Picture Credit: Bloomberg
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Rates can go lower from here. For as long as I can remember, I have been told by many experts that rates can’t go lower, or, that they must go up — there is no way they can go lower. I have argued with that idea, as has Hoisington (Lacy Hunt), Gary Shilling and a few others.
Note also that the Fed and most central banks have been on the wrong side of this as well. They keep saying that inflation will come, economic activity will pick up, and that interest rates will rise.
The Fed keeps saying that they will tighten policy. I’ll tell you this — with only 0.82% between the yields on 10- and 2-year Treasuries, the Fed is not tightening.
WIth debt levels as high as they are (both government and private), trying to influence economic activity though interest rates is a dumb idea. Incenting borrowers to borrow more is difficult, aside from the government — and they rarely do anything with the money that helps produce opportunities for greater economic activity.
We would be better off without “policymakers” trying to “stimulate” the economy, “manage” it, “stabilize” it, etc. (But where is the political will to change things — the populace wants easy prosperity, and who is there to tell them to accept a rough world where work and competition is tough, and there is no “Big Daddy” to make life easy? The people are the problem. The politicians are only a symptom.)
There is one thing that could change this, but it would lay bare the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of what policymakers have been trying to do, which is try to maintain the real value of debt claims while still trying to “stimulate” the economy. They could burn away the value of debt claims through an inflation greater than that of the 1970s.
So far, they aren’t willing to do that. But their existing policies will prolong the stagnation.
And as such, rates can fall further — with a lot of noise/variation around it.
