The Japanese Bond Market Is Imploding
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
As I first noted back in 2023, my disdain, distrust and general disgust for financial media reached a peak in 2016 when CNBC’s Fast Money invited Bill Fleckenstein on the air to offer up his take on the economy and why the Fed-fueled market was “un-shortable”.
Bill is a well-known advocate for the Austrian school of economics and has been highly critical of the Fed and central banking policies for decades.
In this interview, he made two key points: 1) he thought Japan would probably be the first bond market to blow up and 2) he was buying gold and miners and thought the broader market was “un-shortable”. Fleckenstein told the hosts:
“Probably the first bond market to crack up will be in Japan but maybe it won’t. Maybe it’ll be here. I don’t really care if I miss the first break because they’re gonna come with QE4. The trade I want to catch is when people wake up to the fact that these Central Bank strategies are failures. They are the arsonists that create the fire, they’re not the firemen that put it out, even though they claim to be the latter.”
Seymour responded:
“But Bill, it sounds like you missed a lot. I mean, you’ve been on the show a number of times where you’ve been licking your chops and saying it’s about to happen, and it’s two, three years going on doing this, and a lot of this sounds kind of pathetic.”
Fleckenstein responded that’s he’s long gold and miners, prompting Seymour to take sarcastic shots at him, stating:
“Is gold going to $2,000 an ounce? Is it? I bet you bought gold at the bottom.”
To which Fleckenstein, rightfully pissed off, responds:
“I happened to catch the lows, but that does not mean anything. I’m not here to brag. I don’t ask to come on this show — you guys ask me. So don’t get in my face because I’m not joining the party you want me to.”
You can watch the full interview free here.
As I wrote back in 2023, "timing these assholes is everything” and today, here we are, about 9 years since that interview on an evening where it looks damn close to exactly what Bill Fleckenstein was ridiculed for on national television is happening. Japanese bonds are in a “full blown melt-down”, as Zero Hedge described it tonight:
It’s a move that Peter Schiff predicts “could force the Japanese government to sell Treasuries to service its debt.”
“It’s the Takaichi trade in motion. The combination of rising JGB yields in Japan and concerns over renewed US-European tariffs could lead to further rises in global bond yields, ” Mansoor Mohi-Uddin, chief macro strategist at Bank of Singapore told Bloomberg overnight.
Other strategists like Tadashi Matsukawa, head of bond investments at PineBridge Investments Japan are predicting....(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE 100% FREE HERE).