Monday, November 2, 2009

Roubini warns on carry trade


 Roubini:

So the combined effect of the Fed policy of a zero Fed funds rate, quantitative easing and massive purchase of long-term debt instruments is seemingly making the world safe – for now – for the mother of all carry trades and mother of all highly leveraged global asset bubbles.

While this policy feeds the global asset bubble it is also feeding a new US asset bubble. Easy money, quantitative easing, credit easing and massive inflows of capital into the US via an accumulation of forex reserves by foreign central banks makes US fiscal deficits easier to fund and feeds the US equity and credit bubble. Finally, a weak dollar is good for US equities as it may lead to higher growth and makes the foreign currency profits of US corporations abroad greater in dollar terms...

But one day this bubble will burst, leading to the biggest co-ordinated asset bust ever: if factors lead the dollar to reverse and suddenly appreciate – as was seen in previous reversals, such as the yen-funded carry trade – the leveraged carry trade will have to be suddenly closed as investors cover their dollar shorts. A stampede will occur as closing long leveraged risky asset positions across all asset classes funded by dollar shorts triggers a co-ordinated collapse of all those risky assets – equities, commodities, emerging market asset classes and credit instruments. 

That's the theory, and that's the headline.

I guess everyone doing that trade is just stupid, and only the professor from NYU can spot it. Even though every other professor around the world has been talking about that trade on Bloomberg radio.

So now market players will coordinate their panic, and coordinate their collapse???

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

So are we now headed lower this year or some how we march to 1120?

Please let us know once you have covered shorts. Any shorting touts?

Anonymous said...

If ISM is good will the bear case be dead?

Anonymous said...

Ford posted a profit... amazing!