Digesting the impact of an 'Alice in Wonderland' world of monetary policy

Beleaguered income investors have had to contend with falling profits and dividend cuts so far this year.

Furthermore, macro clouds continue to loom large on the horizon. China's economic slowdown, the risk of a Brexit, and a hugely volatile oil price are just some of challenges the world economy faces. Recently, all eyes turned to negative interest rates, now put in place by central banks overseeing a very significant chunk of the planet's economic activity (Japan, the eurozone, Switzerland and Sweden among others). Negative interest rates, in particular, are an unprecedented experiment in monetary policy and potentially present some rather odd, hard-to-predict effects. Financial stocks ...