Around the world central bank interest-rate policies have diverged to address different challenges, including the eurozone debt crisis, but efforts in the United States, Europe, and Japan to hold short-term rates low could cause movement in long-term interest rates.
We continue to find a number of reasons for a positive outlook on the high-yield bond sector. First, the long-term average spread in the high-yield market is close to 500 basis points, so today high-yield spreads are at above-average levels. But at the same time, the fundamental backdrop for high-yield corporate bonds continues to be
European stocks may have a chance of recovery if political leaders can make progress on resolving the debt issue, but analyzing earnings will be critical for investors to navigate risk.
Bond markets in Europe and emerging markets face a host of challenges in the years ahead.
With its meteoric rise to become the world’s second-largest economy, China is an engine of global growth and is currently expanding much faster than developed nations still struggling to recover from the recession. Although today China is facing headwinds such as nagging inflation, Putnam sees investment opportunities in many industry sectors.
Over the next 10 years, some of the greatest growth in health-care spending is projected for emerging markets such as China, India, and Brazil. For many reasons, growth opportunities are abundant in developing economies, but selecting health-care stocks, particularly among the smaller-cap companies based in these regions, is not without its challenges.
Developments in European sovereign debt markets have taken a significant turn recently, and the risk that the crisis could affect financial markets has increased.
With political unrest and natural disasters around the world in recent weeks, investors rushed to gold as a safe haven and sent prices soaring. But while investors choose gold for many reasons, they may find that some gold-mining companies are a more attractive investment than the bullion itself.
The convergence of many types of high bandwidth content — especially video — on mobile devices, tablet computers, and Internet–connected television is generating rapid growth in data traffic on telecommunications networks. Forecasts suggest traffic may grow more than 30% annually over the next several years. Telecom companies may be able to translate data traffic into