Brief : David Solomon wants to make sure you don’t get too attached to your Rona Rigs. The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief executive officer on Wednesday repeated his desire to see the firm’s offices fill up again. “This is not ideal for us and it’s not a new normal,” Solomon said at a Credit Suisse Group AG conference. “It’s an aberration that we are going to correct as quickly as possible.” The 59-year-old CEO has been one of the more vocal business leaders pushing government officials to move faster in making changes needed to bring employees back to work. He’s urged them to use private-sector support to speed up the process. Wall Street firms were preparing to welcome a larger cohort into their emptied-out skyscrapers last year, only to see that effort fizzle with a new surge of coronavirus cases. Some have been further frustrated by what they perceive as a botched vaccine rollout that delayed a return to pre-Covid normalcy. “The vaccine distribution and the process of recovery has been a little bit slower in the first quarter than some of us had hoped,” Solomon said. But additional government stimulus and the potential for an infrastructure bill after that will provide a “very, very strong tailwind” for economic recovery, he said.
Brief: A group of institutional investors worth USD13 trillion, including Aviva Investors, AXA Investment Managers, and Fidelity International, has pledged to support fair and equal global access to vaccines and healthcare in the fight against coronavirus. Last week, the United Nations secretary general António Guterres labelled the global vaccination effort “wildly uneven and unfair” in a security council meeting. Three quarters of all vaccinations have so far been administered by just 10 countries, while 130 countries have not yet received a single dose. Led by the Access to Medicine Foundation, the investor partnership aims to improve financing and co-operation on worldwide vaccination efforts. The investors say they are concerned about limited funding for the World Health Organisation’s ACT Accelerator global healthcare access scheme, which includes vaccination wing Covax, and the effect this will have on the “trajectory of the pandemic and global economic activity in the coming years”.
Brief: Global airline industry body IATA said it would launch a COVID-19 travel pass at the end of March, bringing into use a digital system for test results and vaccine certificates which will help facilitate international travel. IATA said on Wednesday that it was essential that governments start issuing their citizens with digital vaccination certificates which can then feed into its travel pass.
Brief: Hedge funds could be set for a rush of new capital pouring into the industry this year – potentially reaching up to USD30 billion – as investor appetite grows following strong 2020 performances, Barclays said on Wednesday. The bank’s ‘2021 Global Hedge Fund Industry Outlook and Trends’ report found that allocator sentiment towards hedge funds is the strongest it’s been since 2014, with 41 per cent of all investors planning to increase their hedge fund exposure this year. The annual hedge fund investor survey quizzed 240 firms representing USD5 trillion in assets, including USD725 billion of hedge fund investments - roughly 22 per cent of total industry capital. The bank’s Strategic Consulting team, which ran the poll, said hedge funds could draw between USD10 billion and USD30 billion of projected net inflows from investors, and around USD450 billion in gross allocations, in what could prove “a breakout year” for managers.
Brief: A breakneck selloff in the bond market left one of the biggest Treasury exchange-traded funds bleeding. The $14 billion iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (ticker TLT) has plunged 11% this year as long-dated Treasury yields climbed, fueled by building wagers on a rebound in inflation. Investors have yanked over $3.2 billion from the fund so far in 2021, whittling TLT’s total assets to the lowest level since mid-2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Covid-19 vaccine rollouts combined with the prospect of further fiscal aid from the Biden administration has forced a reckoning of sorts for the Treasury market, where long-dated yields were hovering near historic lows entering 2021. Breakeven inflation rates have soared to multi-year highs, dragging benchmark 10-year yields to the highest in over a year, as the economic outlook brightens. That point was reinforced by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell this week as he said the recent run-up in bond yields is “a statement of confidence” in the economy, while downplaying the risk of a sustained pickup in price pressures.
Brief: In the health-care industry, the coronavirus pandemic led to big fortunes, fast. Now some of them are evaporating just as quickly. Take Seegene Inc., a maker of Covid-19 test kits, and Alteogen Inc., a biotech with subcutaneous-injection technology. Their founders became billionaires as the shares surged last year. Fast forward a few months to the vaccine rollout, and they’ve lost their title after both stocks sank more than 40%, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. It’s a similar story for glovemakers in Malaysia, which counted at least five industry billionaires by August as the worsening health crisis increased demand for the protective gear. Despite a brief rebound amid last month’s frenzy in retail trading, their shares are down by more than a third since hitting highs, wiping more than $9 billion from their founders’ net worths. While the billionaires created by the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. vaccines have maintained much of their wealth, many others have seen a falling off. The moves show how fleeting fortunes can be with a market so wild that some stocks have had days with fluctuations of more than 20%. Some of the founders took advantage of the volatility to book profits, just as others increased their control by buying more shares as prices fell.