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Guardian – Emerging markets have been the place to invest over the past decade. While the FTSE 100 is down more than a quarter since it peaked in December 1999, and the S&P 500 in the US by 28%, markets in Brazil, India and Russia have more than trebled in value, while China has doubled, according to figures compiled for Cash by BGC Partners.
The more recent performance of emerging markets has also been better than developed ones, undermining the traditional view that they overreact to bad news. And Bryan Coyne, head of emerging markets at BGC Partners, thinks “there’s no reason why these markets shouldn’t continue to outperform mature markets”.
Bloomberg – Most of the gains in Brazil’s currency and interest-rate futures markets this year are over, said Beny Parnes, chief strategist at BBM Gestao de Recursos Ltda., manager of Brazil’s top-performing hedge fund.
BBM pared back leveraged bets that yields on rate futures will fall and the real will strengthen after its Bahia 1 Fundo Investimento Multimercado jumped 86 percent this year, said Parnes. Bahia 1 has outperformed all 683 Brazilian hedge funds that manage more than 100 million reais ($53 million) as the central bank slashed the benchmark rate five times and the real surged 22 percent against the dollar.
Bloomberg – Theodoro Messa’s Paineiras Hedge FIM hedge fund beat 96 percent of its peers this year on bets Brazilian bond yields will fall as the central banks slashes borrowing costs to shore up Latin America’s largest economy.
Messa is buying bonds and avoiding stocks because the global recession will persist longer than investors expect, requiring Brazilian policy makers to deepen interest rate cuts, he said. He predicts zero economic growth for Brazil in 2009.
Bloomberg – Brazil’s main airports are filled with the country’s fastest-growing import: Brazilians returning home after losing their jobs in the U.S., Japan and Europe.
They left their homeland for jobs in more developed countries years ago, and sent some of their wages to the struggling families they left behind. Now they are out of work, evicted from employer-supplied housing and arriving back home to an economy ill-equipped to absorb or help them.
Most of them are called dekasseguis, a Japanese word meaning “to leave work.” Brazil has the largest Japanese population outside Japan and during Latin America’s economic crises in the 1980s and early 1990s many Brazilians with Japanese ancestry moved to the island nation in search of better jobs. About 322,000 Brazilians work in Japan, making them the third-largest community of foreign workers there, according to Japan’s Ministry of Justice.
