Yield Curve

The US markets are just waking up to the bright red margin calls but the carnage in Switzerland remains. The Swiss Market Index plunged almost 15% on the SNB news (and is bouncing back modestly) to 3-month lows (Bullard lows) before bounciung back modestly. The Swiss yield curve has been crushed 10-20bps lower with yields negative all the way out to 9 year maturity... EURCHF is holding 1.02 for now...

Currently there are a number of weak spots in the global financial edifice, in addition to the perennial problem children Argentina and Venezuela... The happy bubble in risk assets could presumably be derailed a bit if any of the possible worst case scenarios were to become manifest.

It is important to remember that the supportive underpinnings are deteriorating. Valuations are elevated, bullishness and complacency are high, and deviations are at extremes. The combination of these ingredients has never led to a profitable conclusion and expecting a different outcome this time will likely lead to excessive disappointment.

Chicago Fed's Charlie Evans called the drop in rates at the longer-end of the Treasury yield curve "extraordinary," falling just short of screaming "sell, sell, sell bonds" and threw wrench in the Fed's policy path by noting "raising rates at the wrong time would be catastrophic." So it is noteworthy that damage control appears to have been engaged this morning by no lesser Fed mouthpiece than Wall Street Journal's Jon Hilsenrath. Reminding the public of Bill Dudley's fears, when he argued the Fed had the wrong reaction to lower long rates in the 2000s, a mistake that might have contributed to the housing boom that ended disastrously; when instead the Fed should push rates higher sooner or more aggressively than planned.

The Greek 3Y-10Y yield curve is back over 400bps inverted this morning as bond (and stock) prices re-tumble following a new reports. As The FT reports, forecasting group Oxford Economics says it has carried out an "in-depth" analysis of opinion polls ahead of Greece's snap general election on January 25, which shows that the radical Syriza party is on course to win a "clear mandate" to push through anti-austerity policies. Will German worry now?

The surreal nature of this world as we enter 2015 feels like being trapped in a Fellini movie. The .1% party like it’s 1999, central bankers not only don’t take away the punch bowl – they spike it with 200% grain alcohol, the purveyors of propaganda in the mainstream media encourage the party to reach Caligula orgy levels, the captured political class and their government apparatchiks propagate manipulated and massaged economic data to convince the masses their standard of living isn’t really deteriorating, and the entire façade is supposedly validated by all-time highs in the stock market. It’s nothing but mass delusion perpetuated by the issuance of prodigious amounts of debt by central bankers around the globe. But now, the year of consequences may have finally arrived.

The biggest hurdle is too much debt, not the need for more cheap money.   QE may also have sizable unintended consequences through rampant market speculation, herd-like investor behavior, and the creation of asset bubbles.  Those potential ramifications have yet to be realized. ... The best investments or trades usually entail envisioning markets going to previously unforeseen levels and tying it to a coherent story line. Given the simple scenario outlined above, investors should become open minded to the potential for long-dated Treasuries continuing to rally.  I can envision the 10-year note trading to a new low yield (below 1.38%) and even below 1%.  I expect the yield curve to flatten viciously this year.   I remain a bond bull and believe the 30-year yield will trade with a ‘one handle’ (i.e.; below 2%) in 2015.

While the predictions of Blackstone's Byron Wien (born in 1933) have been all over the place in the last few years, they nevertheless provide some color on just what the mainstream does not believe... This is the 30th year Byron has given his views on a number of economic, financial market and political surprises for the coming year. From "our luck running out on cyberterrorism" to "shock and awe no longer working in Japan", Wien's non-predictions range from The Fed to China and from Oil to Hillary Clinton...

Having totally and utterly failed in 2014, the consensus for 2015 is once again higher rates (well they can't go any lower right?) with year-end 2015 expectations of 3.006% currently (having already plunged from over 3.65% in July). However, at the other end of the spectrum, DoubleLine's Jeff Gundlach told Barron's this weekend, the 10-yr Treasury yield may test the 2012 low of 1.38% as the Fed’s short-term rate increase is poised to trigger "surprising flattening" of yield curve.

Commodities broke first because there was the direct link to actual rather than imagined activity; inflation breakevens next; followed by the yield curve in November 2013. Either stocks have permanently decoupled, continuing exclusively within the realm of central bank omniscience that has been rebuked time and again, or there will be a period soon where full harmony is restored; that is everyone’s greatest fear.

The rash of “unexpected” declines in PMI’s this morning in the US, of all places, seems to have abraded at least somewhat the pervasive belief in the American “decoupling.” But... The FOMC sees 5% GDP and a serious workdown in the unemployment rate; credit markets are worried about how continued mistreatment of economic fundamentals may mean another disastrous trip like the one from the housing bust to the Great Recession. Worse than that, the treasury curve, in particular, may be going a step further by envisioning that we may already have replicated that period and are now very deep within it.

And thus the utter craziness of monetarism is on full display, in that after arguing that declining oil prices are good for American consumers, they are also suggesting that monetary policy is “too tight”, and thus oil prices are contradictorily “too low.” That betrays the central aspect of this orthodox embracing of lower energy prices as nothing more than a shaky rationalization – they still are not comfortable with low prices but accept them lest anyone get worried about what they really suggest. Orthodox monetary theory is, when stripped of its academic trappings, dedicated to high oil prices and low wages.

While the rest of the world was preparing to celebrate Christmas, China was busy easing its economy into growth, and its stock market into low earth orbit, by lowering non-bank deposit reserve rates to zero as reported previously, while Japan was enjoying the consequences of the BOJ monetizing 100% of all gross JGB issuance, when overnight the Japanese Ministry of Finance not only sold $22 billion in 2 Year paper at a negative yield of -0.003%: the first time ever a government note (not bill) has sold at a negative yield, but the Japanese 10 Year yield dropped to 0.31%, declining below the previously all time low hit on April 2013 when the BOJ first announced its unprecedented QE program.

As yields across the Treasury complex continue to rise this week - amid desks complaining of no liquidity at all (and following yesterday's weak auction) - the yield curve (5s30s) has collapsed to 108bps, its flattest since June 2008. 2s30s continues to slide also (at 212bps) almost eerily perfectly tracking the plunge in the curve of the early 2000s...

It is a tyranny of the PhDs. It is a group-think mania that has gone global. It’s also only a matter of time before the central bankers’ money printing spree takes down the very bubble-ridden financial system it has so recklessly spawned.