From our point of view (the Macquarie FIC strategy team), the Reserve Bank of Australia is increasingly pointing out things that they have done to support country's economy.
"Abenomics" is comprised of three major policies, monetary, fiscal, and structural.
The inflation rate is obviously very low at the moment and much weaker than the ECB is heading for, with Eurozone CPI falling to 0.5%, according to the data published yesterday.
We do not see a big impact on the Eurozone for now unless there is a serious energy supply shock.
Whenever there are major losses to innocent players in any industry, there is a call for regulation.
The unseasonably cold weather in the U.S. over the winter months has led to poor economic figures, which in turn have pushed interest rates lower and weakened the Dollar.
I believe that the local economic data, while being uneven, is taking a more positive tone, with inflation pressure heading higher.
In my opinion, there is a possibility that Canada's GDP could weaken in the first quarter of this year as it has been a difficult winter in many parts of the country and we did have few significant storms.
In my point of view, the main lesson from the crisis is that in the future we should try to prevent taxpayers from saving banks.
I think we will have to get used to some disappointments, and we got an early flavour of that with the latest flash PMIs from France and Germany, which both missed expectations.
In my opinion, one major change that we are seeing from the Fed with Yellen's appointment is the fact that they are no longer going to carry the burden of the U.S. economy on their shoulders.
In the recent Bank of England's press conference officials announced quite strong economic forecasts for 2014, as they are looking for growth to accelerate to more than 3% this year.
The Chinese state banks are politically aligned with the state owned enterprises and a lot of these are inefficient and struggling; but they are still funding them.
Currently we do not have a really good Ruble story. One of the most important factors behind this is the global sell-off story.
The GDP figure of 7.7% is the main national average and everyone is very keen on quoting that, but in reality it means very little.
From our point of view, the recent Ruble depreciation was mostly driven by both local and foreign factors.
Two SSA countries (excluding South Africa) have large foreign holdings in their markets: Nigeria and Ghana.
In our opinion, China needs stable growth and authorities are committed to support the economy by introducing reforms.
If U.S. oil was more freely available in the global market, this would help to depress international benchmark prices as well as the prices of local U.S. blends.
Once the policy makers indicate that there is economic slowdown from the sales tax hike, we see the Bank of Japan embarking on further easing, most probably towards June of the year of 2014.
I do not believe that gold will lose much of its allure. It will still have investors attracted to it despite the fact that it offers no yield.
In our opinion, Canadian growth will slightly behind the U.S. We are expecting about 2.5% expansion in Canada this year.
The Indian markets have taken QE tapering announcements in its stride and will not see much impact as it actually commences.
Actually, we do not expect major changes in the Fed's policy, in the sense that the current tapering of asset purchases will continue through the rest of the year. We definitely do not anticipate any rate hikes this year.