Riyad assure pouvoir augmenter immédiatement la production de 25% si besoin, un signal salué par les Etats-Unis

L'organisme public qui sert à établir le budget prévoit un déficit de 4,6% du PIB et 2012 et 2013, et appelle à des mesures correctrices

L’association Paris Europlace a présenté vingt mesures destinées à soutenir l’industrie financière et le financement de l’économie

L'idée de développer une agence pour faciliter leur financement via la titrisation est à nouveau citée dans un rapport remis au gouvernement

Le chancelier de l’Echiquier George Osborne présente aujourd’hui son budget pour 2012-2013, après que Moody’s et Fitch ont abaissé leurs perspectives sur la note du Royaume-Uni. Il n’aura donc pas de marge de manœuvre malgré un déficit sur 2011-2012 plus bas que prévu.

George Osborne doit annoncer aujourd'hui un objectif de déficit en baisse par rapport aux prévisions d'automne, sous l'effet de la réduction des dépenses

Ni la France ni l’Allemagne n’ont l’intention de se joindre à une éventuelle initiative anglo-américaine de libérer des réserves pétrolières d’urgence afin d'éviter que la cherté du carburant n’entrave la reprise économique, ont rapporté mardi des sources officielles des deux côtés du Rhin citées par Reuters. Barack Obama et David Cameron ont évoqué la semaine dernière la possibilité de puiser dans les stocks stratégiques.

Le nombre des mises en chantier a reculé en février, mais celui des permis de construire a bondi à son plus haut niveau depuis octobre 2008, a annoncé mardi le département du Commerce, signe que le marché de l’immobilier poursuit sa reprise. Le nombre de permis de construire a grimpé de 5,1% à 717.000 unités le mois dernier, dépassant les attentes des analystes.

Athènes a reçu une première tranche de 7,5 milliards d’euros d’aide financière dans le cadre du nouveau plan de l’Union européenne et du FMI, une enveloppe dont la majeure partie servira à rembourser des obligations détenues par les banques centrales de la zone euro. «Nous avons reçu 5,9 milliards d’euros de la zone euro et 1,6 milliard d’euros du FMI», a déclaré à Reuters un responsable du ministère grec des Finances.

Les syndicats et le patronat français ont décidé mardi de revaloriser de 2,3% les retraites complémentaires des salariés du privé et des cadres (Arrco et Agirc), rattrapant un décalage dans l’appréciation de l’inflation. La mesure prendra effet le 1er avril. Le «salaire de référence», qui permet de transformer les cotisations en points de retraite, sera augmenté de 2,25%, une mesure qui touche 18 millions de salariés, selon la CFTC.

Le Fonds européen de stabilité financière (FESF) a mandaté Citigroup, Nomura et UniCredit en tant que co-chefs de file pour son émission obligataire de 4 milliards d’euros à cinq ans qui doit être lancée sous peu, en fonction des conditions de marché. Les trois établissements ont étéretenus parmi les cinquante qui composent le «FESF Market Group».

Les contrats de protection (CDS) sur la dette du holding qui fournit des services de télécommunications en Irlande vont être débouclés, a indiqué mardi l’Association internationale pour les dérivés et les swaps (Isda). Le processus d’indemnisation des porteurs de protection passera par des enchères.

L’inflation sur un an en Grande-Bretagne est tombée en février à son plus bas niveau depuis novembre 2010, montrent des données officielles publiées mardi, qui entretiennent l’espoir que la moindre hausse des prix de détail va inciter les consommateurs à augmenter leurs dépenses. L’Office national des statistiques (ONS) a ainsi fait état d’une inflation annuelle de 3,4% pour le mois dernier contre 3,6% pour janvier.

La Grèce a emprunté 1,3 milliard d’euros à trois mois, à un rendement en baisse de 36 points de base par rapport à la précédente émission en février. Le prix du papier a été fixé de façon à donner un rendement de 4,25%, contre 4,61% lors de l’opération du 14 février. De son côté, l’Espagne a annoncé une émission de 3,60 milliards d’euros de titres à 12 mois contre 2,94 milliards d’euros lors de la précédente opération du même genre et une émission de 1,45 milliard à 18 mois contre 2,50 milliards précédemment. Le rendement moyen 18 mois est 1,711% contre 2,308% précédemment, celui du 12 mois est à 1,418% contre 1,899% auparavant.

HSBC Global Asset Management has hired Paola Pallotta, formerly of Swiss & Global Asset Management, as a relationship manager for its Italian team. She will be in charge of developing the whosesale client segment, with a focus on emerging markets. She will work with Roberto Citarella, deputy managing director, and Alessandra Primavera, relationship manager. HSBC GAM has been present in Italy for 11 years, and has an office of six people. Assets for the Italian activity totalled USD4.1bn as of the end of 2011.

The investment firm Pimco and the ETP provider Source on 19 March announced the launch of the Pimco Short-Term High Yield Corporate Bond Index Source ETF (STHY). The fund is listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and aims to reproduce the performance of the BofA Merrill Lynch 0-5 Year US High Yield Constrained index. STHY is licensed for sale in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Austria, France, Finland, Germany, Italy (only to institutional investors), the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.STHY is the first ETF available in Europe to offer investors physical access to the short-term high yield bond sector. Exposure to the high yield sector is often used as an alternative to equity markets. Returns on the short-term segment of the high yield market historically are equivalent to those of the equity markets, but offer two timss lower volatility.The index selected for the ETF includes a wide range of issuers and bonds (821 securities as of 29 February 2012), which allows Pimco to rely on its experience and expertise in the optimisation of portfolios and high yield investment internationally. The Pimco optimisation process aims to minimise tracking error compared with the index, reduce trading costs, and avoid exposure to bonds considered illiquid, and issuers whose long-term viability is uncertain, while concentrating on the objective of replicating the index. These issuers generally represent a small proportion of the high yield universe.The Pimco Short-Term High Yield Corporate Bond Index Source ETF is the sixth fund launched in the physically invested Pimco Source ETF range, which includes the MINT strategies, which are the first actively-managed ETFs in Europe, and the first bond ETFs which weight the various countries according to the GNP so as to provide an optimised reproduction of local currency and European currency emerging market government bond indices.

Only 40% of equity funds in Europe out-perform their benchmarks on average over a year, three years and ten years over the past 20 years, a new Lipper study finds. This means that 60% of funds underperform, which is a new argument in favour of ETF funds. This proportion nonetheless varies in different periods and geographical regions. Looking at actively-managed equity funds’ performance relative to their benchmarks over 1, 3 and 10 years to the end of December 2011, the proportion of funds that out-performed varied from 26.7% in 2011, 40.0% over 3 years and 34.9% over the past 10 years. Meanwhile, funds which invest in equity funds in North America have fewer managers who have outperformed than other categories. In bonds, 45.4% of funds did better than the index over three years, but only 16.2% did so over 10 years. In 2011, 23.7% of funds beat their benchmarks.

In the second week of March, bond funds continued to be favoured by investors, as the US and Japanese central banks reaffirmed their intentions to maintain interest rates at a very low level.Bond funds finished the week to 14 March with record net inflows of USD7.57bn, according to statistics from EPFR Global.

The index provider S&P Indices on 19 March announced the launch of the S&P GIVI (S&P Global Intrinsic Value Index), which associates reduced volatility with a specific weighting which takes into account the intrinsic value of a share rather than its market capitalisation. S&P has issued a license to use the index and the complete family of sub-indices for developed and emerging markets to Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

The Lyxor ETF Russia (FR0010326140), launched on 22 June 2006, will on 20 March change its underlying index, to adopt the new Dow Jones Russia GDR Index (GDR stands for global depository receipts), instead of the Dow Jones RusIndex Titans 10. This will allow for diversification of exposure to Russian equities, as the DJ Russia GDR includes about 77% of the larger DJ Russia TSM index.GDRs are bank certificates traded as domestic equities in local firms, but which are offered to investors worldwide via foreign affiliates of international banks.

A team of former electronic traders from RBC Capital is planning to launch an alternative trading platform which will aim to reduce the impact of high-frequency trading on large trades, HFT Review reports. The initiative comes at a time when a growing number of institutional investors are seeking to protect themselves against high-frequency trading. The new platform, supported by RBC and major buy-side institutions, may take the form of a dark pool.

In a deal announced on Monday, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, the owners of the New York Mets baseball team, have agreed to pay USD162m to Irving Picard, the trustee for the interests of Bernard Madoff, to settle a lawsuit against them, the Wall Street Journal reports. Picard had accused the men of having been willfully blind to signs that Bernard Madoff was a fraudster.

Crédit Mutuel ARKEA on 19 March announced that it is investing in the majority-owning fund “France Transmission I,” created by the asset management firm TCR Capital. The subscription to the fund, dedicated to small caps and aiming for assets of EUR50m to EUR60m, will allow Crédit Mutuel Arkéa to enrich its resources in private equity, so as to offer a complete range of owners’ equity assistance solutions. Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, which has hitherto been positioned solely as a minority shareholder in SMEs and mid-sized businesses, now has a resource for the acquisition of SMEs by a majority investor. The “France Transmission I” fund, managed by TCR Cpaital, in which Crédit Mutuel Arkéa is a major investor, aims to acquire majority stakes of up to EUR6m, in regional businesses in the home territories of Crédit Mutuel Arkéa and also nationwide.

The Irish-registered iShares Barclays Euro Corporate Bond ex-Financials and iShares Barclays Euro Corporate Bond ex-Financials 1-5 Etf funds, launched on 25 September 2009 on the London Stock Exchange, with assets of about EUR1.26bn and EUR322.3m, respectively, are now available on the French market.Both products are ex-financials corporate bond funds, which use physical replication of indices, covering about 700 and 400 shares, respectively.In 2011, the two ETF funds had net inflows of over EUR700m in Europe, in addition to which EUR400m have come in since the beginning of the year (as of 21 February 2012), says David Benmussa, director of iShares in France.

About one year after selling off the Marriott hotel on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, the German firm Union Investment Real Estate has acquired the four-star Meliá Hotels International hotel under construction at La Défense (369 rooms, 24,000 square metres) near Paris. The property is slated for completion in third quarter 2014. The sale price has not been disclosed. The vendor is Vinci Immobilier.The property will be added to the portfolio of the open-ended real estate fund UniImmo: Deutschland, which currently owns 10 hotels of seven different chains, with a total value of EUR900m.

Despite toughening regulations, including the compartmentalisation of retail banking by the Vickers commission, increased taxation and an economy in crisis, the British capital has once again won the top place in the rankings of international financial centres (GFCI) by Z/Yen Group, Les Echos reports. The City will soon benefit from a tax break, and its status as a designated offshore market for the Chinese yuan. New York and Hong Kong continue to trail close behind the City, while Paris has risen 2 places to 22nd place.

In an interview with the Börsen-Zeitung, Frank-Peter Martin, CIO of Metzler Asset Management, says that the asset management affiliate of the German private bank Metzler as of the end of 2011 had assets of EUR47bn, compared with EUR45.5bn twelve months earlier, due to market effects and net inflows from institutional investors. These investors have been the priority target of Metzler AM since 2009.

Thomas Richter, CEO of the German BVI association of asset management firms, announced on 19 March that he does not understand why investment funds are named in the European Commission’s green paper proposing regulations of the shadow banking system. These instruments are adequately regulated, he claims, which is not the case for other financial instruments and institutions for which clear rules are overdue for a long time.The BVI manager reminds that the European Commission is seeking to regulate the activities of vehicles which operate to transform maturities, which use leverage, or which run the risk of compromising the stability of the financial system if there are massive withdrawals. This is not the case for money market funds or ETFs, which are mentioned in the green paper.ETF funds are subject to the same strict regulatory conditions as actively-managed funds, and most of these products are subject to the UCITS directive.In conclusion, Richter points out that investment funds did not provoke or aggravate the financial crisis.

SPGP has recruited Cedric Chaboud and Jeremy Boublil, who had previously been in charge of IPO strategy at Lazard Frères Gestion. The two managers, who had been in charge of an international Sicav dedicated to investment in companies undertaking IPOs, will retain their fund at their new employer. The internationally-investing OPCVM fund, launched in February 2010, entitled Skylar Origin, had been reserved for qualified investors. Now that it has received a UCITS IV license from the regulator, it will be made available to institutional and retail investors (in private management or via IFA platforms). The first net asset value figures for the Sicav under management by SPGP will be calculated on Friday, 23 March.

The increasing success of funds trading on the volatility of US equities are the subject of concern on the part of investment advisers, the Financial Times reports. ETFs which track the Vix index from CBOE have had record subscriptions this year. But these products have regularly lost money, not only because the volatility of equities has fallen, but also because fund promoters periodically need to buy new Vix futures contracts, which are costly.