lunes, 22 de julio de 2019

lunes, julio 22, 2019

Living Life Near the ZLB

Doug Nolan


There must be members of the FOMC that feel they are about to be railroaded into a 50 bps cut a week from Wednesday. Chairman Powell essentially pre-committed to a reduction last week in testimony before Congress. For a Federal Reserve preaching “data dependent” for a while now, the less dovish contingent at the Fed must be asking, “But what about the data?”

It was interesting to see headlines Thursday afternoon from a speech by the President of the New York Fed, John Williams: “Williams: Lesson With Zero Rates is to Take Swift Action,” “Williams: Currently Estimates Neutral Rate in U.S. Around 0.5%.” Soon afterward, headlines from Fed vice chair Richard Clarida reinforced the point: “Fed’s Clarida: Central Bank Needs to Act Preemptively,” and “Clarida: You Don’t Necessarily Want to Wait Until Data Turns.” Things turned rather boisterous ahead of the Fed’s “quiet period.”

Markets were all ears. The implied yield on August Fed Funds futures dropped a quick nine basis points to 1.98%, a full 43 bps below the current rate. The Market’s Thursday afternoon pricing of a high probability of a 50 bps cut elicited an unusual backtrack: “Fed Says William’s Speech ‘Not About’ Potential Policy Actions.” (The President tweeted he liked Williams’ “first statement much better than his second.”) The implied rate on August Fed Funds futures closed the week at 2.10%, with market odds (60%) back to favoring a 25 bps cut. Ten-year Treasury yields dropped seven bps this week to 2.06%, with bund yields down 11 bps to negative 0.32%.

William’s speech, “Living Life Near the ZLB,” deserves of some attention: “My wife is a professor of nursing, and she says one of the best things you can do for your children is to get them vaccinated. It’s better to deal with the short-term pain of a shot than to take the risk that they’ll contract a disease later on. I think about monetary policy near the zero lower bound—or ZLB for short—in much the same way. It’s better to take preventative measures than to wait for disaster to unfold… Over the past quarter century, a great deal of research has gone into understanding the causes and consequences of the zero lower bound.”

[Note to PhD economics students: the clearest path to the upper echelon of the Federal Reserve System is to formulate some crackpot theory justifying aggressive monetary stimulus] How much “ZLB” Fed research has been conducted for environments characterized by record stock prices, strong Credit growth, booming corporate Credit markets, and a world with $13 TN of negative-yielding debt? Williams references a 2002 paper (co-authored with Dave Reifschneider) that evaluated “effects of the ZLB on the macro economy and examined alternative monetary policy strategies to mitigate the effects of the ZLB.”

“This work highlighted a number of conclusions based on model simulations. In particular, monetary policy can mitigate the effects of the ZLB in several ways: The first: don’t keep your powder dry—that is, move more quickly to add monetary stimulus than you otherwise might… When you only have so much stimulus at your disposal, it pays to act quickly to lower rates at the first sign of economic distress. …My second conclusion, which is to keep interest rates lower for longer. The expectation of lower interest rates in the future lowers yields on bonds and thereby fosters more favorable financial conditions overall… Finally, policies that promise temporarily higher inflation following ZLB episodes can help generate a faster recovery and better sustain price stability over the longer run. In model simulations, these ‘make-up’ strategies can mitigate nearly all of the adverse effects of the ZLB.”

There would be outrage if the Fed was using similar “model simulations” to justify a policy course at odds with the markets. In a world of unprecedented complexity, model simulations are basically worthless. If the Fed cannot even effectively model consumer price inflation from actual policy measures, how are models simulating impacts on future economic and inflation outcomes (from untested experimental policy) supposed to be credible? Besides, how have the ZLB experiments been progressing in Europe and Japan?

Williams: “An added impetus to this research has been the growing evidence that the neutral rate of interest rate has fallen significantly. I... have devoted a significant chunk of my academic career to studying r-star, or the long-run neutral rate of interest, and its implications for monetary policy. Our current estimates of r-star in the United States are around half a percent.”

What happened to the traditional central bank focus on money and Credit? This “natural rate” framework is problematic – and particularly so in Bubble environments. What was the estimate of r-star last November with 10-year Treasury yields at 3.24% and December ’19 futures implying a 2.93% Fed Funds rate? R-star is defined as the “interest rate that supports the economy at full employment/maximum output while keeping inflation constant.” In a world where loose financial conditions and booming securities markets are required to sustain the global Bubble, one can indeed make the argument that r-star is quite low. R-star is today only relevant in the context of a policy objective of sustaining the Bubble.

I thought it was outrageous in 2013 when chairman Bernanke stated the Fed was ready to “push back against a tightening of financial conditions”. It was as if I was the only analyst that had an issue with Bernanke essentially signaling that the Fed would not tolerate risk aversion or market pullbacks. Now the Fed and global central banks are taking another giant leap – the latest iteration of New Age experimental central banking: The “insurance rate cut” – “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

This is not about prevention, and William’s vaccine analogy is misguided. The world is suffering from chronic (debt) illness. An individual with diabetes, heart disease or cancer will find a cure in a vaccine. Over the years, activist monetary policies have been likened to giving an alcoholic another shot of whiskey or a drug addict another hit of heroin. While these have obvious merits, to counter Williams analogy I’ll instead use antibiotics. Global central bankers have been fighting the world’s chronic debt and economic maladjustment disease with steady doses of antibiotics. Not surprisingly, these pathogens have built up strong resistance to medication.

More stimulus at this point in the cycle is not for prevention – but instead a narcotic for sustaining unsound financial and economic booms (i.e. “extend the expansion”). The Fed and central bankers are again crossing a dangerous red line – compelled to aggressively administer antibiotics hoping to prevent a plague that has evolved to the point of thriving on antibiotics.

It wasn’t that long ago that Fed policy stimulus operated through a mechanism of adding reserves directly into the banking system, with additional reserves working to reduce rates while encouraging borrowing and lending. Policy would act to provide a subtle change in lending conditions that over time would reverberate throughout the economy. The Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan increasingly shifted to using the markets as the mechanism to loosen financial conditions and stimulate the economy. The 2008 crisis unleashed the policy of direct market intervention, with Bernanke later doubling-down with his “push back” comment.

The U.S.’s coupling of market-based finance with market-directed monetary stimulus created a powerful – seemingly miraculous - combination. Others wanted in on the action. It was pro-Bubble for the U.S., but nonetheless took the world by storm. It became Pro-Global Bubble, and the world today is engulfed in historic market and financial Bubbles.

What is the “r-star” for economic equilibrium today in China? Chinese Bubble finance evolved to become the marginal source of finance globally and the Chinese economy the marginal source of global demand. With Aggregate Finance expanding almost $2.0 TN during the first half, Chinese Credit is again leading a global Credit upsurge.

July 16 – Bloomberg: “China’s efforts to shore up sagging economic growth are leading to a resurgence in indebtedness, underlining the challenge President Xi Jinping’s government faces in curbing financial risk. The nation’s total stock of corporate, household and government debt now exceeds 303% of gross domestic product and makes up about 15% of all global debt, according to a report published by the Institute of International Finance. That’s up from just under 297% in the first quarter of 2018.”

July 15 – Bloomberg (Alexandre Tanzi): “Global debt levels jumped in the first quarter of 2019, outpacing the world economy and closing in on last year’s record, the Institute of International Finance said. Debt rose by $3 trillion in the period to $246.5 trillion, almost 320% of global economic output, the Washington-based IIF said… That’s the second-highest dollar number on record after the first three months of 2018, though debt was higher in 2016 and 2017 as a share of world GDP. New borrowing by the U.S. federal government and by global non-financial business led the increase.”

July 15 – Financial Times (Jonathan Wheatley): “Debt in the developing world has risen to an all-time high, adding to strains on a global economy flagging under the weight of rising trade protectionism and shifting supply chains. Emerging economies had the highest-ever level of debt at the end of the first quarter, both in dollar terms and as a share of their gross domestic product, according to… the Institute of International Finance. The figures include the debts of companies and households. The IIF said that lower borrowing costs thanks to central banks’ monetary easing had encouraged countries to take on new debt. In recent months the US Federal Reserve has changed its policy outlook and a string of emerging market central banks have cut interest rates… ‘It’s almost Pavlovian,’ said Sonja Gibbs, the IIF’s managing director for global policy initiatives. ‘Rates go down and borrowing goes up. Once they are built up, debts are hard to pay down without diverting funds from other goals, whether that’s productive investment by companies or government spending.’”

Only “almost Pavlovian”? I’ve been closely monitoring Bubbles going back to Japan’s late-eighties experience. It’s always the same: Everyone is happy to ignore bubbles when they’re inflating. Bubble analysis, by its nature, will appear foolish for a while. But bubbles inevitably burst. There is no doubt that China’s historic bubble will burst, and I expect this will prove the catalyst for faltering bubbles across the globe – including here in the U.S.

The obvious transmission mechanism will be through the securities markets. Global markets have become highly synchronized – across asset classes and across countries and regions. Market-focused monetary stimulus has become highly synchronized, essentially creating a singular comprehensive global bubble.

July 18 – Bloomberg: “A cash crunch at one of China’s best known conglomerates is getting worse as the company said it will not be able to pay its upcoming dollar notes. China Minsheng Investment Group Corp.’s offshore unit said in a filing that it won’t be able to repay the principal, as well as the interest on the 3.8% $500 million bond due August, after considering its liquidity and performance. On Thursday, the property-to-financial conglomerate announced it only managed to repay part of the principal on a 6.5% 1.46 billion yuan note. The development underscores the liquidity crisis that has been pressuring the… company that aspired to become China’s answer to JPMorgan... It will be the first time that the firm’s dollar bond creditors will miss out on repayment.”

“Repo Rate on China’s Govt Bonds Briefly Hits 1,000% in Shanghai,” read an eye-catching early-Friday Bloomberg headline (picked up by ZeroHedge). Repo rates were back to normal by the end of the session, yet it sure makes one wonder… Aggressive PBOC liquidity injections have for the past several weeks calmed the Chinese money market after post Baoshang Bank government takeover (with “haircuts”) instability. The implicit Beijing guarantee of virtually the entire Chinese Credit system is now being questioned. This greatly increases the risk of Chinese money market instability – with ominous ramifications for China and the world.

With this in mind, there’s a particular circumstance that could catch global markets and policymakers by surprise: A dislocation in China’s “repo” securities lending market that reverberates throughout repo and derivatives markets in Asia, Europe and the U.S. This latent risk, in itself, could help explain this year’s global yield collapse and market expectations for aggressive concerted monetary stimulus. When Chairman Powell repeats “global risks” in his talks these days, I think first to global “repo” markets, global securities finance and global derivatives.

Markets are these days are luxuriating in impending Fed rate cuts and global rate reductions that have commenced in earnest. Liquidity abundance as far as eyes can see… What could go wrong? It’s already started going wrong. The flow of Chinese finance to the world is slowing.

July 18 – CNBC (Diana Olick): “Challenging conditions in the U.S. housing market, along with tighter currency controls by the Chinese government, caused a stunning drop in foreign demand for American homes. The dollar volume of homes purchased by foreign buyers from April 2018 through March 2019 dropped 36% from the previous year, according to the National Association of Realtors. The decline was due to a drop in the number and average price of purchases. Foreigners bought 183,100 properties with a total value of about $77.9 billion, down from 266,800 valued at $121 billion in the previous period. They paid a median price of $280,600, which is higher than the median for all existing homebuyers ($259,600), but it was down from $290,400 the previous year. ‘A confluence of many factors — slower economic growth abroad, tighter capital controls in China, a stronger U.S. dollar and a low inventory of homes for sale — contributed to the pullback of foreign buyers,’ said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist. ‘However, the magnitude of the decline is quite striking, implying less confidence in owning a property in the U.S.’”

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