Charts and links today: QE, volatility, earnings, M&A, inequality, tourism and asset class YTD performance

A few charts and links that caught my interest today.

Very interesting article by Raghuram Rajan the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India can be found here.  The key quote I thought was this one:

'the disregard for spillovers could put the global economy on a dangerous path of unconventional monetary tit for tat'
Very true...especially in a world of such low volatility measures at the moment.  I could put a VIX chart here but I came across this MOVE/CVIX chart...bond and FX volatility also low. 

Business Insider noted this interesting earnings season change in the US.  Of course expectations have come down YTD but did they - in hindsight - come down too much in the run up to the Q1 earnings season?  Still not sure it is generally enough to justify mid-teens forward P/E ratings but it is at the margin better

 

Will the Federal Reserve have only three governors for the first time in 80 years due to the slowness of the approval process? Link here.  Maybe better policy-making consequently?!

Interesting article on China: 'Since the 1980s, the rise of income inequality has been far more dramatic in China than in the U.S...The official estimate for the income gap last year was about the same as in 2012, with the statistics bureau giving a Gini coefficient of 0.473, after 0.474 the previous year. That’s above the 0.4 level that the United Nations has said is a predictor of social unrest'. Link here. 

The rise of the Chinese tourist today is outstripping the rise of the Japanese tourist in the 1980s (which is to be expected given population size etc).  The chart below made me think of Samsonite a HK listed previous favourite of mine which is now trading just below all-time highs at HK$24.6.

And the rationale for large M&A is...not product growth:

Interesting YTD performance chart