by Jürgen

Before we head to the direct interactions between the Energy industry and the Financial world, it is important to assess the situation in which the Energy industry is in at the moment. By going through the overall status and the major evolutions, it will indeed be easier to understand the drivers and desires of an industry which – while being in the control zone of governments – has – with a ff market cap of roughly € 210billion for Utilities and € 160billion for Oil (solely in Europe) – a strong impact on the financial world.
In order to prepare the FT WEC Energy Leaders Summit, Market Melange has decided to take the lead by offering you its view on the core subjects of the summit in a series of five articles. The goal is to provide a first analysis and allow you to open up the discussion.

by Gregory

“Summer’s heating up, and so are the markets”. Indeed, The Dow before stabilizing around the 9,000 threshold jumped higher on Thursday reaching an 8 month high. This week brought sufficient data to consolidate the upward movement, mainly housing data and the  GDP numbers. For the former, data showed a 11.0 percent rise over the revised May rate of [...]

by James

Global markets appear to be sustaining their rally, with US equities up some 20% from their trough as we move into the year-end period. But the uncertainties are still high. Markets are due for some kind of rally, but committing heavily means taking on substantial risk. For its part, the Russian market remains pressured, largely [...]

by James

It is some months since my strategy on Russia switched defensive in the summer. That decision was made easy thanks to a range of domestic factors. If the attack on Mechel wasn’t warning enough (coming on the back of an aggressive campaign against TNK-BP), the war in Georgia certainly was. Leaving aside feelings and opinions [...]

by James

Financial markets remained in a state of heightened volatility throughout the last week of October, but showed reassuring improvement from earlier weeks. During the month, the S&P 500 lost 16.9% and oil lost 32.6%, while the dollar gained 6.8% against the broad basket. Financial actions to prop up banks and restore liquidity – both within [...]

by James

Over the last week, I have been travelling – to London and Monaco – to meet with investors and commentators to discuss the ongoing crises, both global and local. This post summarises my experiences and thoughts. Summary > Global financial community is in shock. > Central Banks have done most of what is needed, now [...]

by Gregory

Since August 07, stock markets have been facing a sharp correction all over the world, or as David Viniar, CFO of Goldman Sachs put it: “We are seeing things that were 25-standard deviation events, several days in a row”. In a “normal” world, the ‘25-standard deviation event’ is something that only happens once every 100,000 years [...]

by James

The Russian equity market has been making the news for a few months now, not least on this blog. Well it might, the key indexes dropped more than 70% from their May peaks. Russia is marginally impacted by the global credit crisis, but certainly not to this extent. What is going on? There are several [...]