25 Jan 2016

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) was a (now repealed) US official policy that insisted that gays serving in the military must take part in a cover-up. On the grounds that they kept their sexual preferences a secret they were excused from being openly bullied, discriminated against and dismissed. Something that everyone knew to be untrue (the idea that the US military was staffed entirely by patriotic heterosexuals) was sanctioned in a big game of “let’s pretend”. If everyone acted as if it were true it would be just as if it were actually true. But DADT turned out to be too convenient a device to be confined to such a narrow issue. It was perfect for the treatment of subprime mortgages! It was clear to many insiders that people who had no realistic chance of repaying were being granted loans to buy properties that had to rise in value to bail out the borrower, that these debts were being insured on terms that didn’t come close to reflecting their risk and that the loans were being repackaged and sold on, backed by credit agency ratings that were uninformed and irresponsible at best. Yet even when the crisis was unfolding at speed, banks and other financial institutions were saying publicly that everything with which they had been stuffed was AAA quality. Check out The Big Short for a great explanation of the story. The trouble with DADT is that it is like a Ponzi scheme. Once you have started to pretend, you have to keep going. The morons working at the soon-to-be rescued banks did not mean to buy toxic junk. But once the mistake was made the easier option was to keep playing along. Like a trader who hides loss-making positions in the bottom drawer (or a secret computer file), the final thing you can try to buy is time. You literally decide to wait for a miracle.    Something like this is going on with Quantitative Easing (QE = DADT). As I have pointed out elsewhere, the truth that QE was a device for inflating asset prices in order to save the banks from marking them to market was spun into an officially...

19 Jun 2014

The yields of bonds issued by government are broadly influenced by three factors: the performance of the underlying economy; the outlook for the currency in which the bonds are denominated; and the probability of default. Eurozone government bonds have demonstrated all three factors at work since the financial crisis hit in 2008. The story can be traced by the changing yields offered by (for example) Italian 10 year government bonds since 2008. In the first half of 2008, yields rose as the market worried that governments would have to issue more debt to bail out a few troubled financial institutions. This was widely expected to be inflationary (bad news for bonds). By mid-2008, worries began to be directed towards the probability that the crisis was going to cause recession and that interest rates were heading down. For two years, Italian bond yields fell. Then the story changed again. The possibility that Italy (and a number of other Eurozone countries) might default caused near panic. Finally, in late 2011, the ECB began to convince investors that a solution would somehow be found. The second blip in yields in the summer of 2012 coincided with much wild talk of the break-up of the euro causing some panicky types to worry that Italy et al would honour their debt in a new made-up currency that they could “print” themselves. This was an irrational fear, not least because much of the German and French banking system was a huge holder of such debt and would have been effectively destroyed. Through the rest of 2012 and 2013, Italian government bond yields normalised, offering a consensus view that the economy was poor, inflation low and the government unreliable but unlikely actually to default. In 2014, something quite different has happened. Yields on Eurozone bonds have started to deliver a single rather shocking message – low economic growth and low inflation are here to stay for years and years. Assuming that an investor is happy to disregard the risk that the Italian government will default, we must contemplate the fact that he apparently believes that a 2.6% return on Italian assets is enough to justify a ten year investment. As the...