Since this decade has commenced a few short months ago, the U.S. dollar has defied conventional wisdom and appreciated fairly dramatically. Suddenly, it's the un-Euro, according to Loomis Sayles global fixed-income guru Dave Rolley.
Hopefully, the Un-Euro will do better in the next 50 years than the un-cola, 7 Up, did over the last half century. But at an annual press event yesterday, Rolley painted a depressing near-term future for the Euro, which has been reeling from the specter of a massive supply of Greek debt looming on the horizon.
Even if other southern tier European nations like Italy, Spain and Portugal don't require rescues-bailouts that would be much larger than Greece's-fiscal contraction triggered by austerity measures across the northern Mediterranean will slow down growth throughout Europe. In fact, Euroland may not grow much above 1% this year.
Rolley said that he would be "shocked in the U.S. GDP" number for all of 2010 if it didn't have "a 3 in front of it." Global currency markets are coming to the conclusion that maybe the European Central Bank won't be able to raise interest rates as quickly as the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank can.
Meanwhile, Rolley conceded that he was running out of markets to like. Currency markets actually are all about not getting stuck holding the losers, he said in more diplomatic terms.
Moreover, Euroland and America aren't the only places facing the tricky task of devising an exit strategy for their fiscal and monetary stimulus programs. China could issue more debt this year than the Fed, which is on track to issue a mere $2.1 trillion. Nearly 30% of China's GDP this year could be traced to bank loans directed by the central government, helping to explain why some short-sellers are looking closely at Chinese banks. I said that, not Rolley.
For his part, Rolley claimed he was looking at bonds of nations on the periphery of Europe and Asia, places like Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Norway, Sweden and Singapore. Most of theses nations possess these three, or at least two, traits or resources: solvency, oil and a work ethic.