Global Investing

China’s influence on emerging markets, let alone the global economy, cannot be understated. Great strides have been made to build the economy over the past 30 years, but not without its casualties. In a conversation with Michelle Gibley, director of international research at Charles Schwab, I asked her about a new research paper she’s published on why, amid the angst and doubt on emerging markets, she has shifted her views. She’s turned positive on Chinese large-cap stocks and says the China of the past was running out of gas.

Click here to the interview. (My thanks to Freddie Joyner for helping get the audio into workable shape.)

Why New Reforms Make Chinese Stocks Attractive – Michelle Gibley, Director of International Research, Charl…

Despite all the doom and gloom surrounding capital-hungry Fragile Five countries, real money managers have not abandoned the ship at all.

Aberdeen Asset Management has overweight equity positions in Indonesia, India, Turkey and Brazil — that’s already 4 of the five countries that have come under market pressure because of their funding deficits.  The fund is also positive on Thailand and the Philippines.

Devan Kaloo, head of global emerging markets at Aberdeen, says these economies have well-run companies that are well positioned to adjust and enjoy slightly higher return on equity (ROE) than their developed counterparts. He says:

Since April of last year, a small but growing cadre of lawyers, investors, regulators, and yes, even journalists, have been carrying around dog-eared copies of an International Monetary Fund paper (read: trial balloon) that revisits how the fund, the lender of last resort for many nations, might revamp its approach to sovereign debt restructurings.

The IMF prefaces its latest foray into sovereign restructurings by saying history shows official sector sovereign debt restructurings have been “too little too late” and when it gets involved, the public money used in a settlement too often just flows to private sector investors who take the cash out of the afflicted country.

The Fund tried this once before in 2002 under former First Deputy Managing Director Anne Krueger with the idea of establishing a Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM). This was two years after hedge fund Elliott Associates won a judgment against Peru in a case where it held out for better restructuring terms. It was a year after Argentina’s last and biggest sovereign debt default had occurred and progress in negotiating a deal with creditors was going nowhere. (That default was a sovereign record, only to be eclipsed by Greece in 2012.) The SDRM plan some 14 years ago died after the United States, the largest donor to the fund, decided against to withhold its support.

Felipe Larrain, Chile’s finance minister is facing a new job come March when incoming center-left government of President-elect Michelle Bachelet takes over. An academic by profession, he intends to either make his way back into the cloistered lecture halls of a university, not necessarily in Chile, or work for some kind of international organization that is outside of the corporate or financial world.

Chile’s economy, one of the best run in Latin America, with the highest investment grade credit rating in the region, is however experiencing a soggy point in its economic cycle. Inflation has picked up. There is continued weak economic output and domestic demand is cooling down. The central bank is holding its benchmark interest rate at 4.5 percent and suggests more stimulus is to come in the months ahead. The currency has depreciated but that’s not a concern, Larrain said. He was more concerned when the peso was trading in the 430 per U.S. dollar range versus today’s 3-1/2 year low of 545, an area he describes as providing equilibrium.

But before departing from his ministerial duties, Larrain outlined some of the achievements of his four years in office. The latest is the passage of the ‘Ley Unica de Fondos’, or ‘Investment Funds Act’. In Chile’s fixed income market, foreign participation is a minuscule 1 percent versus 35-40 percent in equities. “What the laws have done to equities, this will do for fixed income,” Larrain said in an interview with Reuters.

Which was the best performer in emerging bond markets last year?  The sector had a pretty torrid year overall, with sovereign dollar bonds finishing 2013 almost 7 percent in the red. But there were exceptions.

The best returns were to be had – hold your breath — in little-watched Belize, a member of JPMorgan’s NEXGEM frontier debt index. Someone who bought Belize debt at the start of last year would have been in the money, with gains of 50 percent, though the returns were in fact down to the restructuring of Belize debt early last year.

Second on the list was Argentina, despite court wranglings over hold-out funds from the country’s 2002 default.

Investors are bracing themselves this year for elections in all of “Fragile Five” countries and a number of other emerging nations that are adding political concerns to those economies already vulnerable to capital flight risks.

Perhaps a lesser-known political event that is coming up in 2014 is in North Korea, which will hold “elections” for its parliament on March 9.

The polls will elect members of the country’s rubber-stamping Supreme People’s Assembly for the first time since 2009 and also for the first time since Kim Jong-Un — the third generation of his family to rule the Stalinist state — took leadership in 2011.

It wasn’t a good year for emerging market bonds, with all three main debt benchmarks posting negative returns for the first time since 2008. But the benchmark indices run by JPMorgan nevertheless saw a modest increase in market capitalisation, and assets of the funds that benchmark to these indices also rose.

JPMorgan says its index family — comprising EMBI Global dollar bond indices, the CEMBI group listing corporate debt and the GBI-EM index of local currency emerging bonds — ended 2013 with a combined market cap of $2.8 trillion, a 2 percent increase from end-2012. Take a look at the following graphic which shows the rise in the market cap since 2001:

Last year’s rise was clearly much slower than during previous years.  It was driven mainly by the boom in corporate bonds, which witnessed record $350 billion-plus issuance last year, taking the market cap of the CEMBI to $716 billion compared to $620 billion at the end of 2012, JPM said.

Former Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill, deviser of the BRIC acronym uniting the emerging market giants of Brazil, Russia, India and China, has coined a new term – MINT.

In a series of BBC radio programmes starting today, O’Neill looks at the “next economic giants” of Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. It’s a break-out of four of the countries from his previously-coined Next-11, which also included Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam.

O’Neill, who retired last year from his role as chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (after spending too much time looking at Reuters), says on the BBC website that the MINT economies benefit from favourable geographical locations and, in some cases, reform-minded politicians:

The fall in Turkey’s lira to record lows is raising jitters among foreign investors who will have lost a good deal of money on the currency side of their stock and bond investments.  They are also worrying about the response of the central bank, which has effectively ruled out large rate hikes to stabilise the currency. But can the 20 percent lira depreciation seen since May 2013 help correct the country’s balance of payments gap?

Turkey’s current account deficit is its Achilles heel . Without a large domestic savings pool, that deficit tends to blow out whenever growth quickens and the lira strengthens . That leaves the country highly vulnerable to a withdrawal of foreign capital. Take a look at the following graphic (click on it to enlarge) :

In theory, a weaker Turkish lira should help cut the deficit which has expanded to over 7 percent of GDP.  Let us compare the picture with 2008 when the lira plunged around 25 percent against the dollar in the wake of the Lehman crisis. At the time the deficit was not far short of current levels at around 6 percent of GDP.  By September 2009 though, this gap had shrunk by two-thirds to around 2 percent of GDP.

Last year was one that most emerging market investors would probably like to forget.  MSCI’s main equity index fell 5 percent, bond returns were 6-8 percent in the red and some currencies lost up to 20 percent against the dollar.  Here are some flow numbers  from EPFR Global, the Boston-based agency that released some provisional  annual data to its clients late last week.

While funds dedicated to developed markets — equities and bonds –  received inflows amounting to over 7 percent of their assets under management (AUM), funds investing in emerging stocks lost more than 6 percent of their AUM.

In absolute terms, that amounted to a loss of $15.4 billion for emerging equity funds , banks said citing the EPFR data.