Rising U.S. Bond Yields May Spark Credit Crisis II

May 30th, 2009

Via: Reuters:

The global financial crisis may morph into a second, equally virulent phase where borrowing costs rise again, hobbling an embryonic economic recovery, debilitating cash-strapped banks, and punishing investors all over again.

Early warnings signs of this scenario include surging government bond yields, a slumping U.S. dollar, and the fading of the bear market rally in U.S. stocks.

Optimists hope that a fragile two-month rally in world stock markets, a rise in U.S. Treasury yields from record lows during the depths of the crisis in late 2008, and some less scary economic data all signal that a recovery is around the corner.

But gloomy analysts insist that thinking is delusional.

Once Credit Crisis Version 2.0 ramps up, foreign investors may punish the U.S. government for borrowing trillions of dollars too much by refusing to buy its debt until bond prices plunge to much cheaper levels.

The telling harbinger is benchmark Treasury note yields’ surge to six-month highs around 3.75 percent this week, as investors began to balk at the record U.S. government borrowing requirement this year.

The U.S. Treasury plans to sell about $2 trillion in new debt this year to fund a $1.8 trillion fiscal deficit.

Heavy selling of U.S. dollar-denominated assets could trigger a full-blown currency crisis and usher in surging inflation, forcing mortgage rates and corporate bond yields up, undermining any rebound in economic activity.

“The financial crisis is a downward spiral with two twists,” said George Feiger, chief executive of Contango Capital Advisors in Berkeley, California.

First came the banking crisis and a huge contraction of credit, starting in mid-2007 which resulted in the stock market panic of 2008 which triggered the deepest U.S. recession in at least two decades.

“Once you have got a recession you have good old-fashioned credit losses,” Feiger said. “The second leg is now the consequences of the massive recession and it is just now working its way out,” he said.

Investors, many of them foreigners who own a large chunk of the U.S. Treasury market, are steadily demanding higher yields.

The price of the historic rescues of banks, insurers, manufacturers, and securities markets, to prevent a complete collapse during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, has meant a record U.S. government borrowing requirement.

But by issuing so much debt, the United States risks repulsing a critical buyer: foreign central banks, who own more than a quarter of marketable U.S. Treasuries. China recently overtook Japan as the biggest such buyer.

“We are getting into that stage which I call ‘the markets revenge'”, said Martin Weiss, president of Weiss Research Inc. in Jupiter, Florida.

Weiss, known for his especially pessimistic views on the banking system and economy, recently published a book entitled: “The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide”.

“The market attacked anyone who had the toxic assets,” he said.

Now, foreign investors’ primary target is the U.S. government because it has bought many of the tarnished securities from banks and some of the failing institutions itself, but the selloff will soon spread to all U.S. dollar-denominated assets, Weiss expects.

Selling could push up the 10-year Treasury note’s yield to about 6.0 percent Weiss warns. For now, he urges investors to stash much of their savings in short term Treasury bills, which carry minimal interest rate risk.

Foreign investors are running out of patience with the U.S. government’s debt issuance, he argued.

“What happened at the end of this month is the beginning of the end of that goodwill period,” Weiss said. “There could be a major near-term selloff in the dollar.”

This month, the euro has gained nearly 7.0 percent against the U.S. dollar. Meanwhile, the benchmark ten-year U.S. Treasury note’s yield has surged to six-month highs around 3.75 percent, nearly doubling from its lowest level in 50 years of 2.04 percent seen last December.

Ultimately, corporate bond yields, although still at very wide yield spreads of more than four percentage points above Treasuries according to Merrill Lynch data, will also spike again, Weiss warned. The S&P 500 stock index may fall to 500 points in this next phase of the crisis he added, down from 911 points early on Friday, he said.

On the other hand, many economists reckon the U.S. government and Federal Reserve have averted a rerun of the Great Depression by swiftly orchestrating financial rescues and monetary and fiscal stimulus to offset sagging consumer spending.

Yet even as the U.S. economy and banking system struggle to recover from two years of turmoil, Europe’s banks are even more debilitated, raising the threat of a second global systemic crisis spreading back across the Atlantic to the United States, some analysts fear.

“I think the most likely origins for a major crisis would be beyond our borders,” said David Levy, chairman of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center in Mount Kisco, New York.

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2 Responses to “Rising U.S. Bond Yields May Spark Credit Crisis II”

  1. anothernut says:

    (I defer to any prognosticators with more experience in financial dynamics… BUT) even if we pull through this one, there will be another one, probably sooner rather than later, that will take America down. Because we’ve learned nothing from this, except that the statement, “the government will bail us out (or die trying)”, is something greedy bastards can always depend on. But we’ve learned nothing about the inherent problems associated with having a system that rewards people for being greedy bastards.

  2. pdugan says:

    Yes, the government will probably succeed at keeping black numbers on computer screens explicitedly meaningful (i.e. not vanishing) because they have an advantage not 3rd world governmnet has with the incumbency of their currency/bond hydra. However, this must come at the cost of those numbers becoming less implicitedly meaningful via compounding inflation. Furthermore, the Elliot Wave schedule on the DX says we´ve got a wave C rebound to go through before the big dislocation to new lows, Elliot Waves are meaningful not because they have some magical fibonacci logic, but because they represent the underlying chaos of the pyschology of the major position holders in any significant trend. Wave 1 represents people pledging with enough force to trigger a feedback loop, in this case that was the collusion between the Fed, ECB and Japanese CB last summer. Wave 2 represents risk being taken off the table ans some profit taking. Wave 3 represents reinvestment and new participants joining the fray, this coincided with the panic into t-bills and the wave 3 of 1 in the stock market´s mulit-year bear. Wave 4 represents profit taking and new fools, with a complex mix of opportunistic counter-trend traders. Wave 5 is the last gush of hope (coinciding with the Obama inauguration in this case) from new people getting in on the trend. a, b and c waves are more interesting and more difficult to trade because they represent a combination of those who joined the party late holding on in increasing desperation, opportunistic short-sellers, and those who originated the trend holding open positions for whatever reason (that reasons should be obvious in this case: consolidation of control).

    I suspect we´ll see a rising dollar with rising gold as the financials lead the rest of the US equity market the same way they did in late march, but in the opposite direction. Then we´ll have meandering gold in a higher range, rebounding stocks to perhaps higher 2009 highs, and an initially slow but quickening falter of the dollar. Then stock market collapse, dollar index weakness that doesn´t look so bad nominally but is a wash in inflation adjusted terms, and yield spikes, though probably not in that order. Just when the trend looks inevitable a counter-trend wave comes along to confound, and at this point in history, when the trend does arrive it will bring with it hidden risks, such as the risk that your US dollar denominated profits in a US account won´t be hardly useable due to capital controls. Just because this apocalypse will be complex, temporally nuanced and difficult to trade won´t stop hundreds of thousands of hedge fund managers and day traders from giving it a shot.

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