Federal Reserve and National Debt
It took the federal government around 200 years to accumulate a trillion dollars in debt. Within the following decade it tripled that number, then doubled it again in just twelve years, and doubled it again in another 8 years. Overall the national debt has increased sixteen-fold in just 30 years. Incidentally, this period coincides with the complete delinking of the U.S. currency to the gold standard.
So how are we managing all this debt? In 2013 the Federal Reserve will buy approximately 90% of the country’s issuance of Treasuries and mortgage bonds! That’s one way to explain how a nation facing such a growing mountain of debt, a slowing to stalling economy, and a paralyzed political process is able to maintain such incredibly low interest rates. Treasuries have long been used as the standard for the risk-free rate. With only 10%
of the issuance to float freely in the market, the Fed is able to generate considerable demand for this “risk-free” asset class, driving prices up, which means driving interest rates down.
The massive distortions from the various Quantitative Easing programs have damaged the market mechanisms for understanding the true price of risk, which gives markets an understanding of the appropriate cost of capital. A market that no longer can obtain this information has a big problem, because mispricing of risk leads to misallocation of capital.
The proverbial saying goes that markets love to climb a wall of worry. We’ve seen corporate earnings and revenue growth slow sharply through the past year, with corporate guidance for future performance continuing to be rather grim, yet equities have had quite a run. This is due to expanding P/E multiples as we discussed in last month’s newsletter. This expansion is 85% correlated to the Fed’s ongoing balance sheet expansion, as it is now adding about $85 billion of relatively secure fixed income securities to its $3 trillion portfolio on a monthly basis. Such an enormous level of buying in the markets, leaving only 10% of new issuance available for purchase, is forcing investors into other assets, pushing up prices.
How is this level of Fed activity going to end? David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff described the situation well by saying,
“I am concerned over the unintended consequences of these experimental policy measures that have no precedence, but perhaps these consequences lie too far ahead in time from a ‘tactical’ sense, but we should be aware of them. The last cycle was built on artificial prosperity propelled by financial creativity on Wall Street and this cycle is being built on an abnormal era of central bank market manipulation.” January 17th, 2013.
Bottom Line: When one looks over the past 12 years of active Federal Reserve monetary policy in which we experienced repeated bubbles followed by painful pops, why does anyone believe this time will be different? Particularly when this time we experienced monetary activism on an unprecedented scale: we are truly in uncharted waters.