The ‘Hot Money‘ Illusion
Last year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high of 16,588, totally overshadowing the previous high of 14,000 in 2007 (pre-financial crisis). Does it mean that the US economy is out of the woods? US Markets Hardly so. As we all know, the Federal Reserves has been printing more the US$3.5 trillion of fresh money over the last 5 years to try to revive their struggling economy through their 3 tranches of Quantitative Easing (or ‘QE’ in short) programmes. Also, Federal Reserve has set its interest rates to almost zero, allowing institutions to borrow more and cheaply, in a hope that more spending would spur the economy. As such, there are lots of ‘hot money’ floating around, waiting to be deployed. And it is no surprise that most of this ‘hot money’ are in the hands of banks.