Market Watch January 2017

The articles in this month’s edition of Market Watch:

Australian housing: Vulnerable but not crashing

The big picture view on Australian residential property is well known: Australian housing is expensive by global standards and the surge in home prices has gone hand-in-hand with a surge in household debt. What is the likelihood of a crash and what would this mean for investors?

Tourist attraction: Investing in Australia’s surging visitor numbers

Record numbers of visitors pouring into Australia suggest flights full of free-spending tourists landing at crowded airports around the country, cramming through immigration to dash to the nearest shopping centre and lift the nation’s retail sales figures as quickly as possible. So how busy are we and how are we capturing the investment theme of visitor spending?

One way to assess policy options and limits

Faced with the difficulty of what to do when cash rates reach the lower bound of zero, central bankers have responded with attempts to twist the yield curve; purchases of government bonds, corporate bonds and equities; direct loans into the banking system; and most recently, negative interest rates. In some countries, these moves have been accompanied by explicit requests from the central bank that governments become more active in fiscal policy. What do these non-traditional policy tools reflect and what is the Policy Inflexibility Index?

4 reasons why listed real estate is now safer if a downturn hits

Advisers who moved their clients into listed real estate after the GFC made a brave call, given that investors in the sector suffered terribly during the economic turmoil. How is the global listed real estate sector better prepared, and what are the four key factors supporting this notion of resilience?

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