Lazard Insights

With global yields close to their historic bottom and jittery markets anticipating resurgent inflation, we believe investors should no longer count on returns on "risk-free" income keeping pace with rising prices. View the slide presentation here: https://www.lazardassetmanagement.com/gl/references/media/stable-income-volatile-times

The now ubiquitous bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are creating a decentralized, alternative global financial system. Hoping to push back against the competition, central banks, led by the People’s Bank of China, are investigating what it would take to launch their own digital currencies.

In this Insights, we discuss the enormous and fundamental implications changing demographics will have in determining the fate of entire industries as new technologies and ecosystems come into favor and replace old products and services.

The 5G wireless network promises to revolutionize the internet, but no matter which nation ultimately assumes global leadership, the competition itself should create enormous opportunities for investors.

When the banks stumble, the economy can falter, as it did in the global financial crisis a decade ago. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic poses sizable risks for the US banking system, risks which the stock market appears to have more than priced in.

Have markets overplayed the threat of sovereign emerging market defaults? We believe the widespread misperception about the risk defaults pose to emerging markets debt has created some of the most compelling alpha opportunities on offer in today’s markets.

We use a case study on water risk in the global beverage industry to show how sustainability has many profound and far-reaching implications.

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced extraordinary uncertainty and volatility to financial markets and put volatility forecasting strategies to the test.

Behind the headlines, some of the world’s biggest commodity-driven emerging markets are “getting it.” They’re cleaning up corporate governance, advancing shareholders’ interests, and inviting private investment. Russia, which had the world’s best-performing stock market in 2019, is a beneficiary of this emerging trend and we think Brazil may be next.