How long before the ECB and Federal Reserve ease monetary policy again?

by notayesmanseconomics

Yesterday brought something of a change to the financial landscape and it is something that we both expected and to some extent feared. Let me illustrate by combining some tweets from Lisa Abramowicz of Bloomberg.

Biggest one-day drop in 10-year yields in almost a year…..Futures traders are now pricing in a 47% chance of a rate cut by January 2020, up from a 36% chance ahead of today’s 2pm Fed release……….More steepening on the long end of the U.S. yield curve as investors price in more inflation in decades to come, thanks to a dovish Fed. The gap between 30-year & 10-year U.S. yields is now the widest since late 2017.

I will come to the cause of this in a moment but if we stick with the event we see that the ten-year US Treasury Note now yields 2.5%. The Trump tax cuts were supposed to drive this higher as we note that it was 3.24% in early November last year. So this has turned into something of a debacle for the “bond vigilantes” who are supposed to drive bond markets lower and yields higher in fiscal expansions. They have been neutered yet again and it has happened like this if I had you over to the US Federal Reserve and its new apochryphal Chair one Donald Trump.

US Federal Reserve

First we got this on Wednesday night.

The Federal Reserve decided Wednesday to hold interest rates steady and indicated that no more hikes will be coming this year. ( CNBC)

No-one here would have been surprised by the puff of smoke that eliminated two interest-rate increases. Nor by the next bit.

The Committee intends to slow the reduction of its holdings of Treasury securities by reducing the cap on monthly redemptions from the current level of $30 billion to $15 billion beginning in May 2019. The Committee intends to conclude the reduction of its aggregate securities holdings in the System Open Market Account (SOMA) at the end of September 2019. ( Federal Reserve).

So as you can see what has become called Qualitative Tightening is on its way to fulfilling this description from Taylor Swift.

But we are never ever, ever, ever getting back together
Like, ever

More specifically it is being tapered in May and ended in September as we mull how soon we might see a return of what will no doubt be called QE4.

If we switch to the economic impact of this then the first is that it makes issuing debt cheaper for the US economy as the prices will be higher and yields lower. As President Trump is a fiscal expansionist that suits him. Also companies will be able to borrow more cheaply and mortgage rates will fall especially the fixed-rate ones. Here is Reuters illustrating my point.

Thirty-year mortgage rates averaged 4.28 percent in the week ended March 21, the lowest since 4.22 percent in the week of Feb. 1, 2018. This was below the 4.31 percent a week earlier, the mortgage finance agency said.

The average interest rate on 15-year mortgages fell 0.05 percentage point to 3.71 percent, the lowest since the Feb. 1, 2018 week.

Next week should be lower still.

Euro area

This morning has brought news which has caused a bit of a shock although not to regular readers here who recall this from the 27th of February.

The narrow money supply measure proved to be an accurate indicator for the Euro area economy in 2018 as the fall in its growth rate was followed by a fall in economic (GDP) growth. It gives us a guide to the next six months and the 0.4% fall in the annual rate of growth to 6.2% looks ominous.

The money supply numbers have worked really well as a leading indicator and better still are mostly ignored. Perhaps that is why so many were expecting a rebound this morning and instead saw this. From the Markit PMI business survey.

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“The downturn in Germany’s manufacturing sector
has become more entrenched, with March’s flash
data showing accelerated declines in output, new
orders and exports……….the performance of the
manufacturing sector, which is now registering the
steepest rate of contraction since 2012.

The reading of 44.7 indicates a severe contraction in March and meant that overall we were told this.

Flash Germany PMI Composite Output Index at 51.5 (52.8 in Feb). 69-month low.

There is a problem with their numbers as we know the German economy shrank in the third quarter of last year and barely grew in the fourth, meaning that there should have been PMI readings below 50, but we do have a clear direction of travel.

If we combine this with a 48.7 Composite PMI from France then you get this.

The IHS Markit Eurozone Composite PMI® fell from
51.9 in February to 51.3 in March, according to the
preliminary ‘flash’ estimate. The March reading was
the third-lowest since November 2014, running only
marginally above the recent lows seen in December
and January.

Or if you prefer it expressed in terms of expected GDP growth.

The survey indicates that GDP likely rose by a modest 0.2% in the opening quarter, with a decline in manufacturing
output in the region of 0.5% being offset by an
expansion of service sector output of approximately
0.3%.

So they have finally caught up with what we have been expecting for a while now. Some care is needed here as the PMI surveys had a good start to the credit crunch era but more recent times have shown problems. The misfire in the UK in July 2016 and the Irish pharmaceutical cliff for example. However, central bankers do not think that and have much more faith in them so we can expect this morning’s release to have rather detonated at the Frankfurt tower of the ECB. It seems financial markets are already rushing to front-run their expected response from @fastFT.

German 10-year bond yield slips below zero for first time since 2016.

In itself a nudge below 0% is no different to any other other basis point drop mathematically but it is symbolic as the rise into positive territory was accompanied by the Euro area economic recovery. Indeed the bond market has rallied since that yield was 0.6% last May meaning that it has been much more on the case than mainstream economists which also warms the cockles of one former bond market trader.

More conceptually we are left wonder is the return to something last seen in October 2016 was sung about by Muse.

And the superstars sucked into the super massive
Super massive black hole
Super massive black hole
Super massive black hole

If we now switch to ECB policy it is fairly plain that the announcement of more liquidity for the banks ( LTTRO) will be followed by other easing. But what? The problem with lowering interest-rates is that the Deposit-Rate is already at -0.4%. Some central bankers think that moving different interest-rates by 0.1% or 0.2% would help which conveniently ignores the reality that vastly larger ones overall ( 4%-5%) have not worked.

So that leaves more bond buying or QE and beyond that perhaps purchases of equities and commercial property like in Japan.

Comment

I have been wondering for a while when we would see the return of monetary easing as a flow and this week is starting to look a candidate for the nexus point. It poses all sorts of questions especially for the many countries ( Denmark, Euro area, Japan, Sweden. and Switzerland) which arrive here with interest-rates already negative. It also leaves Mark Carney and the Bank of England in danger of another hand brake turn like in August 2016.

The Committee continues to judge that, were the economy to develop broadly in line with those projections, an ongoing tightening of monetary policy over the forecast period, at a gradual pace and to a limited extent, would be appropriate to return inflation sustainably to the 2% target at a conventional horizon.

Although of course it could be worse as the Norges Bank of Norway may have had a false start.

Norges Bank’s Executive Board has decided to raise the policy rate by 0.25 percentage point to 1.0 percent:

But the real problem is that posed by Talking Heads because after the slashing of interest-rates and all the QE well let me hand you over to David Byrne.

And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?

 

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