The Relationship between Carry Trade and Asset Markets in South Africa

This paper investigates the extent of volatility or risk spillovers between the currency carry trade and asset markets, namely the equity and bond markets, in South Africa to infer the extent of the connectivity between the two markets. The carry trade operation examined in this paper involves two strategies, both of which use the South African rand as the investment currency, with the U.S. dollar and the Japanese yen as the funding currencies. The vector autoregressive BEKK-Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (multivariate VAR-BEKK-GARCH) model is used to this end. Moreover, the paper assesses the dynamic correlation between each currency carry trade and asset markets to infer the time-varying dependence between the two markets. The results of the empirical analysis show evidence of volatility spillover between the carry trade returns and the two asset market returns. The extent of the spillover depends on the choice of the funding currency, with the U.S. dollar-funded strategy transmitting more shocks to the South African equity market compared to the bond market. Moreover, the synchronisation of the dynamic correlation between each asset market and the currency carry trade returns shows that any possibility of arbitrage is precluded in the currency carry trade market.