Quote from Cavendish:
I believe that the yen and the unwinding of the carry trade is the big driver here. it is tied in to the liquidity crunch angle also, and is what is running the world economy and has been for many years now.
the markets will continue to rally or stay high for as long as it is possible to borrow at 50bps in yen or a touch more in Swissie, sell the yen for anything else and buy assets yielding much more. for all the talk at the end of Feb about the Chinese stock market causing the falls, it was the carry trade that caused markets to fall.
the simple maths of it is that there has to be the expectation that the assets being bought with the borrowed yen will continue to yield more than the loan in yen. when the yen begins to rally strongly, and looks like it will appreciate by more than the yield differential of high yielding long minus fixed rate low cost borrowing, people will sell.
see the attached graph of usdjpy, the falls of may 06 and november 06 and end feb 07 have been directly linked to the so called unwinding of the carry trade. and every time people have taken a few days or a week and realised that the trade is still good, and just presents better levels to short yen. the world to me is buoyed by liquidity, in part from carry, which is a hangover from the past 15 year story in japan of deflation and fallen economy. it is too early for the bank of japan to raise aggressively, people need to realise that a hike of 25 bps twice in a year does not the end of the carry trade make.