[From this past July] “In my 20 years of managing high yield bond investments, I’ve never seen so many signals that scream caution. Desperate to find yield, investors have poured billions into high yield bond funds and ETFs driving the yield on the Barclays High Yield Bond Index to just 5.54% — the lowest level in history. Investors are positioning in a risk they may not fully understand.”
Housing — 43% of the sales in Q1 2014 going to “all cash” buyers (though not using traditional mortgages, they can still be highly leveraged). The fact that so many are buying “all cash” says to me that speculators are heavily in the market, even though some of the institutional speculators have been pulling out.
If you research it, you’ll find that almost all asset prices have been affected by this (usually leveraged) speculation. It is a direct effect of the central banks’ policies and the concentration of wealth around the globe (ratio of money used for speculation vs money used as a medium of exchange/labor/productive investment is higher than it’s been in the past, IMHO…not sure if this is officially tracked, but I can look for it if you’re interested).
