Tag: long-term interest rates

Well, what do you know? That precious Federal Reserve independence we keep hearing about turns out to be a crock.

That reality was exposed in the most blatant terms last week when William Dudley, just a year removed from his serving as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – the second most powerful position on the Fed, just below the chair – argued in a Bloomberg op-ed that the current Fed should do absolutely nothing to try to fix the economy if President Trump is hell-bent on destroying it through his tariff war with China. The Fed, he said, shouldn’t “bail out an administration that keeps making bad choices on trade policy, making it abundantly clear that Trump will own the consequences of his actions.”

But he went well beyond that, urging the Fed to use its monetary policy to help defeat Trump in the 2020 president election.

“There’s even an argument that the election itself falls within the Fed’s purview,” he said. “After all, Trump’s reelection arguably presents a threat to the U.S. and global economy, to the Fed’s independence and its ability to achieve its employment and inflation objectives. If the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, then Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020.”

Thank you, Mr. Dudley, for that admission. Some of us have suspected, Continue reading "That Precious Fed Independence" →

There was a profusion of communications and opinions from the Federal Reserve last week. The challenge now is to try to make sense of it all.

The first thing that caught my attention was the release of a survey conducted by the New York Fed measuring how well the Fed communicates its intentions to market makers. It didn’t do so well.

The bank found that a majority, or 15 out of 24, of the primary dealer banks that bid on U.S. Treasury debt auctions and make a market in government securities found the Fed’s communications prior to its July 31 decision to lower interest rates to be “ineffective” or close to it. “Several dealers indicated that they found communication confusing, and several characterized communications from various Fed officials as inconsistent,” the New York Fed said.

A similar survey of money managers found only slightly better results, with exactly half, or 14 of 28, giving the Fed “low grades for communications effectiveness.”

Then, at the Kansas City Fed’s annual “symposium” in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Athanasios Orphanides, a professor at MIT, released a paper including suggestions on how the Fed can improve how it communicates its policy-making process. While the paper commends the Fed for increasing the amount of information it provides to the public over the past three decades – it surely has – there’s room for improvement in how it communicates that information. Specifically, Orphanides recommended that Fed members provide more details about their confidence or uncertainty in their various economic projections and how those might change given different scenarios or over time.

While all of the information the Fed already provides, and the prospect of more, is good in theory, the problem is that the Fed is providing too much information, which is creating more confusion and uncertainty, rather than less, about exactly where it stands collectively, while businesses, investors and consumers crave simple guidance on the direction of future Fed policy so they can make more intelligent decisions. Continue reading "The Fed's Tower Of Babel" →

In a classic case of the tail wagging the dog, the bond market is signaling that the U.S. economy is headed for a recession, rather than the economy telling the bond market that news, which it doesn’t appear to be doing.

On Wednesday, yields on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell below two-year yields for the first time since 2007. “This kind of inversion between short and long-term yields is viewed by many as a strong signal that a recession is likely in the future,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Except, of course, when it doesn’t, and this just may be one of those times. The economy, albeit weaker than it was late last year and earlier this year, doesn’t seem to be close to a recession.

Actually, Treasury yields have been inverted for a while, depending on which spread you look at it. At the same time, yields along the curve have dropped sharply in recent weeks, with some securities dropping to record lows.

For example, on Thursday, the yield on the 30-year bond dropped below 2.0% for the first time ever. That’s down from 3.45% on Halloween. The 10-year yield plunged below 1.60%, down from 3.16% last October 1 and it's lowest level since it hit 1.46% three years ago in July.

Meanwhile, the price of gold has jumped 18% since May to more than $1520 an ounce, its highest level in more than six years. And of course, stocks are down, with the S&P 500 off more than 6% since hitting a record high just a couple of weeks ago.

Why is the market so panicky? Continue reading "Mixed Signals" →

One of the many memorable scenes in the 1978 comedy classic Animal House is when a 20-year-old Kevin Bacon tries to tell the crowd at the Faber College alumni parade to “remain calm, all is well!” just before he gets trampled flat by the onrushing mob.

I flashbacked to that this week watching global bond yields sink to their lowest levels in several years even as the overall economy – in the U.S., at least – seems to be in pretty good shape. The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell below 2.22%, its lowest level since September 2017. That put it well below all of the Treasury’s securities that mature in one year or less, meaning you could get a higher yield by putting your money in a one-month T-bill (2.35%) than you could lending your money to the government for 10 years.

Still, that was a lot better yield than you could get overseas, where government bond yields sank even deeper into negative territory. The eurozone benchmark, the 10-year German bund, dropped to negative 17 basis points while the Japanese bond of the same maturity hit negative nine basis points, their lowest levels in nearly three years.

Yet, on that same day, the Conference Board’s U.S. Consumer Confidence Index for May jumped nearly five points to 134.1, its highest point since last November. The index “is now back to levels seen last fall when the index was hovering near 18-year highs,” noted Lynn Franco, the group’s senior director of economic indicators. “Consumers expect the economy to continue growing at a solid pace in the short-term, and despite weak retail sales in April, these high levels of confidence suggest no significant pullback in consumer spending in the months ahead.”

Clearly, there’s a serious disconnect between American consumers, who are in a bullish mood – not surprising, given the unemployment rate of 3.6% – and the bond market, which has pushed yields on the safest instruments down to levels you would expect in a recession. Who’s right? Continue reading "Tonic For The Temper Tantrum" →