Elevated levels of risk aversion akin to 2008 global meltdown: BofA survey

Hawkish central banks, recession risks from inflation, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict are the biggest ‘tail risks’ for equity markets, reveals the May BofA Global Fund Manager Survey (FMS). Meanwhile, Covid-19 — which had ruled the charts as the biggest risk between 2020 and 2021 — has slipped down the pecking order, with only a net 1 per cent of respondents seeing it as a threat.

Over the past decades, over a dozen tail risks have spooked investors, observes FMS. “The dominant concerns of investors since 2011 have been Eurozone debt and potential breakdown, Chinese growth, populism, quantitative tightening and trade wars,