EVERYTHING IS COMING UP ROSES… Two Goldman Sachs Asset Management bosses are bullish on emerging markets, writing for the FT’s Beyond Brics that after underperforming developed markets by more than 70% over the past six years, they are receiving a “record number of queries from institutional investors” amid suggestions it is “possible that emerging markets are finally poised to outperform: growth opportunities are superior and valuations less demanding. More importantly, we believe that EM is amongst the richest of all equity markets in alpha opportunities, or the potential to generate excess return. Alpha matters a lot in a low return world.”

The trick, they say, is to look beyond the 800 or so companies on the MSCI EM benchmark to a universe of more than 6,000 investible EM equities.

The Goldman team likes: ecommerce, not telecom operators; listed EM stock exchanges, not the equities that trade on them; and consumer plays, where demographics mean “spending on everything from biscuits to washing machines to medicine will dramatically increase.”

(Just don’t get us started on the fallacy that Brexit is going to be good news for EM.)

…NO, DISASTER IS AROUND THE CORNER: For a nuanced counterpoint, head over to the New York Times’ “The Upshot” for “Can We Ignore the Alarm Bells the Bond Market Is Ringing?” After convincingly taking us through the argument that yield curves for the bond market imply disaster ahead (including a 60% chance of recession in Amreeka within the next 12 months, according to Deutsche), the author then makes the even scarier argument that yield curves may be unreliable narrators.

The bottom line: “The bond market right now is like a speedometer that is miscalibrated and therefore unreliable. It may be less useful than usual, and is not to be interpreted literally — but it’s still telling us something. And that something is that we should be worried about the possibility the world is in a nasty deflationary economic trap that won’t get better anytime soon.”