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David Fuller and Eoin Treacy's Comment of the Day
Category - Fixed Income

    A Generational Change at the Fed

    Thanks to a subscriber for this note by Tony Dwyer at Canaccord Genuity. Here is a section:

    Foreigners Sell Rand Assets at Record Pace as Eskom Woes Mount

    This article by Paul Wallace for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Fitch Ratings Ltd. followed on Friday by cutting its outlook for Africa’s most industrialized economy to negative. JPMorgan Chase & Co. said the same day that a rally in the rand since the start of June was more to do with a supportive global environment than improvements in conditions locally.

    “We now believe levels are stretched enough to enter outright rand shorts,” JPMorgan analysts including London-based Anezka Christovova and Robert Habib in New York said in a note. “South Africa’s fundamental picture remains very challenging with a ballooning fiscal deficit and structurally low growth.”

    Citigroup Inc. recommended to clients on Monday that they short the rand against the Turkish lira. The Wall Street bank’s analysts see the latter strengthening about 7% versus the South African currency over the next three months.

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    Draghi Urges "Significant" Fiscal Response to an Economic Slump

    This article by Catherine Bosley and Jill Ward for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    and Jill Ward for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Despite years of exceptional ECB support, the euro-area economy is in the throes of a slowdown in growth and inflation remains weak. In Germany, typically the region’s stalwart, manufacturing is mired in a slump as trade tensions weigh on exports and auto factories struggle to cope with changes in the industry.

    With borrowing costs at historic lows, Draghi has repeatedly stressed the need for structural reforms, and he reiterated that call at a press conference in Frankfurt on Thursday.

    “Monetary policy has done a lot to support the euro area and continues to do a lot,” he said. “If there were to be a significant worsening in the euro-zone economy, it’s unquestionable that fiscal policy, a significant fiscal policy, becomes of the essence.”

    Just before Draghi spoke, German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz brushed off warning signals for Europe’s largest economy, saying the government has no concrete plans to spur economic growth.

    “We are not in a situation that makes it necessary or wise to act as if we were in a crisis, we are not,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

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    RBA Chief Says He's Ready to Ease Again, Sees Rates Staying Low

    This article by Michael Heath for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    “But if demand growth is not sufficient, the board is prepared to provide additional support by easing monetary policy further,” he said. “Whether or not further monetary easing is needed, it is reasonable to expect an extended period of low interest rates. On current projections, it will be some time before inflation is comfortably back within the target range.”

    Lowe’s speech, which made the case for maintaining the RBA’s current policy framework despite prolonged low inflation, was his most explicit that further easing remains on the table. The Reserve Bank cut rates in June and July to a record low of 1% and signaled at the time that it would wait to see how the easing filtered through the economy.

    Since then, consumer confidence has actually fallen and the currency has risen -- the latter due to an easing bias among major central banks -- in contrast to RBA’s hopes. Indeed, the Federal Reserve is expected to cut as soon as next week. Westpac Banking Corp. Chief Economist Bill Evans on Wednesday predicted Lowe and co. would cut in October and February to push the cash rate to 0.5%.
     

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    Five Reasons to Oppose the Budget Deal

    This article from crfb.org may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    The proposed budget deal would lift spending caps for the next two years by a combined $320 billion, which over the next decade will result in $1.7 trillion of additional projected debt. Negotiators explicitly chose not to extend the Budget Control Act (BCA) caps, which will expire in 2021. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will thus assume discretionary spending rises with inflation after 2021 in its baseline, leading to roughly $1.5 trillion more of outlays through 2029. Netting interest and offsets brings the total cost to $1.7 trillion.

    2. The Budget Deal Would Cost Nearly As Much As the Tax Cuts

    While we and many others have decried the cost of the unpaid-for 2017 tax law, passing this deal would enshrine nearly as much debt as the tax cuts did. According to CBO, the 2017 tax law will cost $1.9 trillion over a decade, including the dynamic effects from economic growth and interest. We project that the proposed budget deal will enshrine $1.7 trillion of debt over a decade, including interest. As a result, lawmakers will have added almost as much to the debt with this round of spending increases as they did with tax cuts.

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    Johnson;s Acerbic Brexit Mastermind Wants a Political Revolution

    This article by Joe Mayes for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Since the referendum, he has retreated from public politics, offering only the occasional blog post, often thousands of words long, setting out his views about government, technology and educational systems, but especially on why he believed the government was making a mess of Brexit.

    His tone was often contemptuous: Brexit Secretary David Davis was “thick as mince, lazy as a toad and vain as Narcissus.” Pro-Brexit MPs were “useful idiots” who spent their time “spouting gibberish.”

    In 2018 he described Theresa May’s approach to Brexit as a “surrender” and said that Article 50 -- the divorce process with the EU -- was triggered too early, akin to “putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger.’’ He said the success of Brexit won’t be known for decades, and tweeted in 2017 that there are “possible branches of the future’’ where leaving will have been an error.

    Cummings’s main thesis is that Britain’s system of government is “systematically dysfunctional” and designed to keep the U.K. as closely tied to the EU as possible. He’s called for a radical shake-up of Whitehall, saying Brexit cannot be delivered without it.

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    Europe Bank Earnings to Offer Peek Into Negative-Rate Abyss

    This article by Nicholas Comfort for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    The second quarter will probably provide more evidence how damaging zero or negative rates are for an industry that at its core depends on clients paying to borrow money. Revenue at eight of Europe’s top lenders is set to decline 2.7% on average from a year earlier, according to filings and analyst estimates. That compares with a 0.5% gain for the top U.S. peers, many of which still managed to post record earnings after nine interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve since late 2015.

    “The focus for European banks is really on revenue,” said Jonathan Tyce, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “Rates are set to go down, which means lower loan loss provisions, but that doesn’t make up for the loss in revenue. All this keeps bringing you back to costs.”

    And here is a section on Deutsche Bank

    Deutsche Bank (July 24) unveiled its biggest overhaul in decades this month, including a plan to exit its underperforming stock trading business. The move was partly driven by low interest rates and the company now assumes that European short-term rates will rise to just 0% in 2021. Deutsche Bank also offered insight into second-quarter earnings with a 5.9% slide in revenue. Costs and profit figures fell short of expectations, even before the bank said it expects 3 billion euros of restructuring charges in the period. Deutsche Bank says about 75% of the investment banking businesses it wants to keep will have a top five market position, and the release this week will 

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    The enduring link between demography and inflation

    This report by Mikael Juselius and Előd Takáts for the Bank of International Settlements may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Our paper builds on recent empirical work. Focusing exclusively on ageing, Anderson et al (2014), Yoon et al (2014) and Bobeica et al (2017) find significant deflationary effects from an increasing share of older population cohorts. Juselius and Takáts (2015) and Aksoy et al (2015) take the age structure more fully into account and find that an increase in the number of dependants, young and old, is generally inflationary. Juselius and Takáts (2015) also show that the deflationary effects of ageing found in previous studies are driven primarily by the very old (80+ year old) cohort. A common feature of these studies, as noted above, is that they rely exclusively on post-war data, which makes it difficult to separate the age structure effect in inflation from other global secular factors that may be related to trend inflation.

    The uncovered link is policy-relevant, because global ageing will substantially increase the share of the old-age population in almost all countries (eg Goodhart et al (2015)). Increased longevity and stagnant or declining birth rates will affect both advanced and emerging economies. While slow, such large-scale demographic shifts have the potential to materially affect trend inflation. For instance, we find that accounting for the age structure leads to substantially lower estimates of endogenous inflation persistence. Hence, past historical periods of high inflation persistence might have reflected, in part, persistent demographic changes. This implies that the role of conventional endogenous drivers, such as inflation expectations, may have been overstated. If so, this could account for the current conundrum with well-anchored long-term inflation expectations and persistently low inflation rates. The stability of the relationship furthermore suggests that this may help us forecast longer-term inflation trends, as previously noted by McMillan and Baesel (1990) and Lindh and Malmberg (2000). Our estimates indicate that inflationary pressures are likely to rise in future due to the increasing share of older population cohorts and a declining share of younger ones, which has not been emphasized in the literature.

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    Email of the day on global growth

    Can you please expand on this statement from Friday's commentary:

    "There is potential we are currently at the trough in global growth which could support the stock market in its breakout."

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