Barron's

Jan. 4, 2019 9:00 a.m. ET

Geopolitics is top of mind for emerging-market investors at the dawn of 2019, as U.S. trade negotiators head for Beijing on Jan. 7. But national politics also loom large in other key markets. Nowhere more so than in Brazil, where capitalists’ enthusiasm for new President Jair Bolsonaro rests on the assumption that he will push through long-stymied pro-market reforms.

That won’t be easy. Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party controls just one-tenth of the 513 seats in the lower house of Brazil’s Congress; the rest are split among 30 other parties. And the mother of all reforms, a pension cutback that would force voters to retire in their 60s, not their 50s, requires a three-fifths majority.

Emerging market assets have certainly been beaten up over the last 12 months. The Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets exchange-traded fund (ticker: VWO) has lost 17%, the iShares JP Morgan Emerging Markets BondETF (EMB) 9%. Does that make them a bargain now? The short answer is: sort of, though external risks remain higher than usual, and bonds, with a few exceptions, look better than stocks.

Global Finance, May 2016

“If we were to write a check to nature to cover the cost of our business activities, what would its value be?” The person posing this question is not a utopian Greenpeace activist. He is Michael Beutler, a onetime Ford Motor Company financial wonk who is now sustainability operations director at French luxury goods company Kering. Based in Paris, Kering controls two-dozen clothing and accessory brands, mostly luxury icons such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. Revenues for Kering in 2015 were €11.6 billion ($13.2 billion).

Beutler is on a quest to quantify the real long-term costs, in terms of water and air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, of producing his company’s fashion wares. The project has taken him to the far reaches of the world. “We have to map all our business processes back to the raw materials,” he says. “A pair of shoes goes back to the ranch where the cow came from.”

Institutional Investor, Nov. 2016

Barron's Sept. 2016

Investors are finally warming to emerging markets. The iShares MSCI Emerging Markets exchange-traded fund has jumped 17% this year, and emerging markets funds of all kinds have marked more than $130 billion in inflows, according to the Institute for International Finance in Washington.

But numbers from the private-equity sector make you wonder if something is wrong with this picture. New capital commitments to emerging market private-equity funds dropped 42% in 2015 to about $40 billion, and are plunging again this year toward 2009 levels, says London-based data tracker Preqin.

Barrons, July 2016

A technological generation ago—the early 2000s—upstart software outsourcers from India like Tata Consultancy Services , Infosys , and Wipro wrought an industry revolution and put their country on the map as a global brain center. Now they are in danger of falling behind the times. Shares of all three have slumped over the past month or so after quarterly results disappointed on growth, margins, or both.

GLOBAL FINANCE MAGAZINE, APRIL 2017

Politically, 2017 looks like the Year of the Wall, with governments from Washington to London to Beijing committed to hindering the free flow of people, goods or capital, while their ideological kindred bid for power across continental Europe. But protectionist barriers will strain to hold back an unprecedented globalist tide among economic actors, specifically corporations that are scouring the world for deals to juice lackluster growth.

OCT 20, 2015

Shale oil drillers squeezed by crashing prices and mountainous debt make a tempting target for well-funded private equity and industry investors. “Oil is the biggest investment opportunity in the world,” Stephen Schwarzman, chairman and CEO of top private equity financier Blackstone Group, declared at last winter’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Institutional Investor,  Oct 22, 2015

Emerging-markets debt has reached worrying levels again, but the focus of anxiety is different than it was during the crises of the 1980s and ’90s. Sovereign states have largely heeded the lessons learned from those debacles. Much unlike their developed-world peers, they’ve held debt steady since 2000, at about 40 percent of gross domestic product, according to the Institute of International Finance in Washington.

September 26, 2015

When Mark Mobius urges caution on emerging markets, you know they’re in trouble. The septuagenarian executive chairman of Franklin Templeton’s emerging-markets group has been boosting the asset class for decades, exhorting investors to pile back in after crises and meltdowns. Now, not so much. “Things have changed since the 1998, 2008, and 2011 downturns,” he says. “It would be dangerous to make an overall or categorywide judgment.”