David Bloom, HSBC's Global Head of Foreign-Exchange Strategy, offered his outlook on currencies for this year, making a bullish case for the US dollar.
"Everyone's convinced themselves the dollar's going to be weaker. It's the third year in a row they're going to fail. The one currency we are very bullish against the dollar is sterling. The political risk was very negative for sterling, so we've taken one negative factor and we've chucked it away. That's got to be good for the currency. Once those yields start compressing" even further than they have done already, "you've got kind of developed market yields but emerging-market risks. After we see the great rally in EM and the race to the bottom of interest rates we could see at some point later this year, or maybe it's next year, you could see suddenly your yields are just too low for the risks involved."