The eight local currency bond markets in which the Asian Bond Funds 2 (ABF2) invests have continued to develop since 2011. But the development of corporate bonds continues to lag that of government bonds. We focus on areas where we believe there remains work to be done to foster corporate bond...

Securitized equity interests in commercial property (the so-called listed REIT market) across a number of countries are analyzed. In so doing, we have pulled together financial as well as real economic data from a large number of different sources. On the real side, we focus particularly on...

This issue has four excellent articles - Dr. William (“Bill”) M. Isaac, former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and now a top global banking industry consultant, has submitted a thought-provoking article on lessons learned from the 2008 banking crisis in the U.S....

Historically, sovereign debt in local currency has been considered safer than debt in foreign currency. Yet the literature offers scant theoretical or empirical guidance as to why such a gap exists, or why it appears to have slowly and steadily diminished for all regions over the past two...

The three major credit rating agencies have reassessed sovereign credit risks in the light of the Great Financial Crisis, increasing the transparency of their methodologies. This has resulted in material shifts in the rank-ordering of risks. Simple statistical models explain the lion's share of...