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strong control of the government and its high approval rating are steadily raising the chance of success. We stay overweight Japanese equities and grow wary of the short yen trade, as capital inflows and rising growth expectations (chart of right) are ultimately bullish for the currency. Watch next week’s BoJ meeting, led by newly appointed Governor Kuroda, for new reflationary measures. e The Euro area economy remains in recession, while policy makers are making little effort to reverse the contraction. We monitor signs of any large deposit flight post Cyprus over coming weeks and months to judge whether the bailout may actually be worsening conditions in the Euro. Economic forecast momentum remains negative (chart of right). These are good reasons to underweight the Euro area, if not all of Europe, across asset classes, against the rest of the world. e The US, in contrast, is seeing better spending from both corporates and consumers than we could have expected post Fiscal Cliff and sequestration. But given the huge amount of fiscal drag, which is a fact, we want to see another 1-2 months of data before extrapolating the good news. It did support US equities in recent weeks, which continue to benefit from US corporates issuing debt to buy their own shares and others', through M&A. This corporate rotation from debt to equities is almost exclusively a US flow, which helps explain US equity outperformance. e Across risk assets, we are similarly seeing huge delinking, with equities rallying greatly and commodities and credit secing no gains (chart p. 1), very much unlike last year. Commodities are delinking as there are no growth upgrades in EM, and inflation concerns are concentrated on two countries, UK and Japan. Credit is delinking as most investors are massively overweight credit versus equities, as evidenced by the disparity in buying flows in 2011-12. Relevering by US corporate and the Fed debating the end of QE are signaling that the 3-decade long rally in bonds ts likely over. Investors are starting to dollar-average away from bonds to equities. Fixed Income e Bonds rallied again, except for Euro area peripherals, the source of this week’s market concerns. The imposition of capital controls on Cypriot deposits is to be sure a watershed moment, but for now not one we expect to spark significant deposit withdrawals elsewhere. Meanwhile, the most likely outcome to the Italian impasse appears to be new elections in the autumn. With seemingly little prospect of a material rise in yields on the safest assets, we think the search for carry evident across the full gamut of asset markets will see peripheral spreads narrow over time. e Ten-year JGB yields have rallied to within a few bps of their all-time low, ahead of next week’s inaugural meeting for the new BoJ leadership. We do indeed expect aggressive easing, with JGB purchases out to 30 years, but think this will be trumped by profit taking in JGBs after the fiscal year end. e Our latest Inflation Expectations Survey (F. Diamond, K. Gupta) was out yesterday. One interesting result is that almost 90% of respondents believe the BoJ has less than a 50/50 shot of hitting its 2% inflation target in two years, a reflection of the formidable challenge of sparking inflation expectations after two decades of falling prices. Equities e The global rally in equity markets slowed this week, but did not reverse, on continued concerns about the fallout from a poorly executed Cyprus solution. The Euro area underperformed again, for a second week in a row. As discussed last week, we view Cyprus as a local problem that we address by underweighting Euro area equities in a global portfolio. A potential negative feedback loop from markets to the economy poses a serious downside risk for Euro area growth over coming months prolonging the current run of negative economic surprises from the region. e Japan is the region we like the most. In our mind the Japanese equity trade has further legs not only due to prospective BoJ balance sheet expansion but more importantly due to a reform agenda to be unveiled into the summer. e EM equities are suffering from renewed policy tightening in major EM economies such as Brazil and China. Investors have bitter memories of previous property tightening measures in China. As within DM, we see a lot of divergences within EM and prefer to focus on under-owned markets with good domestic demand story such as Mexico and Malaysia. See “Consensus Asset Allocation”, Adrian Mowat and team, Mar 26th. Open overweights in Mexican and Malaysia equities vs MSCI EM. e For long-term investors we just released our quarterly publication "Trade opportunities for long term investors" Mar 27. We monetize risk premia in Value stocks via a long in S&P500 Value vs S&P500 ETFs. It appears that a five year long underperformance of Value stocks has come to an end. We take profit on trades that monetize skew risk premia in S&P500 due to sharp contraction over the past quarter. We continue to monetize equity risk premia via buying high dividend yield equity ETFs against USTs. Our preference is to buy ETFs which track the S&P US Preferred stock due to its high yield, around 6%, and its high weight on Financials. Credit e The news flow from the Cypriot bailout continued to push spreads wider and vol higher this week, with European Financials underperforming as creditor bail-in risks returned to the forefront. iTraxx senior and subordinated financials indices widened 20bp as investors sought to hedge via CDS rather than sell bonds. European credit continued to underperformed US credit. e The fact that Cypriot banks debt is only 1.3% of total liabilities was a key factor in the decision to bail-in depositors. Yet events surrounding the banking sector restructuring also suggest that keeping senior unsecured bondholders immune from costly bail- HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030845