The long-awaited dose of reality from the massive and unprecedented financialization of the global economy has finally begun.
Of course, those of us who understood from the start how healthy economies and markets naturally function, knew that a viable recovery from the fiscal and monetary excesses–which caused the great recession and financial crisis of 2008–was never underway. This is because central banks manipulated interest rates to zero percent and below and kept them at that level for a decade. Then, those same low rates engendered a humongous amount of new debt to be incurred, leading to the rebuilding of the current stock and real estate bubbles. And, it also created a tremendous and unprecedented bubble in the global fixed income market. This entire artificial construct, which was built upon bigger asset bubbles and greater debt loads, is now being tenuously held together by that very same government-engineered bond bubble.
However, the bond bubble is now bursting. Global central bankers now face the results of their $14 trillion worth of money printing since 2008, which was manufactured in search of fatuous inflation targets. This “successful” achievement of inflation goals is now being met with the removal of that liquidity, as asset price levels have become completely unstable.
Indeed, this switch to a hawkish monetary policy is now being adopted by many of the world’s central banks. There have been a total of 13 countries that have hiked interest rates so far this year, and only 5 rate cuts. According to Capital Economics, among the 20 major global central banks, they cover, just one (China) will cut rates in the remainder of this year. Whereas, the U.S., Canada, Norway, Sweden, Brazil, India, and South Korea are all expected to hike before year’s end.
Not only is the next rate decision expected to be Hawkish in 14 out of the 20 nations—with Japan expected to be neutral for the foreseeable future–but the pace of monthly Quantitative Easing is projected to drop to zero by the end of 2018, from $180 billion at its peak in March of last year. This incorporates the Fed’s selling $600 billion off its balance sheet per year starting in October.