There is a table in The Financial Times which everyone ought to follow, though it refers to fixed interest securities and moves rather slowly. It is something I regard as a thinking point. It portrays one of the core relationships of global finance, and it is always worth asking oneself why the relationships are what they are, and why they have moved as they have moved.
Gulf energy crisis boosts oil. Why has the oil price stayed above $100, when all other commodity classes have shown larger falls? The gold price has fallen significantly more than the oil price as the dollar gained ground in recent days. There appears to have been a decoupling of the dollar-oil movements that we saw through March.
It may be that the credit crunch has not arrived yet, according to Financial Times blog FT Alphaville.
Alphaville has dug up a chart showing average daily volume of cash and securities transfers across Fedwire, the real-time gross settlement system operated by the Fed for transfers between commercial banks and other major financial institutions in the US.
The short sellers appear to be dwindling. This morning the Financial Times reports that global stock markets continued to rally.
The rally comes despite heavy writedowns from Swiss banking giant UBS.
The uncertainty about the markets’ direction reflected the fact that stocks rose after another round of bank writedowns and capital-raisings – developments that might have been expected to send prices lower.
