日本的灾难对全球股市的影响

In the Portuguese bullfight, the forcados try to subdue the animal by lining up in front of its charge and jumping on its head. That sounds full hardy. It is. But apart from the horrible injuries, the eight forcados are usually successful. The equity market right now, is the bull that’s winning in spite of Japan’s biggest disaster since the Second World War, and the unexpected decision of the US to support the bombing of Libya.

This chart shows the effect of the biggest of the problems facing the bull at the moment--the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear calamity in Japan. We can see that Japanese equities have been totally along pretty much in line with the rest of the world right up until the quake. The result was a crash in Japanese shares, briefly down more than 20% as investors tried to assess the scale of the country’s disaster. The rest of the world though, wasn’t that badly affected. Since the day before the quake hit, shares in the rest of the world had fallen by just over 1% in dollar terms. That includes another strong bounce today Monday as investors became ever more convinced that the economic recovery was well underway.

The surprisingly small reaction outside Japan came despite the fact the Middle East situation was worsening. Coming late at the weekend were the American, British and French attacks on the Libyan military. Stock markets have been reacting badly to rising oil prices even before Japan’s quake. Surely another Middle East conflict, Libya’s actually in North Africa, of course, but investors have long loved the two together. Surely that’s enough to stop the bull. Even the prospect of an extended battle of unrest in Libya doesn’t seem to have that much effect. But at some point, rising oil has to be bad for equities.

You can see on this chart that oil started to rise faster than shares at the end of November. When the oil markets woke up to the dangers of the Middle East revolutions in mid-February, that’s here, that did slow the bull and coincided with the peak in the market. But since then, world equities went down a bit more than 4%, wiping out all their gains for the year. But it isn’t how bull runs usually end. The fall is just too small. Today’s rise of shares worldwide, up 1.4% or so, came as investors decided that today was a day to take a risk following good news on the fight to get Japan’s Fukushima reactors back under control. Market reacted in a standard risk-gone way. Bonds of the dollar tumbled and commodities and equities rose. The bull run will have to come to an end at some point. When it does, investors will suffer. But for now, the markets seem to be able to toss aside all but the worst news.