The Low-Interest-Rate Trap
by ilene - August 20th, 2010 12:41 am
The Low-Interest-Rate Trap
Courtesy of John Rubino of Dollar Collapse
Pretend for a second that you recently retired with a decent amount of money in the bank, and all you have to do is generate a paltry 5% to live in comfort for the rest of your days. But lately that’s been easier said than done. Your money market fund yields less than 1%. Your bond funds are around 3% and your bank CDs are are down to half the rate of a couple of years ago. Stocks, meanwhile, are down over the past decade and way too volatile in any event. If you don’t find a way to generate that 5% you’ll have to start eating into capital, which screws up your plan, possibly leaving you with more life than money a decade hence.
Now pretend that you’re running a multi-billion dollar pension fund. You’ve promised the trustees a 7% return and they’ve calibrated contributions and payouts accordingly. But nothing in the investment-grade realm gets you anywhere near 7%. If you come up short, the plan’s recipients won’t get paid in a decade or – the ultimate horror – you’ll have to ask the folks paying in to contribute more, which means you’ll probably be scapegoated out of a job.
In either case, what do you do? Apparently you start buying junk bonds. According to Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, junk issuance is soaring as desperate investors snap up whatever paper promises to get them the yield they’ve come to depend on. Here’s an excerpt:
U.S. companies issued risky “junk” bonds at a record clip this week, taking advantage of keen investor appetite for returns amid declining interest rates and tepid stock markets.
The borrowing binge comes as the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates near zero and yields on U.S. government debt are near record lows. Those low rates have spread across a variety of markets, making it cheaper for companies with low credit ratings to borrow from investors.
Corporate borrowers with less than investment-grade ratings sold $15.4 billion in junk bonds this week, a record total for a single week, according to data provider Dealogic. The month-to-date total, $21.1 billion, is especially high for August, typically a quiet month that has seen an average of just $6.5 billion in issuance over the past decade.
For the year, the volume of U.S.
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Money Markets are the New Suspenders
by ilene - September 29th, 2009 3:04 am
Money Markets are the New Suspenders
By EB, courtesy of Zero Hedge
The Financial Times recently reported on the Fed’s latest exit strategy to eventually contain the inflation zombie:
During the crisis, the Fed created roughly $800bn of additional bank reserves to finance asset purchases and loans. This total is likely to rise in the coming months as the central bank completes its asset purchases and the Treasury unwinds financing it provided to the Fed. Fed officials think they could raise interest rates even with this excess supply of reserves by offering to pay banks to deposit their surplus funds with it rather than lend them out. However, they also want to use reverse repos in tandem to soak up some of the excess reserves. Policymakers call this a “belt and braces approach”. [The latter, clearly a nod to the great Gekko.]
TD touched on this last Thursday, and we will expand upon it here as it is particularly relevant to our ongoing theory that it is the proceeds from permanent open market operations (POMOs) and their close cousins that are driving equities. Though this may be received wisdom to ZH readers, the Fed has done us the favor of providing additional evidence through the FT story. A bit of background, as we are new contributors to this forum:
Money Supply: Based on our previous research on the effects of swings in M2 non-seasonally adjusted money supply (M2) on the stock market, we were a bit surprised in July 09 by the resiliency of the rally, which continued in the face of such a dramatic contraction in M2. The dismal Durable Goods report from last Friday confirms that the capital goods sector is still under significant pressure as a result of a lack of money in the general economy. With banks not lending to normal businesses and consumer credit contracting equally as violently, what is the basis for this rally and from where does the never-ending flow of equities juice flow?
Bank Non-Borrowed Excess Reserves: The Fed statistic that most closely correlates with the 2009 equities run-up appears to be bank non-borrowed excess reserves (bank NBER), which
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More signs of liquidity withdrawal, now from the U.S. Treasury
by ilene - September 10th, 2009 3:11 pm
More signs of liquidity withdrawal, now from the U.S. Treasury
Courtesy of Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns
Yesterday I mentioned the announcement by the FDIC to end its debt guarantee program and opined that this was the first sign of tightening/liquidity withdrawal by the U.S. government. Today the evidence is mounting that this is indeed an orchestrated move toward policy normalization.
The FT spoke to treasury officials who confirmed this interpretation:
A senior Treasury official said “we are pivoting and starting to pull back on certain programmes.” The administration will allow the money market mutual fund guarantee programme to expire as scheduled on September 18, and is backing a review by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that is likely to see funding guarantees for bank debt either ended or restricted to emergency cases on penal terms.
How the Federal Reserve acts is the key missing component here, both in terms of returning repoed assets to the banks which own them and in terms of eventual interest rate decisions. My guess at this point is that the Fed will look to reduce its balance sheet well before it looks to increase interest rates.
In addition, the Fed had provided up to $650 billion in swap lines to other central banks at the height of the financial crisis. Those swap lines are now down to $70 billion (source: Marc Chandler, Brown Brothers Harriman). This reduction in a liquidity-induced appetite for U.S. dollars may be a major reason the Dollar is falling right now even against the Pound and the Swiss Franc where the central banks are engaging in quantitative easing.
Update 1530ET: See also Bailouts Are Shrinking, Geithner Says from DealBook:
One of President Obama’s top economic strategists said on Thursday that the government was now starting to shrink many parts of its gigantic financial bailout following the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September, The New York Times’s Edmund L. Andrews reports.
“We must begin winding down some of the extraordinary support we put in place for the financial system,” said the Treasury Secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, in written testimony prepared for the Congressional Oversight Panel on the Treasury’s $700 billion rescue program. (Go to a Webcast of Thursday’s hearing.)
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JAPAN ALL OVER AGAIN?
by ilene - September 3rd, 2009 4:35 pm
JAPAN ALL OVER AGAIN?
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
From the always informative David Rosenberg:
Finally, for all the talk of a V-shaped recovery, outside of a brief 3Q bounce — likely as brief as the spurt in last year’s second quarter — there is no such thing and the money market is telling you as much. When the yield on the three-month T-bill is 14 basis points above zero, you know that this has a real Japanese feel to it.
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site