Capital Flows
In this Special Report, we evaluate future prospects for the Australian dollar and Australian government bonds. The currency remains fundamentally cheap, and positioning is very short, but the AUD will continue to underperform in the near-term due to sluggish global growth. Australian government bonds have had a nice run of outperformance over the past year, but it is now time to take profits with given the uncertainty that the RBA will deliver the rate cuts currently discounted.
Eventually South Africa will do its macro rebalancing the least painful way: via adjustments in nominal variables such as prices and currency, rather than in real variables such as jobs and incomes. That entails a much weaker rand in future.
Thai stocks and currency will weaken over the short term. And yet EM equity portfolios should overweight Thailand as tourism revivals will rejuvenate this economy.
Commodity currencies have been rather resilient, despite the broad rise in the dollar this year. In our view, we are about to experience a big rotation in commodity currency market performance at the crosses, from NZD, to CAD and finally to AUD.
A country’s external balance remains one of the key pillars of the longer-term trend for the exchange rate. In this week’s report, we look at the developments in global basic balances, and their implications for currency strategy.