Analysis Topic: Interest Rates and the Bond Market
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.Monday, May 18, 2015
Bond Market Chaos Is Spinning Out of Control / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
MoneyMorning.com Michael Lewitt writes: A few weeks ago, the man formerly known as the Bond King, Bill Gross, tweeted that shorting German bunds would be the trade of the century.
I was gratified to see that he was reading my mind, as readers of my Credit Strategist newsletter already know.
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Sunday, May 17, 2015
Velocity of Money - The Chart the Fed Doesn’t Want You to See / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
Andrew Snyder writes: The folks at the Fed are getting desperate. Their patient is slowly healing, but he refuses to do it without a big dose of painkillers. It’s clear that if the money manipulators hide their pills now, our addict will throw an economic fit none of us is eager to experience.
On Wednesday, markets were shaken when the world’s top pill pusher Fed Chief Janet Yellen boldly told us that stocks are overpriced. It was a half-cocked assertion that Alex Green quickly overcame (read his argument here).
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Friday, May 15, 2015
Double Black Diamond - What a Bond Bear Market Looks Like / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
I was a halfway decent skier when I was a kid. Good enough that I could navigate every trail on the mountain except for one or two. Good enough that I could do the double black diamonds.
My grandfather built a cabin on the access road to Sugarbush, Vermont, in the ‘80s and sold it in the ‘90s. Makes me weep when I think what that thing would be worth now. I wasn’t kidding when I said I come from a financially unsophisticated family.
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Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Debt Bomb - Big Volatility Shakes Bond Market Investors / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
Is the debt bomb about to go off?
Editor's note: You'll find the text version of the story below the video.
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Tuesday, May 12, 2015
U.S. Bond Bear Market Still Underway? / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
The has been lots of talk lately of a Bond market top. This type of talk has actually been going on, and off, for a few years. To our surprise we find we have not written a Bond specific report in nearly three years: https://caldaro.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/bonds-and-long-term-rates/. In that report we detailed why we expected Bond yields to be bottoming in 2012. The 10YR did make a new yield low that year at 1.39%, and it has remained above that low ever since – currently 2.27%. The 30YR also made a new low yield that year at 2.45%. It then rose to 3.98% in 2014, but renewed its decline into a lower low at 2.23% in February of this year – currently 3.04%.
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Saturday, May 09, 2015
Credit Insanity: The Biggest Debt Bomb in History and the Fuse is Lit / Interest-Rates / Credit Crisis 2015
Dear investor,
Exclusive invitation: Our friends at Elliott Wave International have just released a new subscriber-level summary report, Credit Insanity: The Biggest Debt Bomb in History and the Fuse is Lit, for their paying subscribers. Once I read it, I asked EWI if I could share it with you, too, and they graciously agreed, but asked that I don't make too big of a deal about it, because it was intended for subscribers only.
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Thursday, May 07, 2015
Global Bond Markets in Perspective / Interest-Rates / International Bond Market
The world is getting hyped up about bond yields lately with bonds of all stripes declining, as if we are in the midst of a debt Armageddon (we are and have been in the midst of a decades-long and still intact 'debt for growth' Ponzi operation). Here is some perspective...
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Thursday, May 07, 2015
U.S. Fed Embarrassment of Transparency / Interest-Rates / US Federal Reserve Bank
Over the past decade or so, "transparency" has become one of the buzzwords that has guided the Federal Reserve's culture. The word was meant to convey the belief that central banking was best done for all to see in the full light of day, not in the murky back rooms of Washington and New York. The Fed seems to be on a mission to prove that its operations are benevolent, fair, predictable, and equitable. Part of that transparency movement took shape in 2007 when the Fed began publicizing its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) forecasts, which previously (to the frustration of investors) had been kept under wraps. Most of the Fed's policy moves are tied to how strong, or how weak, it believes the economy will be in the coming year. As a result, its GDP forecast is perhaps the single most important estimate it make.
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Tuesday, May 05, 2015
TLT Breaks a Head & Shoulders Neckline / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
TLT just crossed the neckline of its Head & Shoulders formation, suggesting a very steep decline to 107.76.Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, May 05, 2015
The U.S. Fed Needs Your Help / Interest-Rates / US Federal Reserve Bank
Rodney Johnson writes: The Fed needs your help. This stately body of academics has worked for years to rejuvenate the U.S. economy, but to no avail.
You can’t say they’ve been lazy in their efforts. When their first quantitative easing (QE) program failed to create a bounce back in housing, they started up another one, QE2. When that failed they brought in QELite, followed by Operation Twist.
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Tuesday, May 05, 2015
The Collapse of Cash / Interest-Rates / Global Financial System
Despite all of the central bank manipulations over the past seven years, it is finally becoming clear economies will not be able to achieve escape velocity. The U.S. central bank has the longest track record of treading down the path of monetary manipulations. And has achieved anemic average annual growth of 2.2% since 2010. Therefore, to further demonstrate the failure of money printing to engender economic growth, the dismal Q1 GDP read of just 0.2 % displays the failure of this policy once again. Wall Street Shills have been quick to once again blame snow in the winter for the Q1 miss. However, it is becoming evident that Q2 will not produce any such anticipated rebound.
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Monday, May 04, 2015
U.S. Long Bond, an Historic Trading Opportunity? / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
This past week saw a huge swing in interest rates at the long end of the curve with the long bond in particular getting knocked for a loop.
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Saturday, May 02, 2015
Everyone Piles Into Junk Bonds - The End Is Near? / Interest-Rates / International Bond Market
Six years into a recovery, stocks at record levels, high-end real estate in the stratosphere and debt levels soaring in virtually every public and private sector. Time to scale back and protect those gains, right? Wrong, apparently, for a depressingly obvious reason: Huge sections of the investing public can’t afford to move into cash or even into conservative paper like short-term Treasuries.
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Thursday, April 30, 2015
Bill Gross on Pimco Hiring Bernanke and Fed Interest Rate Hike 2015 / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
Bill Gross of Janus Capital spoke with Bloomberg Television's Erik Schatzker about today's Federal Open Market Committee statement and the outlook for Federal Reserve policy, global bond markets and Pacific Investment Management Co.'s move to hire former Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke as an adviser.
On Pimco hiring Bernanke, Gross said: "Obviously it's a public relations effort….To be able to hook up with Ben Bernanke, I think it is. And that was one of the reasons why we did it with Alan Greenspan [when I was at Pimco], but we found out that there were some very positive benefits to it as well."
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Thoughts from the Frontline: The Third and Final Transformation of Monetary Policy / Interest-Rates / US Federal Reserve Bank
The law of unintended consequences is becoming ever more prominent in the economic sphere, as the world becomes exponentially more complex with every passing year. Just as a network grows in complexity and value as the number of connections in that network grows, the global economy becomes more complex, interesting, and hard to manage as the number of individuals, businesses, governmental bodies, and other institutions swells, all of them interconnected by contracts and security instruments, as well as by financial and information flows.
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Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Rush Hour! A Bond Market Traffic Jam / Interest-Rates / US Bonds
Rodney Johnson writes: In the early 1990s I was a young bond trader with a Wall Street firm.
The business was not exactly like the movies, but it wasn’t too far off, either. We got to work by 7:00 a.m., set the strategy for the day — “Are we buying more or selling more?” — and then got on the phones.
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Saturday, April 25, 2015
Negative Interest Rates Financial Black Hole / Interest-Rates / International Bond Market
It feels like not a single soul is worried about the increasing amount of negative interest rates. Ignorance or indifference? This could become a very expensive ordeal.
A black swan event is a metaphor for an enormous problem that develops underneath the surface and then suddenly puts the whole financial system at risk. The financial crisis of 2008 was a black swan event, for example, that slowly developed in the US real estate market where excess had ruled in the years before.
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Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Bill Gross - German 10-Year Bunds Short of a Life Time / Interest-Rates / Germany
Bill Gross of Janus Capital spoke with Bloomberg Television's Alix Steel about yields on the 10-year German bund, his bet against German debt and the European Central Bank's program of quantitative easing.
On shorting the bund, Gross said: "Most investors would probably want to wait for 12 to 18 months because that's when the Eurozone and the ECB's quantitative easing program ends. And one of the reasons for the overvaluation of bunds has to do with Mario Draghi and his program of EUR60 billion a month in terms of buying power. And so you don't want to fight the Fed or the ECB, I suppose, and then getting in early is doing that to a certain extent."
Friday, April 17, 2015
The Consequences of The Fed's Interest Rate Hike / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
Although sometimes we doubt whether the Fed is going to increase interest rates soon, it is worth analyzing the consequences of such a game-changing move. The hike would be the first in nearly a decade. Theoretical effects of rising interest rates are well-known: higher interest rates mean higher borrowing costs (something to consider: if you have a variable rate mortgage and believe that Fed will eventually hike interest rates, think about locking in at current low rates with a fixed-rate mortgage), lower asset prices, reduced risk-premium and a stronger greenback. All of these are relatively bad for the stock market. Higher discount rates mean lower stock prices, while reduced risk-premium makes equities less attractive compared to new issues of bonds. Higher borrowing costs hurt indebted companies, while a stronger greenback negatively affects the exporters and international businesses, which are a significant part of the U.S. stock market. This is why the equity indices were generally falling in March in anticipation of the Fed's hike and surged after the publication of the dovish FOMC statement.
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Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Boom Zero Interest Rates / Interest-Rates / US Interest Rates
There is so much data flying around out there. From the Credit data we reviewed yesterday to weakening manufacturing and exports to employment up nicely one month and down big the next, to frisky consumers (the economy’s ‘back end’, putting it nicely) out there confidently living it up.
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