Global ETF News Older than One Year
S&P 500 Benchmarked Assets Reach $7.8 Trillion; $3.05 Trillion Invested in Products Indexed to S&P DJI Indices
Explosive Year-over-Year AUM Growth in Products Based on S&P DJI Smart Beta Indices
June 4, 2015--S&P Dow Jones Indices ("S&P DJI"), one of the world's leading index providers, announced today that is has published its annual survey of indexed assets.
According to the survey, approximately $7.8 trillion is now benchmarked to the iconic S&P 500(R) with $2.16 trillion of that figure directly indexed via exchange traded funds (ETFs), mutual funds, and other investment product structures.
Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices
World's biggest gold ETF loses place in U.S. top 10
June 4, 2015--SPDR Gold Shares falls out of top 10 U.S. ETFs
Value of fund falls to $27.1 bln vs peak of $77.5 bln
The world's largest gold-backed exchange-traded fund, New York-listed SPDR Gold Shares, is no longer one of the top 10 U.S.-listed ETFs by value, according to data from FactSet.
Source: Reuters
Russia May Soon Sell Its Debt In Yuan
June 4, 2015--Russia is considering issuing debt in Chinese yuan in the coming years, which will facilitate Russian corporate borrowers' access to the Chinese market, Russia's Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak said.
The Russian Ministry of Finance has a lot of issues to explore, like how to organize Russia's entrance into the Chinese market and its infrastructure, according to Storchak. It should also understand how to work with the agent banks and intermediaries, which could be potential investors.
Source emergingequity.org
EMERGING MARKETS-Qatar stocks fall 2 pct on World Cup fear; higher US, German yields worry EM
June 3, 2015--Qatari stocks slumped as much as 2.6 percent on Wednesday as the resignation of Sepp Blatter as head of soccer's governing body FIFA raised fears the Gulf state could lose the right to host the 2022 football World Cup.
The move come against a stormy backdrop of rising German and U.S. bond yields, though a retreat in the dollar provided some respite to emerging currencies.
Source: Reuters
IMF Paper-Housing Finance and Real-Estate Booms : A Cross-Country Perspective
June 3, 2015--Summary: The recent global crisis highlighted the risks stemming from real estate booms. This has generated a growing literature trying to better understand the sources and the risks associated with housing and credit booms.
This paper complements and supplements the previous work by (i) exploiting more disaggregated data on credit allowing us to dissociate between firm-credit and household (and in some cases mortgage) credit, and (ii) by taking into account the characteristics of the mortgage market, including institutional as well as other factors that vary across countries. This detailed cross-country analysis offers new valuable insights.
view the IMF Paper-Housing Finance and Real-Estate Booms : A Cross-Country Perspective
Source: IMF
JSE announces ESG partnership with FTSE Russell
June 3, 2015--The Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Africa's leading exchange and the first emerging market and first stock exchange to form a Socially Responsible Investment Index (SRI Index) in 2004, today announced that from 2015
it is partnering with FTSE Russell, the global index provider, in progressing the JSE's work around promoting corporate sustainability practices over the last decade.
Source: Johannesburg Stock Exchange
Regulators scrutinise asset managers as bond holdings rise
June 3, 2015--Asset managers have increased bond holdings since the financial crisis, prompting regulators' concerns about consequences of a probable interest-rate increase by the US Federal Reserve.
Source: SmartBrief
Strengthening investment key to improving world economy's B-minus grade, says OECD
June 3, 2015--Global growth will gradually strengthen towards its pre-crisis trend rate by late 2016 as activity becomes more evenly shared across the major economies and overall external imbalances are less marked than in the run-up to 2007, according to the OECD's latest Economic Outlook.
Labour markets are gradually healing in the advanced economies and risks of deflation have receded.
But the global economy can be characterised as only achieving a muddling-through "B-minus" grade. Global growth in the first quarter of 2015 was weaker than in any quarter since the crisis. And although this softness is seen as transitory, productivity growth continues to disappoint, reflecting in part tepid business investment which has weakened the spread of new technologies.
view the OECD Economic Outlook, Volume 2015 Issue 1
Source: OECD
Energy Storage-The Next Big Source of Innovation
June 3, 2015--With solar and wind energies reaching the tipping point across the world, the next big source of innovation is storing the energy that these intermittent technologies produce.
Once energy can be affordably stored in large amounts, there is no stopping the renewable energy revolution.
To give you an idea of how quickly this new industry is growing, revenue is expected to jump from $605 million a year now to over $21 billion by 2024 worldwide, according to Navigant Research.
Source: NASDAQ.com
IMF Working Paper-When Should Public Debt Be Reduced?
June 2, 2015--Summary: What considerations should guide public debt policy going forward? Should debt be reduced to achieve normative anchors (such as 60 percent of GDP), should it be increased further to finance a big public investment push, or should the existing debt be serviced forever?
We argue that, for countries with ample fiscal space (little risk of encountering a fiscal crisis), raising distortive taxes merely to bring the debt down is a treatment cure that is worse than the disease.
High public debt of course is costly, but it is a sunk cost only made worse by efforts to pay down the debt through distortionary taxation. Living with the debt is the welfare-maximizing policy. In decisions vis-á-vis the big push for public investment, golden-rule considerations remain salient, with due account taken of the additional servicing costs (and associated distortive taxation) from the resulting buildup of public debt.
view the IMF working paper-When Should Public Debt Be Reduced?
Source: IMF
