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Friday 06th of September 2019 |
Haven Rout Sends Wall of Money Rushing Into Emerging Markets @markets. Africa |
Thursday’s rout in U.S. Treasuries and German bunds coincided with a rally in high-yielding debt of emerging markets, Anders Faergemann, a senior portfolio manager at Pinebridge in London, said by phone. Renewed expectations for progress in the U.S.-China trade talks and a better-than-expected print on U.S. service-industries growth spurred bond investors to shift some of their capital to riskier bets. That contrasts with their rush to safety in August when the average yield on emerging-market dollar bonds jumped the most in nine months. The yield on Argentina’s 100-year bond fell for a third day to below 17%, after closing last week at 18.85% Longer-dated bonds enjoying a resurgence included Nigeria’s 2047 debt, which shaved off 15 basis points of yield Angola’s international bond due 2028 shed 13 basis points of yield, building on a 23 point drop on Wednesday Ghana’s sinkable securities due 2051 advanced, taking the two-day drop in yield to 33 basis points
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24-JUN-2019 :: Wizard of Oz World. Africa |
the Wizard appears in a different form, once as a giant head, a beautiful fairy, a ball of fire, and as a horrible monster. When at last he grants an audience to all of them at once, he seems to be a disembodied voice. Eventually, it is revealed that Oz is actually none of these things, but rather an ordinary conman from Omaha, Nebraska, who has been using elaborate magic tricks and props to make himself seem “great and powerful”.
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Biggest Bond Rout in Years @markets Africa |
Yields on two-year notes jumped as much as 14 basis points, which would be the largest full-day increase in a decade, before pulling back to 11 points. A popular iShares ETF tracking long bonds sank as much as 2.4%, the biggest intraday rout since the day after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The sell-off was global, with German 30-year rates briefly turning positive after a month under zero, and yields in Australia and New Zealand climbing early in Asia on Friday.
Treasury yields hit their highs of the day after growth at U.S. service businesses beat estimates. A deluge of investment-grade corporate bonds sold by the likes of Apple Inc. and Walt Disney Co. flooded the market with supply, which tends to drive up yields. And a trio of central banks just refrained from sounding dovish, putting some investors on alert for policy surprises.
The rate on 30-year Treasuries sank to a record low of 1.90% on Aug. 28.
With a rally in Treasuries pushing the average investment-grade bond yield below 3%, companies are getting in while the getting is good. U.S. investment-grade sales through Wednesday amounted to $54 billion. In Europe, BT Group Plc, Continental AG and Snam SpA joined the barrage of new offering on Thursday, fanning what may be the busiest week for corporate issuance since March 2018.
While most expect the European Central Bank and Federal Reserve to add more accommodation this month, investors were disappointed by the less-than-dovish messages just sent by central banks in Sweden, Canada and Australia. And resistance is growing among European policy makers to ECB President Mario Draghi’s bid to reactivate bond purchases.
German 30-year bund yields rose 14 basis points, ending the day at minus 0.08%. That rout “is a message to the ECB countries who do not want to do quantitative easing,” said Andrew Brenner, head of international fixed income at NatAlliance Securities in New York. If they don’t do QE, “it’s going to get ugly.”
Rates futures traders are pricing in another quarter-point reduction at that meeting, and a total of about 60 basis points of easing by year-end.
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24-JUN-2019 :: We are in "nose-bleed" territory. This is "Voodoo Economics" Africa |
We are in ‘’nose-bleed’’ territory. This is ‘’Voodoo Economics’’ and just because we have not reached the point when the curtain was lifted in the Wizard of Oz and the Wizard revealed to be ‘’an ordinary conman from Omaha who has been using elaborate magic tricks and props to make himself seem “great and powerful”’’ should not lull us into a false sense of security.
Home Thoughts
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The Underground Worlds of Haruki Murakami @NewYorker Africa |
He talks about being “surprised and confused” by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to his first attempts at fiction. That confusion may have fuelled something in him. His narratives are almost always inquisitive, exploratory. His heroes, hapless or directed, set off on missions of discovery. Where they end up is sometimes familiar, sometimes profoundly, fundamentally strange. A subtle stylist and a self-willed Everyman, Murakami is a master of both suspense and sociology, his language a deceptively simple screen with a mystery hidden behind it. In his fiction, he has written about phantom sheep, about spirits meeting up in a netherworld, about little people who emerge from a painting, but, beneath the evocative, often dreamlike imagery, his work is most often a study of missed connections, of both the comedy and the tragedy triggered by our failures to understand one another.
The other side is usually a dark place?
Not necessarily. I think it has more to do with curiosity. If there is a door and you can open it and enter that other place, you do it. It’s just curiosity. What’s inside? What’s over there? So that’s what I do every day. When I’m writing a novel, I wake up around four in the morning and go to my desk and start working. That happens in a realistic world. I drink real coffee. But, once I start writing, I go somewhere else. I open the door, enter that place, and see what’s happening there. I don’t know—or I don’t care—if it’s a realistic world or an unrealistic one. I go deeper and deeper, as I concentrate on writing, into a kind of underground. While I’m there, I encounter strange things. But while I’m seeing them, to my eyes, they look natural. And if there is a darkness in there, that darkness comes to me, and maybe it has some message, you know? I’m trying to grasp the message. So I look around that world and I describe what I see, and then I come back. Coming back is important. If you cannot come back, it’s scary. But I’m a professional, so I can come back.
You said once that your life’s dream was to sit at the bottom of a well. You’ve had a number of characters do exactly that. There’s a character in “Killing Commendatore”—Menshiki—who does it. Why?
I like wells very much. I like refrigerators. I like elephants. There are many things that I like. When I write about the things I like, I’m happy. When I was a kid, there was a well at my house, and I always looked into that well and my imagination grew. There’s a short story by Raymond Carver about falling into a dry well. I love that story very much.
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On Joy and Sorrow Kahlil Gibran Africa |
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, "Joy is greater thar sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater." But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy. Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced. When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
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The Clarity of Violence On rereading Don DeLillo's White Noise Paris Review Africa |
In one of my favorite DeLillo scenes, Jack Gladney, the protagonist of White Noise, browses his supermarket with an almost religious reverence: “all the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases … not that we would want to, not that any useful purpose would be served.” Later, Gladney experiences a moment of “splendid transcendence,” hearing his sleeping daughter mutter, over and over, the brand name of an automobile. In the world of DeLillo’s novels, what lies beneath or beyond, is too terrifying to contemplate, and so his characters are trapped in a surface world, dense with color and sound and signifiers that, if unravelled, point to nowhere more profound than a supermarket aisle, or the make of a car.
Sitting on the floor of my parents’ living room, I came across a passage in White Noise I remembered vividly. It is the scene near the end of the novel in which Jack Gladney points a gun at the man who has been sleeping with his wife and pulls the trigger. Gladney watches as his victim’s blood flows from his body: “I knew then what red was, saw it terms on dominant wavelength, luminance, purity.”
Like many of the starkest scenes in DeLillo’s work, it is among the most beautiful. Gladney is hypnotized by the image of blood squirting in a “delicate arc” from Willie Mink’s body, by the intensity of color, the discovery of beauty in another man’s pain. Wanting to relive the experience, Gladney fires the gun again, overawed by his own power. As in the supermarket, Gladney is stunned by the sensory density of his experience. In this moment, his world is entirely calibrated around violence and the power it gives him, the desire to repeat a violent act. In my copy of White Noise, I had underlined the passage, and in the margin, I had written two words: burial / resurfacing.
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Hezbollah is preparing to down an Israeli drone in the coming days @ejmalrai Law & Politics |
Hezbollah is preparing to down an Israeli drone in the coming days, after leaving time for Israeli politicians and media to increase their criticism and attacks on Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, accused of undermining Israel’s vital deterrence strategy in force since 1955.
The Secretary General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has decided to make his own contribution to the forthcoming Israeli elections, expected on September 18, by backing the failure of Netanyahu’s candidacy. Hezbollah achieved the first part of its two-part plan by hitting a military vehicle last Sunday on the 3.8 km road between Yiron and Avivim. The attack caused the destruction of the Israeli vehicle and inflicted casualties among the five soldiers inside- notwithstanding the Israeli denial of casualties. The hit was filmed by Hezbollah’s cameras and shows the firing of two anti-tank Kornet guided missiles.
Indeed, Israel sent two suicide drones last month to blow-up a Hezbollah military asset in a suburb of Beirut, after killing two Hezbollah members in a direct targeted killing in Syria. That triggered an overt threat by Sayyed Nasrallah to hit back, which gave Israel ample time to take counter-measures. Israel deserted its military positions all along more than 100 kilometers of the UN blue-line separating Lebanon and Israel, to the extent of 4 to 5 kilometers and more. This was interpreted as an admission of cowardice by the Israeli Army, shaking its reputation as the “eighth strongest army in the world.” This hide and seek followed a televised threat by a “non-state actor”. Hezbollah doesn’t have tanks or jets in Lebanon but its guerrilla skills gained through decades of experience, in particular in the Syrian war, have transformed it into a an organised, strong, “non-regular” army.
Well-informed sources indicate that “Israel deserted their military barracks and all positions along the Lebanese borders for fear of being bombed by Hezbollah’s rockets, notably the Burkan (Volcano) that can carry over 1000 kg of explosive and cause a large number of casualties”.
US President Donald Trump can do little now to save his close friend and advisor the Israeli Prime Minister. The US can’t fight Netanyahu’s war of election for him.
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17-JUN-2019 :: So lets start with the enigmatic and mercurial Fugitive and Bitcoin evangelist John McAfee, who always seems to pop up in my Feed like an acid Trip whenever Bitcoin is doing its Parabola imitation Commodities |
So lets start with the enigmatic and mercurial Fugitive and Bitcoin evangelist John McAfee, who always seems to pop up in my Feed like an acid Trip whenever Bitcoin is doing its Parabola imitation. ''But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice -guessed and refused to believe -that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.’’
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Lebanese dollar bonds, the worst performers across emerging markets this year after crisis-hit Argentina and Zambia, rallied this week @Business... Emerging Markets |
Lebanese dollar bonds, the worst performers across emerging markets this year after crisis-hit Argentina and Zambia, rallied this week, fueled by a renewed government commitment to urgently repair public finances and an addition of $1.4 billion to central bank reserves. After originally giving Lebanon up to a year to stabilize its finances, S&P said that a continued decline in bank deposits -- a key source of the government’s funding -- could trigger a downgrade to the CCC category already during the next six months. “While Lebanon’s FX reserves remain sufficient for immediate financing obligations, they may not be adequate to cover significant outflows of nonresident and resident deposits,” S&P analysts led by Zahabia Gupta said in a report.
Frontier Markets
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Burundi on Edge of Violence Ahead of 2020 Elections, @UN Warns @bpolitics Africa |
Burundi could plunge into violence with less than a year to go before elections, as arrests, intimidation and disappearances of opposition members continue, according to a United Nations report. Youth aligned to the ruling party known as Imbonerakure are the main perpetrators and operate with the consent of security and administration officials, according to the report released Wednesday. The investigators were neither allowed into the country, nor given any cooperation by authorities, it said. “Imbonerakure often act alone, sometimes in the presence of police, National Intelligence Service or local government officials,” the UN said. “They enjoy great freedom conferred by the Burundian authorities, who have the means to control them, and operate with almost total impunity.” The report is politically motivated and should be disregarded, the president’s communications adviser, Willy Nyamitwe, said on Twitter. “We are no longer interested in responding to the lies and fake news by some Westerners, who obviously seek the destabilization of Burundi,” he said. The ruling CNDDFDD party’s spokeswoman, Nancy-Ninette Mutoni, said on Twitter that the report is biased and full of Western imperialist propaganda against Burundi. Burundi expects to hold elections in 2020, five years after the start of political turmoil that some human rights groups say left more than 1,200 people dead. UN agencies estimate another 390,000 fled to neighboring countries. Burundi says the crisis is over and has arranged with neighboring Tanzania to repatriate citizens sheltering there, a move criticized by the UN’s refugee agency.
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4 MAY 15 :: :Eyes on Burundi::Spill-over Risks Africa |
President Pierre Nkurunziza, a pentecostal former aerobics instructor and rebel leader with his own presidential soccer team, “There is an internationalisation of African youth who are dreaming and thinking in the same way,” said Barro to Reuters, wearing his trademark scarf and woolly hat, back in Senegal after spending three days in detention in Kinshasa. Barro: “But they cannot imprison hope. They will fail. Youth will continue to mobilise.
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Ailing President Leaves Gabon Wondering Who's Running the Show @bpolitics Africa |
President Ali Bongo’s health problems have many Gabonese wondering who is in charge of the central African nation, a former prime minister said. “Gabon is in troubled waters,” Raymond Ndong Sima, who served as prime minister from 2012 to 2014, said by phone. “It’s not only bad internally -- even externally the health of the president is a cause of concern because investors are afraid to invest. Honestly, no one knows who is really running the country.” Bongo suffered a stroke almost a year ago while attending a conference in Saudi Arabia and spent months abroad to recover before returning to the capital, Libreville, in March. The presidency initially maintained he was absent from the country because he was severely fatigued. His few public appearances since then have fueled widespread speculation that the stroke inflicted lasting damage and that people in his entourage have seized control. Opposition activists want a court to help determine whether he’s fit to rule, but hearings have been delayed. Bongo’s office said this week that he’s fine and in the process of regaining his “full physical capabilities.” The 60-year-old leader used a cane to attend independence day celebrations last week, walking slowly and with apparent difficulty. “Our president is required to be strong physically and mentally, but what we saw during the national day plunged the country into greater uncertainties,” Sima said. Bongo has since traveled to London, where he’s been hospitalized, two people familiar with the matter said Sept. 2. The people asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter. Gabon’s presidency has dismissed the report as “fake news” in a statement posted on Twitter, saying Bongo is in London on a private visit and has undergone routine medical checks. Ali Bongo assumed power in 2009 after disputed elections that were held months after his father, Omar Bongo, died in office. Omar Bongo was Africa’s longest-serving head of state at the time of his death from cancer in a hospital in Barcelona. Gabon’s government had initially said he’d flown to Spain to rest. Ali Bongo “brought in a different spirit than that of his father but unfortunately his health seems to have halted that trajectory,” Sima said. “We want the president to get well fast and come back to the country. No right-thinking Gabonese was happy at seeing the state the president is currently in.”
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@SafaricomPLC Demands Kenyan Rivals Pay Debt Before Merger Kenyan Economy |
Kenya’s biggest mobile operator asked the regulator to compel its rivals to pay debt it’s owed before approving their proposed merger. Safaricom Plc demanded that Telkom Kenya Ltd. and Bharti Airtel Ltd.’s domestic unit pay a total of 1.3 billion shillings ($12.5 million) for services it provided including interconnection, co-location and fiber, Chief Executive Officer Michael Joseph said in an emailed statement. Safaricom, which controls more than half of Kenya’s mobile market, also asked the regulator to review spectrum allocations and ensure that the provisions are fair, he said. Safaricom’s opposition is the latest obstacle to Telkom and Airtel’s plan to combine some of their operations into a rival entity that would effectively create a duopoly in the East African nation’s telecommunications sector. Last month, the Communications Authority suspended the deal pending investigations by the nation’s anti-graft agency into a 2012 decision to convert government loans to Telkom into equity. The intended transaction will not affect the repayment of debt, Telkom said in an emailed statement in response to Safaricom’s demands. “In fact, it will enhance Telkom’s ability to pay,” the company said. “As is usual in transactions such as this, many other vendors and suppliers have already signed the requisite documents to legally transfer their debt to the combined entity.” After the proposed merger, Airtel and Telkom will hold more spectrum than Safaricom, yet the latter’s customer base is almost double that of its rivals, according to Joseph. Safaricom, partly owned by Johannesburg-based Vodacom Group Ltd. “wants equal treatment of operators” specifically “in relation to licensing and operations,” Joseph said. Telkom is 60% owned by Helios Investment Partners LLP and 40% by the Kenyan government.
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Choppies Supermarket - which has its roots in Botswana - has revealed plans to exit the Kenyan market four years after acquiring Ukwala stores for Sh1 billion. Kenyan Economy |
The retailer has been struggling to grow market share in an increasingly competitive retail market characterised by the merger of some of its rivals like Quick Mart and Tumaini and the declining fortunes of erstwhile big players like Uchumi and Nakumatt. The retailer held an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) with its shareholders on Wednesday, during which it announced that it had listed its Kenyan assets for sale. It had also classified its 12 stores as distressed. Competition in Kenya’s retail sector is heating up with multinational supermarket chains like Carrefour, Shoprite and Game Stores opening outlets in recent years in an attempt to cut the dominance of Tuskys and Naivas, both of which are indigenously owned. “Zambia has a steady performance in a volatile economy, Kenya’s distressed business has been identified for disposal. Tanzania and Mozambique are distressed while Namibia is performing as expected,” Wilfred Mpai, Choppies director told shareholders during a presentation.
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