Analysis Topic: Interest Rates and the Bond Market
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.Thursday, March 23, 2017
Low Interest Rates Helping Australia Transition from the Mining Boom / Interest-Rates / Austrailia
Australia’s transition from its reliance on mining exports to other sectors appears to be gathering pace as more businesses continue to take advantage of the low interest rates.The Reserve Bank of Australia reduced the base interest rate, popularly referred to as the cash rate, twice last year from 2% to 1.75% and again to 1.5%. The cash rate remains fixed at 1.5%, which when compared to many developed countries is still one of the highest.
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Wednesday, March 22, 2017
MSM Bond Market Full Nonsense Mode as ‘Trump Trades’ Unwind on Schedule / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
I’ve been watching the herds to try to determine just when the interest rate topic among the best and brightest (as chosen by the media) would start to pivot from ‘rising rates!’ hysterics that have been locked and loaded in the public psyche since the US election to a sort of ‘rut roh, maybe we got played again… ‘ realization that Rome – and a Great America – are not built in a day.
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Monday, March 20, 2017
Where the Fed Goes, Other Central Banks May Not Follow / Interest-Rates / Central Banks
It has been a busy couple of days for the world's central banks. Since the U.S. Federal Reserve made its decision to hike interest rates, rate announcements have followed from the People's Bank of China, the Bank of Japan, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of England. This confluence of activity from most of the key guardians of the global economy provides a good opportunity to take stock of where things stand.
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Friday, March 17, 2017
US Government Hits Its Debt Target (Ceiling) Again As Trump Has No Plan To Reduce Government / Interest-Rates / US Debt
Many people fell for Donald Trump’s pre-election promises, but we warned there would be no major changes made and that Trump was an elite insider.
How right we were.
Here was a list of his biggest promises and how he has already backtracked on all of them:
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Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Forget 3% Growth with This Deficit, US Approaching 150% Debt-to-GDP Ratio / Interest-Rates / US Debt
Studies have shown that when government debt rises above 90% it begins to have an effect on the growth of GDP. That conclusion is a bit controversial in economic circles, as some say the critical level is higher or lower.
Understand, those studies are not examining some theoretical proposition; they are looking at actual debt and growth levels in countries over a long period of history. And the data show that excess debt inhibits growth.
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Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Fed Rate Hikes, Fiscal vs. Monetary Policy and Why Again the Case for Gold? / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
I’ve been thinking about the current Fed Funds rate hike cycle, which is logically gaining forward momentum now that the Fed can stand down from its 8-year, ultra-lenient monetary policy cycle. That is because the Obama administration’s goals required a compliant Federal Reserve to continually re-liquefy the economy as its fiscal policies drained it.
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Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Raising the Ides of March US Debt Ceiling Limit / Interest-Rates / US Debt
One of the most played out scenarios in the rarified air of Washington life support is keeping the debt balloon inflating without blowing. Dismissing all the drama from the Kabuki theater that relies upon passing another continuing resolution to raise the debt limit seems to be one of the most reliable predictions that can be made about Congress. Come hell or high water, the borrowing ceiling goes up. So when Mnuchin calls on Congress to raise debt limit as deadline approaches, all seems ready to follow the familiar pattern of kicking the can down the road.
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Friday, March 03, 2017
How Trump Versus Fed Adds to Uncertainty / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
To implement his $1 trillion dollar infrastructure plan, President Trump needs low rates, even though the Fed’s rate hikes will strengthen dollar. That means new uncertainty worldwide.In his Crippled America (2015), Trump argued that “our airports, bridges, water tunnels, power grids, rail systems—our nation's entire infrastructure is crumbling, and we aren't doing anything about it."
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Thursday, March 02, 2017
Trump Avoid Debt Crisis ? “Extremely Unlikely” says Rickards / Interest-Rates / US Debt
The upcoming March 15 U.S. debt ceiling deadline is something that is being largely ignored by markets and most media for now. Despite it being just 9 trading days away. This will change in the coming days and is one of the many reasons why we are bullish on gold.
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Saturday, February 25, 2017
A Damaging Week for U.S. Treasury Yield! / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
What a weird and unsettling week. The equity indices for the most preserved their gains, albeit despite Thursday's divergent action, while the bond market went straight up (YIELD straight down), which is the more curious of the major asset class behavior as we head into the weekend...
Technically, the plunge in yield fom 2.46% on Tuesday to 2.30% on Friday (-6.5%) has broken the integrity of the Dec-Feb high-level coil/digestion pattern. It is threatening to morph all of the action since Dec 15 (2.64%) into an intermediate-term top formation that will project weaker yield into the area of the up-sloping 200 day eMA, now at 2.10%
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Monday, February 20, 2017
A Game Of Chess And The Source Of The Federal Reserve’s Power / Interest-Rates / US Federal Reserve Bank
We have become pawns in the game of Chess being played by the Federal Reserve Bank. Who is their opponent? Anybody else who makes a move.
Week in, week out, everyone’s eyes and ears seem fixed on what the Federal Reserve Board will say or do. Mostly, it is about what they say. That’s because they can’t really do much of anything.
Except inflate the supply of money and credit. Which they have been doing for over one hundred years. And they are good at it, too. The historic erosion in value of the US dollar should merit more acclaim – or outrage. Unfortunately, the Fed is good at shifting the focus of concern to their opponent(s).
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Wednesday, February 15, 2017
This Chart Shows an Economic Anomaly That Investors Can’t Explain / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
BY PATRICK WATSON : Nineteenth-century writer Frédéric Bastiat, in his classic “Broken Window” parable, warned that economic thinking requires us to see what isn’t happening as well as what is.
This yield curve chart from Macquarie Research provides a good example.
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Monday, February 13, 2017
Is the UK An Economy Built on Debt? / Interest-Rates / UK Debt
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Saturday, February 11, 2017
Greece Debt Crisis Outrageous Malevolence / Interest-Rates / Eurozone Debt Crisis
Earlier this week I was talking in Athens to a guy from Holland, who incidentally with a group of friends runs a great project on Lesbos taking care of some 1000 refugees in one of the camps there. But that’s another topic for another day. I was wondering in our conversation how it is possible that, as we both painfully acknowledged, people in Holland and Germany don’t know what has really happened in the Greek debt crisis. Or, rather, don’t know how it started.
That certainly is a big ugly stain on their media. And it threatens to lead to things even uglier than what we’ve seen so far. People there in Northern Europe really think the Greeks are taking them for a ride, that the hard-working and saving Dutch and Germans pay through the teeth for Greek extravaganza. It’s all one big lie, but one that suits the local politicians just fine.
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Friday, February 10, 2017
Brace Yourself, There May Be An Epic Collision Between Trump and Yellen / Interest-Rates / US Federal Reserve Bank
BY JARED DILLIAN : The FOMC recently held its first meeting since Trump took office. But before I get to that, I want to talk about the backdrop to the meeting… Trump’s relationship with Yellen and Yellen’s relationship with Trump.
Trump hasn’t had much good to say about Yellen. He said that her interest rate decisions were politically motivated. Hey, I was saying the same thing at the time. No disagreement out of me. No rate hikes for years, and now that Trump is elected, the Federal Reserve is suddenly keen on hiking with renewed vigor.
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Thursday, February 02, 2017
Could Cars Be the Death of Us This Time Around? / Interest-Rates / Debt Crisis 2017
The shining star of the 2009-2016 recovery has been auto sales.We weren’t surprised. In fact, we saw it coming. After all, cars are the last large purchase people make before stepping quietly into their years of increased saving and decreased spending. From around the age of 57 to 64, one task takes center stage: save for retirement. In the durable goods sector, housing peaks first around age 40, then furnishings at age 46. Only automobiles continue to grow after the peak in spending at age 46.
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Tuesday, January 31, 2017
US 10-Year Bond Yield Transitioning Out of Multi-Year Bear Market / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
My intermediate and longer term technical set-up work on 10 year U.S. Treasury YIELD argues that benchmark yield is in transition from a 35 year Bear Market (dominant downtrend) into a multi-year Bull Market (dominant uptrend).
From 1981, when 10 year yield peaked at 15.84% amid concerns about rampant, un-containable inflation and stagnant growth ("Stagflation") precipitated initially by the 1973 OPEC Oil Embargo, benchmark yield steadily and relentlessly declined to a post-Financial-Crisis 2016 low at 1.32% (see Charts 1 and 2).
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Wednesday, January 25, 2017
TLT Update…US Bonds and Gold an Odd Couple / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
Lets start by looking at a weekly chart for TLT, 20 year bond etf, which shows it built out a H&S top last summer. That H&S top is a reversal pattern that showed up at the end of its bull market which has been ongoing for many years. There is a big brown shaded support and resistance zone that has been offering support.
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Tuesday, January 24, 2017
2017’s Real Milestone, Or Why Interest Rates Can Never Go Back To Normal / Interest-Rates / US Debt
Forget about NAFTA or OPEC or TPP or crowd size or hand size or any other acronym or stat or concept that obsesses the financial press these days. Only two numbers actually matter.
The first is $20 trillion, which is the level the US federal debt will exceed sometime around June of this year. Here’s the current total as measured by the US Debt Clock:
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Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Fed Monetary Policy Is Impotent Against These Trends / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
Chris Wood of CLSA has a marvelous newsletter called, aptly, GREED & fear. He began his January 5 issue talking about bond yields possibly bottoming out.
For perspective, he starts with this long-term view of the 10-year US Treasury yield.
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