Barb,
"One month ago and you made your opinion about a deflationary spiral, citing the ever-falling long-term yields" regardless of what the fed or the German Buba does or does not (with short-term funding rates).
Economists warn agencies from cutting interest rates as repeated or steep cuts only seem to exacerbate the liquidity trap situation, heading capital more and more towards so-called "quality" in the form of triple-A treasuries, creating already a new bubble.
Which rational investor could buy a 30-year contract at yields heading 4%? If and only if he has the expectation that tomorrow, for sure there is the greater fool buying it some yield points lower.
If there are not tulips: For the long run, he is happy with the offered inflation-adjusted yield, implying no inflation at all.
At the same time stocks price movements and yield changes decoupled and the "old natural hedges" not even went to zero correlation but turned heads since months.
The credit spread movement replaced the former long term interest rates, pretty expressing quality or the lack of it. What suffers most is to find in the large area of credit quality brokers, i.e. lenders to any sort of sub-prime entity, ranging from startup companies to the whole emerging markets.
The "irrational exuberance" seems to have turned to the area of credit spreads as an expression of creditworthiness and relative safety. There is no other possible explanation for the - parallel - rise of Bond/AA Swap spreads in the area of 100 bp and rising.
Yet it seems to create a new form of "crowding out" corporate investment by simply tracking the quality bubble, whereas the private sector has little use of interest rate movements, but in fact lacks cheap money in the form of equity or debt at reasonable rates.
Is that the sort of public revenge for having been cheated too often by bogus companies and countries in the past equities and emerging market rally (tout)?
Still riddled by the facts, but awaiting the treasury bubble to implode.
C.
P.S: A new hazard approaching:
In Europe there are talks within the FX dealer community that ..."Italy may face a currency realignment (softening) of unknown but not negligible size just in front of the EURO introduction". Whispers are supported by early movements of some big FX participants in the Italy currency forwards market, reverting ITL deposits, which is in effect selling the lira against DEM at a discount. Heard in the treasury bank I work.
There is some real trouble behind it. The Italian communist party which supports the middle-left Italian government coalition, threatened the prime-minister, Prodi with distrust vote and revoking support if he continues to disregard communist proposals of softening/ expansive fiscal and social policy.
It was only 3 days ago when I compared Italy to Brazil (lower half of text):
Message 5906715
"I compare it to an overvalued stock where one MM has the bid rigged while the company does a lot of discounted private placements and that additional stock - or money hits the market. At one time, even the toughest MM can't take it any more. "
The government or central bank simply prints new money.. |
