit”. Barring some deus ex machina that swept May out of power, that left only one possibility: a rock-hard Brexit.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky, Nick Andrews

Nov 04th 2016

Markets and media were shocked by yesterday’s High Court judgement that UK prime minister Theresa May must seek parliamentary approval before pursuing her Brexit strategy. But for London’s legal community the decision was not unexpected. Many senior lawyers had predicted that the ruling would go against the government, if only because its case was so poorly presented by the Attorney General, who was forced for political reasons to concede the...

Gavekal Research

Cedric Gemehl

Sep 19th 2016

It was billed as a show of post-Brexit unity of purpose. Without the fractious Brits to obstruct progress, leaders of the remaining 27 members of the European Union would come together to affirm their unshaken commitment to the goal of “ever-closer union”. Unsurprisingly, the reality of the weekend’s Bratislava gathering failed to live up to its billing. Without the presence of the habitually adversarial British to unite them in antagonism, the...

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Jun 21st 2016

If anyone still doubted the claim expressed here on May 25 that politics is now driving global financial markets far more than economics (see The Brexit Vote As Harbinger Of A Populist Age, Or Not), those doubts should have been dispelled by Monday’s trading. From the moment that currency trading started in the New Zealand morning, through the Nikkei and Hang Seng openings in Asia, to the main forex business in London and finally the stock...

Gavekal Research

Charles Gave

Apr 15th 2020

There is a strange contradiction in most developed economic systems as they have been driven by freely assembling entrepreneurs who operate on the basis of money, which is the ultimate tool of state coercion. Charles is worried that the private, risk-taking element of our economies may be fully extinguished by responses to the Covid-19 crisis.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

May 03rd 2017

The pound has rallied strongly since Theresa May announced an early UK general election on April 18 and may soon break through US$1.30, opening the way for a rise back to levels not seen since last summer. This move has mostly been driven by politics in France, rather than Britain, but this may be about to change.

Gavekal Research

Tan Kai Xian

Jun 16th 2016

After the Federal Open Market Committee yesterday revised down both its growth forecast and its projection for the future trajectory of US interest rates, market expectations of rate hikes have collapsed. Fed fund futures are now pricing the probability of a July rate hike at just 6%, down from 16% immediately before the FOMC’s meeting. In reaction, the yield on 10-year treasuries has dipped further below the 1.6% mark to 1.56%, the lowest since...

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

Mar 28th 2017

Tomorrow should see the UK initiate its departure from the European Union by triggering Article 50 and starting the clock on a two year exit negotiation. Yet far from anxiously counting down the days, investors have spent the last week bidding sterling higher, largely on the belief that a robust UK economy may soon spur tighter monetary policy. That is probably a bullish interpretation too far, and the pound’s next significant move will probably...

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

Feb 12th 2019

For the British economy, it has been a case of “mustn’t grumble” since the 2016 Brexit referendum. However, the effect of a weak fourth quarter GDP report was to debunk any illusion that Brexit uncertainty has been weathered. Such a reckoning was inevitable with or without Brexit, as the UK has in effect hit limits to its growth.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Feb 22nd 2016

Among the multiple existential challenges facing the European Union this year—refugees, populist politics, German-inspired austerity, government bankruptcy in Greece and perhaps Portugal—one crisis is well on its way to resolution. Britain will not vote to leave the EU.

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

Dec 10th 2015

This week David Cameron has been on the road in Eastern Europe arguing that British voters will vote for “Brexit” unless it gets a new deal with the European Union. As polls suggest that Britons are pretty much split down the middle on the issue, the prospect of the UK bidding adieu to Brussels is getting more real by the day. Indeed, with the negotiation expected to reach a head early next year, the question of a British exit is likely to...

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Oct 08th 2019

What will determine whether the global economic expansion and equity bull market will continue in the year ahead? The political upheavals which dominated in the past three years, such as the trade war, Iran oil sanctions and Brexit, have seemed to subside or become priced in. But new political noise is being generated by the threatened impeachment of President Donald Trump.

Gavekal Research

Will Denyer, Tan Kai Xian

Feb 28th 2020

The Covid-19 outbreak has sparked a flight to safety, reversing an incipient weakening of the US dollar. This is hardly unfounded, as the US so far has been spared a major outbreak and its economy is decently insulated. Yet most of the factors weighing on the US dollar late last year remain valid. Thus Will and KX advise a negative dollar bias.

Gavekal Research

Louis Gave

Mar 04th 2020

The bull market of the last few years has been built on the twin assumptions that globalization will continue, and that interest rates will remain low for years to come. These convictions have propelled an exponential wave of optimization. As the coronavirus calls key assumptions into question, the worry is that the giant bubble which sits at the heart of the system may be about to burst.

Gavekal Research

Anatole Kaletsky

Feb 14th 2020

Ever since turning negative on sterling and the UK economy when Boris Johnson dropped his post-election bombshell announcing a new “No Deal” deadline of December 2020, I have been waiting for a chance to double-down on this bearish position. On Thursday, Johnson provided such an opportunity to extend short positions in sterling.

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

Feb 06th 2020

It seems the European economy can’t catch a break. After a grim year in 2019, especially for the manufacturing sector, the old continent entered 2020 with reasons for cautious optimism. Survey-based indexes of business optimism appeared to bottom out late last year. Then the Wuhan coronavirus hit China.

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

Jul 31st 2019

Since Boris Johnson became prime minister, the UK government’s promise of a “do or die” Brexit has caused sterling to slump -2.9% against the US dollar to about US$1.21. While the chances of Britain actually leaving the EU without a deal remain small, this outcome will remain unclear for some time. That presents risks, but great opportunities for those dealing in sterling.

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews

Feb 13th 2020

A triumphant Boris Johnson is set on consolidating a new electoral coalition through big infrastructure projects that help “level up” forgotten regions, but he faces a weak economy and tough negotiations with the European Union over Britain's trading relationship. The worry is that investors begin to balk at funding a gaping current account deficit.

Gavekal Research

Nick Andrews, Cedric Gemehl

Jan 24th 2020

When a government agency announces a “strategic review”, the presumption is that some knotty issue is being kicked into the long grass. That was the vibe yesterday when Christine Lagarde kicked off the European Central Bank’s year-long navel gazing exercise. In this case, however, investors would do well not to check out entirely from ECB watching.

Gavekal Research

Louis Gave

Jul 14th 2016

Let’s face it, few expected the rally in global risk assets of the past ten days. Even investors who, like Charles, believed that Brexit was a fundamentally positive development did not expect positivity to erupt quite so suddenly. Yet, here we are, with the Nikkei up 10% since its post-Brexit low, the S&P 500 breaking out to new highs and the Shanghai benchmark above 3,000. Will it last?