Today’s Essay at Trying to Understand Current FedThink: Daily Focus
The “more thoughts about this” I promised earlier below…
Could Lower 10-Year Yields Spark A More Aggressive Fed?:
“Falling long-term interest rates pose a quandary for Federal Reserve officials….
…If falling yields are a reflection of diminishing inflation prospects… it ought to prompt the Fed to hold off on raising short-term interest rates…. If… lower long-term rates are a reflection of investors pouring money into U.S. dollar assets, flows that could spark a U.S. asset price boom, it might prompt the Fed to push rates higher sooner…. The latter interpretation is less conventional, but it is one that New York Fed President William Dudley made….
During the 2004-07 period, the (Fed) tightened monetary policy nearly continuously, raising the federal funds rate from 1 percent to 5.25 percent in 17 steps. However, during this period, 10-year Treasury note yields did not rise much… the availability of mortgage credit eased…. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that either monetary policy should have been tightened more aggressively or macroprudential measures should have been implemented in order to tighten credit conditions in the overheated housing sector.
Mr. Dudley’s conclusion was that the pace of the Fed’s short-term interest rate moves this time around ought to be dictated in part by whether the rest of the financial system is moving with or against the Fed’s intentions when it decides it ought to start restraining credit creation:
When lift-off occurs, the pace of monetary policy normalization will depend, in part, on how financial market conditions react to the initial and subsequent tightening moves….
The challenge for the Fed is that one can make any number of arguments about the cause of falling long-term rates today…. The Fed’s next policy meeting is three weeks away. It is clear officials will spend a considerable time debating the correct response to a perplexing lurch down in long-term rates.
Our current remarkably-low long-term interest rates has three possible interpretations:
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Ms. Market expects currently-planned near-term Fed policy to produce a very weak economy for a long time to come, and hence very low interest rates in the out years. Ms. Market is correct. In this case, low long-term interest rates are a signal that the Federal Reserve’s current liftoff plans are a mistake and should be revisited.
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Ms. Market expects currently-planned near-term Fed policy to produce a very weak economy for a long time to come, and hence very low interest rates in the out years. Ms. Market is wrong. In this case, low long-term interest rates are not a signal that the Federal Reserve’s current liftoff plans are a mistake and should be revisited. Rather, the Federal Reserve should act as in (3).
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Ms. Market expects currently-planned near-term Fed policy to produce a normal economy in the out-years, but the U.S. Treasury market has an unusually small or negative term premium because of the large number of foreign investors seeking U.S.-based political and economic risk insurance via holdings of U.S. Treasuries. In this case, low long-term interest rates are inappropriately stimulative and run the risk of generating an overheating economy, and the proper response by the Federal Reserve is to announce that it will raise interest rates sooner and faster in order to push long-term rates to where they need to be for a sustainable Goldilocks continued recovery.
The Federal Reserve strongly believes that Ms. Market has no information about the future course of the macroeconomy that the Federal Reserve does not have–that (1) is simply unthinkable. That leaves (2)–Ms. Market thinks the Federal Reserve’s currently-planned near-term policy path is risking another lost decade, but Ms. Market is wrong–or (3)–long-term rates have an anomalously-low term premium because of foreign-investor demand.
A glance at the graph above would seem to rule out (3): 10-Yr breakeven inflation has fallen from 2.5%/year just before the taper tantrum to 1.6%/year today, while the TIPS has risen from -0.7%/year to +0.4%/year today. If it were (3), the surge of foreign demand ought to have put downward pressure on both nominal Treasuries and TIPS, leaving the breakeven largely unchanged. That is not what has happened. If the Federal Reserve wants to hold to (3), therefore, it needs to add to it:
3′. Something else weird and unrelated has happened in the market for TIPS.
While that is possible, it is disfavored by Occam’s Razor.
Thus Dudley seems to be chasing down a red herring. The interpretation he wants to put forward ought to be this:
Today Ms. Market expects inflation over the next ten years to be 0.9%/year less than it expected it to be back in June 2013. But we know better: the economy is actually much stronger than Ms. Market thinks.
Coming from a Federal Reserve that has overestimated the future strength of the economy in every single quarter since the start of 2007, that is not a terribly reassuring posture for it to take.
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