Fixed income viewpoints from CFA Institute conference

Here are opinions on currency and CDOs that grabbed my attention at the CFA Institute’s Fixed Income conference last week.

If YOU were at the conference, I’d be interested to learn what surprised or intrigued you. 

“The New Currency World Order”
Ron Liesching of Mountain Pacific Group, LLC

The U.S. dollar cannot be replaced as the world’s reserve currency, but its role will be profoundly altered.

It’s time for investors to consider
*  Hedging their U.S. dollar risk
*  Active currency management
*  Active long commodity allocation
*  Long commodity currencies
*  Strategically long emerging market currencies
*  Global is the new core

“The Pricing of Investment-Grade Credit Risk during the Financial Crisis” 
Joshua Coval, Harvard Business School

There’s evidence that ratings agencies bent their standards to bestow too many AAA ratings.  They rated 75.5% of CDOs’ capital structure as AAA, when the rating agency model allowed 63.4%, according to “Did Subjectivity Play a Role in CDO Credit Ratings?” by John Griffin and Dragon Tang. Thanks, Prof. Coval, for sending me the link to Griffin and Tang’s article!

The collapse of structured products will impact the economic recovery to the extent that cheap credit is less available. The U.S. consumer had been the engine of U.S. GDP growth thanks to cheap credit.

Related posts:
* Dan Fuss: Bond investors have learned from experience…not