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Originally Posted by petegz28
Heard a great analysis today on CNBC by a Treasury trader who said this entire inversion crap goes back on the shoulders of the Fed and their aggressive rate hiking last year. Now they actually need to start dumping their $2.4t worth of 10 years and cut rates to get the curve back to normal.
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Sorry, but that’s an entirely ridiculous analysis.
Term premium - or the amount investors are compensated for investing in longer maturity interest rates - is low. A portion of that is a function of the Fed’s large holdings of Treasury securities. But a larger portion is the fact that 30y German bonds are yielding -0.20% (exerting a global pull lower in yield) and a portion is a function of lower inflation expectations than we’ve faced in many, many decades. So it’s a lot easier
You’ll hear a lot about how the inverted yield curve is an indicator of a coming recession. And while that may be true, there are lots and lots of reasons why it could easily be giving a false positive in this environment given the much reduced term premium mentioned above (ie, inversion has a much lower bar) and a sort of self-fulfilling quality to it all as the Treasury rally tends to accelerate when it inverts because of its alleged meaning. I’d also mention that liquidity - that is, the ease with which one buys and sells - in Treasuries is abysmal right now (JPM released a paper today mentioning that it declined by a factor of 3 this month), and August is seasonally a month very favorable to a flattening of the yield curve.
In any case, if the Fed actually started selling Treasury securities as per the trader you saw on CNBC (I wanna LOL at that), equities would be down 10% tomorrow.
The Fed hasn’t been the problem here, no matter what Trump tells you.