Today's Major Market Move: Hungarian Equities Up 11.9% in 2012

Global equity markets are off to a pretty good start in 2012 with 61 out of 91 benchmark equity indexes in the green. Argentina has been the best performer out of the gate with a 17% gain (we last referenced Argentina's stock market on 1/6/2012). Coming in second place at 11.9% is a country whose economy really struggled in 2011: Hungary.

Click here to go to the live table.

Hungary came up as the subject of our Major Market Move post several times in 2011 but unfortunately it was because of either a declining stock market or a weakening currency. Here's a comparison of the Hungarian Traded Index with the US Dollar / Forint cross going back to the beginning of 2011.

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There's a fairly strong inverse relationship being exhibited and that has continued to be true in 2012 with the currency strengthening as equities improve.

Hungary had been involved in a stare-down competition with the IMF and the EU over the past few months. In a nutshell, the Hungarians had put in place some economic policies that the IMF and EU were not happy with and the two organizations were threatening to withhold additional financial assistance unless changes were made (for those interested more info and a notion of the timeline can be found by reading these posts: 12/22/2011, 12/30/2011 and 1/5/2012).  Today from the Wall Street Journal we got the headline that Hungary has acquiesced. We will update this post when details become more generally available.