In an increasingly fractured world there are still some things that unit the most disparate countries. In recent years a trader, named ‘the Dude’, has popped up in Turkey’s financial markets. ‘The Dude’ has been known to trade in huge volumes, on occasions boosting the average volume of the Istanbul Exchange by up to 10%.
He came to mind last week after I read William Cohan’s fascinating article in Vanity Fair where he detailed a range of enormous trades in the S&P futures market that appear to have taken place just before market moving tweets from the US President. Regular market participants have been left flummoxed by the size and prescience of these trades, and it is to be hoped that the market regulator will get to the bottom of the matter. However, one cannot help pondering the identity of these ‘Dude’ like traders.
Beyond trading, there is oddly, much ore that unites Turkey and the USA. Turkey has become the graveyard of US diplomacy as the sanctioning of the Turkish army’s incursion into northern Syria by President Trump arks the end of the moral, democratic and military backstop that American has extended to the rest of the world for the past seventy years.
That Mikes Pence and Pompeo have only managed to agree a stay of execution for the Kurds illustrates the atrophying in American power, and the schoolboy-ish letter that President Trump sent to his Turkish counterpart makes matters even worse.
Economically, Turkey has two interrelated lessons for the USA and the rest of the world. First, Turkey is a salient tale in the rise and fall of nations. Since the early 2000’s when Kemal Dervis had righted the banking system and the prospect of membership of the EU was dangled in front of it, Turkey made great progress. Lately this has come to a halt as policy making, the quality of institutions and the rule of law have been degraded.
It leads me to think of Edward Gibbon’s ‘A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’ Gibbon, who sought to explain why the Roman Empire disintegrated believed that Rome became complacent, institutions weakened and the leaders in Roman public life lost their sense of civic virtue (or what Machiavelli later simply called ‘virtu’ – the good of the republic or common good).
The importance of institutional quality and the need for a sense of civic ethic is evident in other books that track the rise and fall of nations such as Acemoglu and Robinson’s ‘Why Nation’s Fail?’.
Acemoglu, like Dani Rodrik, is one of the leading economists in the world, and Turkish. Both of them I am sure, lament the direction that their country has taken, and both would have clear policy answers to set it back on course. Both are based in Boston, and it is hard not to think that their work (Acemoglu and Robinson have a new book out, ‘The Narrow Corridor’), as well of course as that of Gibbon, deserves reading in Washington.
It might also be more widely read on Wall Street, because as Turkey again shows, political risk is becoming a greater force in markets. Typically, and doubly so in the age of quantitative easing (QE), political and geopolitical risk have not played a significant role in developed economy markets. The behavior of the Turkish lira, its debt and equity markets in the past three years suggests that for emerging markets at least, political risk is now a dominant market factor.
The case of Brexit and sterling suggest that developed markets are not immune. The perplexing issue however, is how investors (at least those who, to go back to William Cohan’s article, do not have premonitions of market turning tweets) can react to heightened policy uncertainty.
The puzzle is deepened by the fact that number of measures of policy uncertainty are at all time highs, while volatility is close to its historic lows. Indeed, for most investors the political risk they are most concerned about is the prospect of an Elizabeth Warren Presidency, which whilst arguably good for American institutions could be tough on corporate profits and taxes.
Back to the current incumbent of the White House, who is attacking his country’s central bank and institutions with nearly the same vigour that Mr Erdogan is employing in Turkey.
The reason that the dollar is not as volatile as the lira is that it is the reserve currency in a reasonably healthy economy in a world where most other large economies are weak. For dollar based investors however, dollar strength is a good opportunity to diversify, especially for those who think that the ‘American empire’ has peaked. In the shorter term, hedges such as gold and equity volatility, are beginning to look more attractive. If the ‘Dude’ sized trader in the S&P futures market is found out, they may be doubly interesting.
Have a great week ahead,
Mike
The Levelling 