M&G Investments is a global asset manager, serving customers and clients for over 90 years since launching Europe’s first ever mutual fund back in 1931.
We’re part of M&G plc, a family of brands, all aligned behind the same ambition: to manage our customers’ investments so that they can live the life they want, while aiming to make the world a little better along the way.
Through long-term active investment management, we build solutions around what matters most to our customers and clients. We look for the best opportunities to invest in, across a wide range of asset classes, on behalf of people who care how their money is invested.
We manage assets of over €357 billion (at 30 June 2022) in equities, multi-asset, fixed income, real estate and cash for our customers and clients in the UK, Europe and Asia.
The value and income of a fund's assets will go down as well as up. This will cause the value of your investment to fall as well as rise and you may get back less than you originally invested.
Governments have traditionally argued that as long as debt remains manageable and serviceable without difficulty, there’s little cause for concern. While this notion holds some truth, the reality is that recent growth has largely been fueled by an insurmountable increase in debt.
We are now 18 months into the Fed’s tightening cycle and many market participants, including us, have been surprised by the resilience of credit spreads, particularly in the high yield (HY) market where the option-adjusted spread for the Global HY index has dipped to the low 400s (bps), one of the tightest levels of post Global Financial Crisis observations.
Has the ECB just delivered its final rate hike of the cycle?
The current state of UK Government Debt as of 2023 is circa £2.5 trillion, which is 100% of GDP and equates to £38,000 per person.
An inverted yield curve refers to a situation in which short-term interest rates are higher than long-term interest rates for government bonds of the same credit quality. Inversion is considered unusual because, under normal circumstances, longer-term bonds tend to have higher yields than shorter-term bonds.
During this Fed hiking cycle emerging markets have been split into two camps.
Inflation is one of the great economic debates and often leaves big economic thinkers at loggerheads. I am not a financial titan, but looking at the world from 100,000 feet, the conditions are in place for the world to see inflation heading meaningfully lower.
For a long time, it has made no sense to keep money under your mattress or invested in cash-like instruments (short dated, fixed return) such as money market funds, without facing an inflation-adjusted loss.
A brief press release recently from Europe’s largest and possibly oldest industrial manufacturer, announcing a short-dated, small-sized bond, seems hardly significant. In time however it may come to be seen as heralding a transformation of bond markets.
Real estate downturns (defined as two consecutive quarters of falling prices) have been triggered in a number of economies including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Nordics. One area where this trend is playing out most rapidly is Sweden, where house prices are falling at one of the fastest rates in the world.
