Why investors should stop worrying about the yield curve
After "inverting" and sparking talk of impending recession earlier this year, the yield curve on US government debt has returned to a more normal pattern.
"False alarm?" The inversion of the US yield curve sparked talk of impending recession earlier this year, says The Economist. Yet yields on US government debt have returned to a more normal pattern since mid-October. The curve completely uninverted for the first time in a year earlier this month. Financial markets are "celebrating a bullet dodged". US indices have been hitting new all-time highs in recent weeks as investors go back into "risk-on" mode. The Dow Jones index has gained 4.5% in the past month; the S&P 500 has risen 24% so far this year. But "the bullet may still be on its way".
Doomsday delayed
The yield curve plots the interest rates on US Treasury bonds of different maturities. Under normal circumstances investors will demand higher interest rates for longer maturities. But if they think that a recession and Federal Reserve interest rate cuts lie in store, then long-term yields can fall and the curve become "inverted". Over the summer the US government was paying less to borrow money for ten years than for two years.
Markets consider this a "powerful economic omen", says The Economist. The last three US recessions were preceded, roughly one year before, by a yield curve inversion. Few economists think the "inversion itself causes a slowdown". Rather, it is a sign that markets think short-term interest rates are too high and will need to fall. Yet the US central bank has "responded faster and more fiercely to an inversion than it usually does", with three interest-rate cuts this year. That makes a recession next year seem less likely. Traders credit speedy Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts as well as better mood music from US-China trade talks for the improved sentiment, say Sam Goldfarb and Daniel Kruger for The Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, an un-inverted yield curve "doesn't mean the economy's in the clear". The yield curve has uninverted before previous recessions, including in the run-up to 2007. Uninversion doesn't cancel out the original recession signal.
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Wall Street is "obsessed with the game of inversion-watching", says Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. Yet a recent paper from the Bank for International Settlements suggests that markets are looking in the wrong place. The study suggests that government bonds are a less reliable predictor of downturns than "financial cycle metrics (such as the debt-service ratio, property prices, credit spreads and so on)". While there are pockets of trouble in Chinese debt markets and US leveraged finance, the boffins do not think that the broader US financial cycle "signals a looming recession".
"Wall Street has forecast nine of the last five recessions," writes Jonathan Allum for The Blah! The yield curve may simply not be "the economic indicator it is cracked up to be", especially because quantitative easing policies have distorted interest rates over the past decade. We will have to wait until 2021 to find out if markets "were on the money" about a coming recession.
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Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019.
Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere.
He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful.
Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.
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