Analysis Topic: Interest Rates and the Bond Market
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Thursday, October 31, 2019
What Has Freaked Out The US Fed? / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
By: Chris_Vermeulen
The US Fed cut rates again by 25 basis points, the third time this year. Prior to the start of 2019, the US Fed gave guidance that 3 to 4 more rate increases were planned for 2019. What the heck happened to the US Fed and what has them so freaked out that they completely changed direction on their expectations for the US and Global economy so quickly? Source: Yahoo Finance
It is painfully obvious to anyone paying attention that the US Fed expected the many years of near-zero interest rates between 2009 and 2015 to act as a fuel for future growth. The problem was that no real growth materialized until just before the 2016 US Presidential elections – and even that was relatively muted. The US Dollar had continued to rally from July 2011 lows well into the 2016 election date. The expectations for the US economy hinged on who won the election. After President Trump won, the markets started an immediate rally expecting business-friendly policies and government.
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Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Why Nobody Chants “End the Fed” Anymore / Interest-Rates / US Federal Reserve Bank
By: MoneyMetals
Americans hated it when the Federal Reserve handed trillions of dollars to crooked Wall Street banks following the 2008 Financial Crisis. Politicians were confronted about the merits of central banking and bailouts.
For the first time in history, college students were chanting “End the Fed” at campaign rallies as Ron Paul took the central bank to task during his presidential campaigns.
Virtually everyone in America vehemently opposed the central bank handing piles of cash to the same bankers whose greed and fraud had caused the Financial Crisis.
Monday, October 28, 2019
What if the Fed Stops Cutting Interest Rates? / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
By: Jordan_Roy_Byrne
Fed rate cuts have been the driving force of the recent gains in precious metals.
This is not a surprise to our readers as since 2018 we argued that a shift in Fed policy from rate hikes to rate cuts would springboard the next big move. History argued the same.
The market is showing a roughly 90% chance the Fed will cut rates this week which indicates the market has essentially already priced in the rate cut.
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Saturday, October 26, 2019
The Fed’s “Not QE” Is Morphing into “QE4ever” / Interest-Rates / Quantitative Easing
By: MoneyMetals
Another week, another new and expanded repo market intervention by the Federal Reserve. On Thursday, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York intervened twice with fresh liquidity injections. Fed officials raised their offerings for overnight repos up from $75 billion to a staggering $120 billion.
This comes on top of the $60 billion per month in Treasury bill purchases that will extend well into next year and possibly beyond. Over the past month alone, the Fed's balance sheet has soared by $200 billion.
You might think numbers like these should be quite alarming to investors and to anyone who holds U.S. dollars. But the strange thing about these Fed interventions is that hardly anyone seems alarmed. There’s no sense of rising risk being priced into the stock market. And the mainstream media is barely even mentioning these massive transfers of paper wealth.
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Tuesday, October 22, 2019
A Look at Peak Debt / Interest-Rates / Global Debt Crisis 2019
By: Harry_Dent
David Stockman, Dr. Lacy Hunt and I agreed on a lot of things last week at the seventh annual Irrational Economic Summit in D.C. In the September issue of Boom & Bust, I talked about corporate debt being the greatest threat globally this time around. The worst is in the emerging world that used cheap printed dollars from the developed countries, primarily the U.S., to fund a debt binge concentrated in the corporate sectors. But our corporate sector also added a lot to their debt and only 39% of their bonds are investment grade, with 39% BBB and 22% junk.
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Tuesday, October 22, 2019
How High Debt Affects Bond Interest Rates / Interest-Rates / International Bond Market
By: Harry_Dent
The only Phd economist I allow to speak each year at the Irrational Economic Summit is Dr. Lacy Hunt. (You can watch his presentation from this year’s conference here.) Lacy can take that complex science and still see the forest for the trees. He can still find reality from all of that great theory to real-life outcomes.It also helps that he advises a $4 billion bond fund at Housington Management and has to get the reality of bond interest rates right or face the consequences – which he has for this entire boom!
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Tuesday, October 22, 2019
The Coming Great Global Debt Reset / Interest-Rates / Global Debt Crisis 2019
By: Richard_Mills
In the first quarter of 2019, global debt hit $246.5 trillion.
Encouraged by lower interest rates, governments went on a borrowing binge as they ramped up spending, adding $3 trillion to world debt in Q1 alone. It reverses a trend that started in the beginning of 2018, of reducing debt burdens, when global debt reached its highest on record, $248 trillion.
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Monday, October 21, 2019
Learn to Spot Reliable Trading Setups: ANY Market, Any Market Time Frame / Interest-Rates / Learn to Trade
By: EWI
Hi Reader,
On October 23, you are invited for a rare, free opportunity to see for yourself how to use simple, everyday price charts to find reliable trade setups -- in any market and any time frame.
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Friday, October 18, 2019
US Treasury Bonds Pause Near Resistance Before The Next Rally / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
By: Chris_Vermeulen
Our research team believes the US Treasuries and the US Dollar will continue to strengthen over the next 2 to 6+ weeks as foreign market and emerging market credit and debt concerns outweigh any concerns originating from the US economy or political theater. Overall, the major global economies will likely continue to see strength related to their currencies and debt instruments simply because the foreign market and emerging markets are dramatically more fragile than the more mature major global economies.
We believe the US Treasuries may surprise investors by rallying from current levels, near price resistance, to levels above $151 on the TLT chart.
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Friday, October 18, 2019
Federal Reserve’s New QE Transfers Wealth to Its Owner Banks / Interest-Rates / Quantitative Easing
By: MoneyMetals
Metals investors are positioning themselves for rapidly developing political and geopolitical events, as well as a rapidly expanding Federal Reserve balance sheet.
What started out as a limited intervention to provide temporary liquidity to overnight lending markets has morphed into a massive $60-billion-per-month Treasury-buying campaign. By some measures, it’s even bigger than the last Quantitative Easing program.
The Fed has yet to fully explain why this is all necessary given the lack of an immediate crisis in the real economy. Last week, Fed chair Jerome Powell took great pains to insist that their expanded repo market operations are “not QE” – only to announce a massive new Treasury bill buying program on Friday.
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Wednesday, October 16, 2019
This Is Not a Money Printing Press / Interest-Rates / Quantitative Easing
By: Peter_Schiff
Rene Magritte's 1929 painting "The Treachery of Images," depicts a tobacco pipe with a caption that reads "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," (French for "This is not a pipe"). Everyone who has taken a course in modern art knows that Magritte's exercise in contradiction was meant to draw a distinction between a real thing and a representation of that thing. Perhaps we should send Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell a beret and an easel as he is attempting a similarly surrealistic take on monetary policy.
Early last week, the Chairman announced a new, as yet unnamed, Fed program through which the bank will now buy regular amounts of short-term U.S. government debt. Seeking to counter the rumblings that a new form of quantitative easing would be seen as an admission that the economy may be in trouble, Chairman Powell asserted during the annual meeting of NABE on October 8, "This is not QE. In no sense is this QE". In other words, "Ceci n'est pas QE."
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Tuesday, October 15, 2019
“Baghad Jerome” Powell Denies the Fed Is Using Financial Crisis Tools / Interest-Rates / US Federal Reserve Bank
By: MoneyMetals
Jerome Powell has something in common with Bagdad Bob, Saddam Hussein’s infamous press secretary. They’re both liars, suggests Money Metals podcast guest Craig Hemke of the TF Metals Report.
Telling obvious lies with a straight face is part of Powell’s job description. He hopes to maintain order even though anyone who is paying attention knows something extraordinary is going on.
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Will Interest Rate Cuts Be Enough? / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
By: Michael_Pento
The main stream financial media is absolutely ebullient about global central banks’ renewed enthusiasm to cut interest rates to a level that is even lower than they already are. And, most importantly, Wall Street is completely confident that theses marginally-lower borrowing costs will not only be enough to pull the global economy out of its malaise; but will also be sufficient to provide enough monetary thrust to blow asset bubbles into the thermosphere.
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Wednesday, October 09, 2019
Whatever Happened to Philippines Debt Slavery? / Interest-Rates / Phillippines
By: Dan_Steinbock
In early 2017, a Forbes contributor claimed President Duterte will bankrupt the Philippines economy in five years. Half of the period is gone. Will the country default in 2022?In May 2017, Forbes released a column, which claimed that “New Philippine Debt of $167 Billion Could Balloon To $452 Billion: China Will Benefit.” It was written by Anders Corr, who was portrayed as an independent geopolitical risk analyst. He predicted that the Philippines would be in debt slavery at the end of the Duterte era.
Now that half of that prediction period has passed, let’s see whether Corr was right.
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Wednesday, October 09, 2019
The Later United States Empire / Interest-Rates / US Debt
By: Richard_Mills
In 1917, the United States created the federal debt limit (or ceiling) to make it easier to finance World War One, essentially allowing Congress to borrow money to pay for the war effort by issuing bonds.
By 1939 with World War Two looming, Congress passed the first aggregate debt limit, but it meant little. For nearly 60 more years the debt ceiling caused nary a ripple, until 2011 when Congress delayed approval of the annual budget, nearly causing a government shutdown. Then a minority in the House of Representatives, Republicans balked at the $1.3 trillion deficit, the third largest in history, so Democrats suggested a $1.7 billion cut in defense spending, since the war in Iraq was winding down. The GOP wouldn’t agree to that, instead offering $61 billion in non-defense cuts including Obamacare. Finally the two sides agreed on $81 billion worth of cuts.
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Monday, October 07, 2019
Yield Curve Inversion Current State / Interest-Rates / Inverted Yield Curve
By: Nadeem_Walayat
An inverted yield curve is basically when the yield on 2 year US government bond exceeds the 10 year US bond yield as worried investors opt to disinvest from risky assets in favour of safer longer term government bonds thus driving down long bond yields below that of nearer term bonds. And the closer the yield curve gets towards towards an inversion the greater the likelihood for a future recession. So far the yield curve inversion has successfully forecast the last 3 economic downturns in the United States. Though the YCI has proved less reliable elsewhere, especially for Australia.
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Monday, September 30, 2019
Watching Paint Dry in the Repo Market Part 2 / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
By: Michael_Pento
The Fed has now begun to pave the way for a return to Quantitative Easing. The reason for this was the recent spike in borrowing rates in the Repo market. At his latest press, Chair Powell said this about the spike in the Effective Fed Funds and Repo rates:“Going forward, we’re going to be very closely monitoring market developments and assessing their implications for the appropriate level of reserves. And we’re going to be assessing the question of when it will be appropriate to resume the organic growth of our balance sheet… It is certainly possible that we’ll need to resume the organic growth of the balance sheet sooner than we thought.”
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Thursday, September 26, 2019
The Disaster of Negative Interest Rates / Interest-Rates / Negative Interest Rates
By: Ellen_Brown
The dollar strengthened against the euro in August, merely in anticipation of the European Central Bank slashing its key interest rate further into negative territory. Investors were fleeing into the dollar, prompting President Trump to tweet on Aug. 30:
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Tuesday, September 24, 2019
Watching Paint Dry in the Repo Market / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
By: Michael_Pento
The world of fixed income trading has been extremely volatile lately. Rates have not only spiked in the Treasury market but borrowing costs in money markets have also become extremely disconcerting. The residual effects from Quantitative Tightening, which ended just this past July, are wreaking havoc on the liquidity in bond markets. Ironically, the Fed’s erstwhile rate hikes and its QT program--what Fed Chairs described as running in the background and like watching paint dry—turned out to be the catalyst for a freeze in the junk-bond market in December of 2018 and is now causing major disruption in the Repo market.
This illustrates clearly the tenuous nature of the bond bubble and that it will someday implode like a supernova---sending yields skyrocketing on a long-term basis. However, it most likely does not yet mark the start of the epoch debt bubble debacle that is in store. We will need a surge of inflation expectations, or the credit markets to shut down on a protracted basis for that to occur. We are moving closer to that eventuality every day.
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Now That Bonds Have Pulled Back As Expected, Maybe We Can Set Up Another Rally / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
By: Avi_Gilburt
I think this market has been providing many investors with whipsaw and head aches, which has also caused much head scratching. (And, yes, that little itch may be telling you something.)
Back in November of 2018, no one even considered the possibility of a bond rally because the Fed was raising rates. And, recently, no one even considered the possibility of any type of top in bonds because the Fed is now lowering rates. Has anyone considered that maybe the Fed does not control the bond market? (See my prior articles for thoughts on this).
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