Category: Economics

The US federal reserve today released a “business as usual” statement, leaving their short term rates between 0 to 0.25%. Most relevantly:

To promote a stronger pace of economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with its mandate, the Committee decided today to continue expanding its holdings of securities as announced in November. In particular, the Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its securities holdings and intends to purchase $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities by the end of the second quarter of 2011. The Committee will regularly review the pace of its securities purchases and the overall size of the asset-purchase program in light of incoming information and will adjust the program as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability.

This QE2 (Quantitative Easing #2) capital will fund the US government’s fiscal deficit. Normally when the federal reserve purchases long-dated treasury securities, you would expect the yields of such bonds to decrease, but ever since the last imminent threat of QE2 last October, long-term bond yields have done nothing but rise. The following are 1-year charts of the 30-year and 10-year US treasury bond yields:

If these yields rise further, it affects valuations of other yield-bearing securities since these bonds are considered to be “risk-free”. In addition, the value of companies with long bonds in their portfolios will decline, and companies will be taking comprehensive losses to account for the market value decline in treasury prices.

Will interest rates rise further? Time will tell. Just be prepared for volatility.

It should also be noted that Canadian equivalents are trading at less yield than US counterparts – e.g. the Canadian 10-year note is trading at 3.27%, while the US 10-year treasury note is at 3.43%.

Take a moment to read Bank of Canada chief Mark Carney’s speech, Living with Low for Long. It gives some interesting perspective in terms of the macroeconomic and monetary policy side of the economy.

Export-related economies are “unsustainable” – this is a kick at China for sure:

This is an increasingly uneasy emergence. Growth strategies reliant on exports and excess national savings are unsustainable in the long term. In the near term, for many emerging economies, the limits to non-inflationary growth are approaching and the challenges of shadowing U.S. monetary policy are increasing.

US householders are still suffering:

Unfortunately, the best contemporary analogue to the Japanese zombie firms is probably the U.S. household sector. Problems with the foreclosure process, government programs and forbearance by lenders are all delaying the adjustments. Absent more aggressive restructuring, the impact of negative equity on one-quarter of U.S. homeowners will weigh on consumption for the foreseeable future.

Sensitivity of householders to rising unemployment is significant:

The Bank has conducted a partial stress-testing simulation to estimate the impact on household balance sheets of a hypothetical labour market shock. The results suggest that the rise in financial stress from a 3-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate would double the proportion of loans that are in arrears three months or more. Owing to the declining affordability of housing and the increasingly stretched financial positions of households, the probability of a negative shock to property prices has risen as well.

Apparently if more people adhered to the following quotation, we might not have the 2008 financial crisis:

Similarly, financial institutions are responsible for ensuring that their clients can service their debts.

Makes you really wonder about who’s buying sovereign debt in countries clearly unable to pay it back.

And finally, when rates rise, they may rise very quickly, leading to:

More broadly, market participants should resist complacency and constantly reassess risks. Low rates today do not necessarily mean low rates tomorrow. Risk reversals when they happen can be fierce: the greater the complacency, the more brutal the reckoning.

An interesting speech. Nothing concrete, but you can infer what the Bank of Canada is guessing their tea leaves indicate.

It is visibly evident, especially going through the supermarkets, that food prices have been heading up. In light of the fact that commodity prices (e.g. grain, sugar, etc.) have been rising, there is no way that producers can sell the same products and maintain margins without increasing prices.

Reducing the size of packaging has been one approach some companies have been taking – seen with such products such as breakfast cereals, to name one.

This is a function of loose monetary policy and demand for goods – the net result is that everybody is going to have more money, but the purchasing power of that money will be less. It will be nearly impossible for the average member of the public to maintain their purchasing power – you are forced to make a financial decision of some form to maintain it.