On February 12, 1999, the Bank of Japan announced that it was going full zero. Japan’s central bank would from that day forward push the overnight uncollateralized lending (interbank) rate to the zero lower bound. Further, it pledged to keep it there until Japan’s economy recovered.
The economic slump in the nineties had been by 1999 almost a decade in length. As the Japanese economy ground to a halt, unmovable and completely resistant to being restarted by any of the orthodox techniques tried up to that point, there came to be an institutional bid for government paper. It was the perfect illustration of Milton Friedman’s interest rate fallacy – low-interest rates signal tight money in the real economy. The bid was pure liquidity risk, having nothing to do with the “fundamentals” of bonds.
ZIRP was intended to try and change that condition. The mere rumors about it all the way back in 1998 had kicked off a BOND ROUT!!! From September 1998 through February 1999, it seemed as if the so-called bond bull market had finally been broken. Central bankers would ride to the economy’s rescue with non-standard “accommodation.”
The bond market for a brief time operated in the same misconception as Japanese central bankers. We are taught from Economics 101 that central banks are central; that when confronted with stubborn economic circumstances they need only use the tools they have available.
In nineties Japan, then, what was missing was the will to deploy all of the various methods at the disposal of uninhibited central bankers. The world’s first zero interest rate policy seemed like a change in at least official mindset. The bull market would be history.
Except, there is no such thing as a bond bull. It just doesn’t happen, at least not that way. The term has been conjured by bond shorts as a way to make it seem there is no value, therefore no justification, for interest rates staying ridiculously low.
