Wobbling into crisis

America's hints at tightening up its monetary policy is giving markets the jitters, says John Stepek.

This week's antics in emerging markets just prove the truth of the old market saying: "money goes where it's treated best". When yields the world over are being squeezed lower as printed money chases asset prices higher, investors have to travel far to find acceptable returns.

If that means lending to Rwanda for ten years at a rate of just under 7% (as investors did last April), so be it. What could go wrong in a world propped up by endless quantitative easing (QE)?

But when there's even a hint that the squeeze on yields might stop or worse still, reverse investors' appetite for exotica collapses. Why lend to the Rwandan government, or risk investing in Turkey, when the promise of higher interest rates in much safer countries looms on the horizon?

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With the Federal Reserve promising to reduce the amount of money it prints this year, higher rates from the US central bank remain a while off but markets have already decided that the next move is up.

Of course, the argument goes that we needn't fret, because a crash will see central banks crank up the presses again. We wouldn't rule that out, particularly if there's a severe spillover to US markets. But given that this is pretty much the consensus take on things, it's worth considering that this view may be too sanguine.

The US, despite some significant problems, also enjoys some big advantages right now. Its banks are healthier than those of most developed economies. The potential of shale gas may or may not have been overstated, but it is already allowing the US to attract jobs and business back from emerging markets. And while the stock market looks expensive and vulnerable to a correction, the Fed can't switch tack every time there's a 1% wobble.

And if the Fed doesn't print, who will? As emerging markets are learning, it's hard to run loose monetary policy in your own country when the world's top economy even hints at tightening up.

Japan can get away with it one reason we like it as an investment as could Europe (though it's not keen to do so). But for many others, as India and Turkey have shown this week, the only feasible direction is to raise rates from here.

Britain is not immune. We were helped in the early days of the crisis by the government talking a good game on austerity' but more crucially, monetary policy was loose everywhere else too. As that ends, Mark Carney will face a tough choice. Start raising interest rates, risking a pile-up in the housing market and by extension the banks, or leave policy too loose and risk a collapse in sterling.

Our Roundtable experts this week give their views on how to fix our financial system, and what they'd do in Carney's shoes. Of course, changes on the scale they discuss would require a crisis. But perhaps we'll get one.

John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.