It’s probably safe to say we’ve reached something that approximates “peak” French election analysis on Wall Street.
No one wants to be the macro (or rates or FX) strategist that didn’t weigh in and/or recommend a hedge or a trade.
Similarly, everyone is trying their hand at palm reading. Every poll is parsed. Previous election results are scrutinized. Anything to avoid what happened with Brexit and Trump, when everyone (including the pollsters themselves) failed miserably when it came to predicting outcomes. No one is taking much solace in the fact that just last month we dodged another (blond) populist bullet in the Netherlands and indeed that’s probably because the outcome here is far less certain (“Geert risk” was falling into the Dutch election while “populist risk” is rising into Sunday’s first round in France).
Last week, Citi was out with their latest attempt to make sense of things and I suppose, given how big of a deal this is, any incremental information is worth highlighting.
But before we get to that, here’s the latest from a reader who regularly updates us on his take. So far, he’s been remarkably prescient…
