Must-read: Paul Krugman: “Bonds on the Run”

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Bonds on the Run: “Something scary is going on in financial markets…

…Bond prices in particular are indicating near-panic…. Bond markets are a bit less flighty than stocks, and also more closely tied to the economic outlook. (A weak economy has mixed effects on stocks–low profits but also low interest rates–while it has an unambiguous effect on bonds.)… Plunging rates tell us is that markets are expecting very weak economies and possibly deflation for years to come, if not full-blown crisis…. A very bad place into which to elect a member of a party that has spent the past 7 years inveighing against both fiscal and monetary stimulus, and has learned nothing from the utter failure of its predictions to come true.

Email chatter:

JGB ten years at 0. Wow. Just wow. What a widowmaker…. Excepting buying assets at the dawn of QE, every EXPLICIT trade that hinged on relying on industrial core Central Bank inflation credibility has been a widowmaker…

It is starting to look, I must say, that [the U.S. Fed’s] triggering the taper tantrum and then doubling down on the proposition that triggering the taper tantrum was not an error is going to be judged very harshly when people look back at this decade or so from now…

I’m adding [U.S.] Q4 at a bit over 1%…. Q1 gets to 2%, but some of that is the mild winter. I do have growth staying in the 2 to 2 1/2% range after that, but I have to admit that assumes that exports crawl back to some growth, the consumer stays steadfast, there’s some inventory rebuilding, and S&L spending holds up–much of that is a wing and a prayer…

I have been much more wrong about, and much more worried by, their failure to deliver in the last 12-18 months when their intent was to raise inflation. Nowhere so more than Japan, where they did everything largely as prescribed…

it is over-ambitious to assume that projections about exchange rate expectations dominate over other factors. There is long demonstrated home bias, reinforced by Reinhart-esque longstanding structures and practices of financial repression. In the data, it is bizarre but evident over decades that Japanese private capital flows are opposite of most places: when the economy slows (speeds up), net capital flows are in (out), so the exchange rate moves the ‘wrong’ way…

Richard Koo has been saying that stout talk from the Fed about boosting rates (Jim Bullard is one thing, but say it ain’t so, Stan) is helping to spook the market. I’m getting inclined to agree…

“Whatever it takes” worked for Draghi as a signal of long-term commitment and a regime shift from Trichet. From Kuroda, my take is it was viewed as an act of desperation. Accordingly, Japanese investors took more about this as bad news on the Japanese economy and about BOJ capabilities than they did as evidence of stimulus…

The tendency of my dear friends to never admit error or wish to retrace steps bug[s] me…. Independence is to be used, and stop being so frigging afraid of Paul Ryan! QE4, anybody?…

The broader and more significant issue of why what the BOJ has done has not been enough to sustainably raise inflation, and it hasn’t worked in EU and US either…