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The capacity of the central banks to ease has never been less in our lifetimes

Die Frage der weiteren Politik der US-Fed und damit der anderen Notenbanken wird immer relevanter. Nicht wenige Beobachter erwarten weitere Zinsschritte und selbst für Europa eine Normalisierung. Das dies nicht mit der fundamentalen Situation einer überschuldeten Welt und einer dysfunktionalen Eurozone zusammenpasst, wird dabei gerne verdrängt. Umso interessanter, wenn wir einen nachdenklichen Beitrag bei bto kommentieren können:

  • “(…) the Fed, at the highest level, is heavily reliant on, if not married to, a limited equation called the Phillips Curve. The Fed’s goals are to keep employment strong and inflation in check.” – bto: Vor allem will sie unbedingt Deflation verhindern; sie ist einseitig.
  • “The Phillips Curve assumes that high levels of employment will pressure wages, increase incomes, increase spending and drive inflation higher. And that is true in the short-term debt (or business cycles) we move through over time, but is it always true? In my view, the answer is no.” – bto: Meine wäre das auch. Wir haben es mit offenen Volkswirtschaften und noch dazu mit überschuldeten zu tun.
  • “I argued they need to consider where we are in terms of both the short-term and the long-term debt cycle. (…) the understanding of short-term and long-term debt cycles and where we are within those cycles in the matters most.” – bto: weil es eben um Kreditinflation und -deflation geht.
  • “Bottom line: We sit at the end of a long-term debt cycle. (…) Following are my abbreviated notes from a recent Keene-McKee-Ray Dalio video interview to better understand how the economic machine works and how Bridgewater uses this understanding to invest their clients’ money.”
  • “There are three main factors. There is productivity which produces income. You can spend at the end of the day what you earn. And what you earn is a function of your productivity. (…) You can be more productive if you work harder and you can be more productive if you are creative.” – bto: Und wir wissen, dass das Produktivitätswachstum zurzeit enttäuscht.
  • “Over a short period of time you can spend more money than what you earn. That’s because we have debt. So we have debt cycles. There are two major debt cycles. There is a short-term debt cycle which we are used to. We have recession and the Fed eases (…). It first bids up asset prices and then the lower borrowing costs enable business to make items that are cheaper because interest rates go down. When that cycle gets past a certain mid-point in the cycle, there is a tightening of monetary policy as you get to the later part of the cycle (Fed raises interest rates) as you start to have inflation. It then gets too tight and the economy starts to go down. And that’s the business cycle.” – bto: einfaches Modell, aber durchaus nachvollziehbar.
  • “And then there is a long-term debt cycle because these cycles add up. In a long-term debt cycle, imagine you start off with no debt. Think of low debt-GDP ratios. Say you’re earning $100,000 a year and you have no debt. You borrow $10,000 so you can spend $110,000. Your spending is somebody else’s income. They are earning more so they can spend more. And it becomes self-reinforcing until you get to the point where debts rise too high relative to the income.” – bto: In der Lage befinden wir uns schon lange und es ist noch immer gut gegangen. Immer tiefere Zinsen und höhere Assetpreise haben zu einer Erhöhung der Schuldenkapazität geführt. Dennoch hat dies per Definition ein Ende.
  • “Central banks, all central banks, are in the business of helping this process go along. They lower interest rates, and lower again until rates hit 0% and we then come to a dilemma. We reach an end of monetary policy as we traditionally have it and as a result, you can’t keep that cycle going.“ – bto: Und sie machen damit das Problem immer größer.
  • “At this point the Fed puts money into the system. There is a difference between debt and money. (…) So the central banks can’t create credit because we’ve reached a point of too much debt so they put money in the system. They do this by buying financial assets.” – bto: weshalb es eben kein Kreditwachstum gibt, wie immer wieder diskutiert.
  • “When they buy bonds, the seller of those bonds takes the cash and he does something else with that cash. As a result of this, it causes longer-term yields to fall as the buying drives asset prices to rise.” – bto: Und damit steigen alle Vermögenswerte.
  • “Where are we now within that equilibrium? The United States is in the mid-point of its short-term debt cycleso as a result central banks are talking about whether we should tighten or not. That’s what central banks do in the middle of the short-term cycle and we are near the end of a long-term debt cycle.” – bto: und das wohl nicht nur in den USA, sondern auch in Europa.
  • “You have interest rates going to zero. You have spreads that have come down. So spreads that have come down mean that asset prices have gone up. So now the expected return of asset classes (cash, stocks, bonds) are all very low. If interest rates rise, then it will cause all of those assets to decline in value.” – bto: Der Zinsanstieg am Ende des langen Zyklus ist jedoch der Trigger für einen Margin Call/die Debt Deflation. Deshalb darf er nicht kommen. Oder?
  • “I don’t believe they can raise rates faster than is discounted in the curve. In other words, the rate at which it is discounted to rise which is built into the interest rate curve (the curve is the different yields you get for short-term Treasury Bills to long-term Treasury Bonds). This is built into all asset prices. So if you raise rates much more than is discounted in the curve, I think that is going to cause asset prices to go down. Because all things being equal, all assets sell at the present value of discounted cash flow.” – bto: Und wie Hussman schön gezeigt hat, sinken auch die künftigen Erträge mit sinkenden Zinsen. Deshalb rechtfertigen auch die tiefen Zinsen unsere heutigen Assetpreise nicht.
  • “(…) the capacity of the central banks to ease has never been less in our lifetimes. So we have a very limited ability of central banks to be effective in easing monetary policy.” – bto: weil sie sich selber in die Ecke manövriert haben durch ihre Politik der letzten 30 Jahre.
  • “We are in an asymmetrical world where the risks of raising rates is far greater than lowering rates (this is due to where we sit in the long-term debt cycle including emerging market U.S. dollar denominated debt, commodity producing dollar denominated debts, Japan, Europe and China debts relative to GDP or their collective income). Meaning if you raise rates, it affects the dollar and it affects foreign dollar dominated debt. So the risks on the downside are totally different than the risks on the upside.” – bto: wobei ein Weiter-so das Problem noch vergrößert.
  • “(…) we can’t have a big rate rise because of the amount of debt, because of what it will do to the dollar, because of the disinflation it will cause and we will have a downturn.” – bto: Das sieht doch wie eine Falle aus, aus der es kein Entkommen gibt. Da sind die Helikopter.
  • “And the downturn should be particularly concerning because we don’t have the same return potential with asset prices richly priced, so each series of QE cannot provide the same bump. You reach a point where QE is simply pushing on a string. You get nothing.” – bto: Und QE hat ohnehin in der Realwirtschaft nur wenig bewirkt.
  • “(…) we are not there yet, but we are close. Some countries are there. Europe is there. What are you going to buy in a negative interest rate world? Japan is there. The effectiveness of monetary policy then comes through the (…) currency devaluation.” – bto: siehe England seit dem Brexit!
  • “If you can’t have interest rate moves, you’ve got to have currency moves. And that’s the environment we are in.” – bto: Auftakt zum Währungskrieg? Ich denke, er kommt unweigerlich im nächsten Schritt.

→ cmgwealth.com: „On My Radar: Doesn’t Matter, Doesn’t Matter, Matters!“, 18. August 2017