Stéphane Déo & team UBS
The buy side says: “Stéphane sees ahead rather than following immediate data.”
For a third year in a row, the UBS team led by Stéphane Déo, 43, captures the top prize. The quintet “produces insightful pieces putting recent data points into a longer-term and continentwide context,” asserts one fund manager. In December 2009 the UBS economists were among the first to alert clients to a brewing sovereign-debt crisis, noting that “Greece seems to be the most worrying country ... due to its large deficit” and high debt ratio: 127 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product that year. “On Greece our view was that default was a distinct possibility, but we also held the view that if you were brave enough you could take a position on the short part of the curve — don’t buy five- or ten-year bonds, but if you want to buy three- or six-month you can do it, because the odds of default on short-term instruments were very small,” Déo explains. In May the International Monetary Fund and euro zone countries approved a €110 billion ($146 billion) bailout plan for Greece that included disbursement of up to €30 billion last year so the country could meet its short-term obligations.
