BofA: Even The Bubbles Are Becoming More “Bubbly” Thanks To Central Banks
Back in June, Citi’s credit strategist Hans Lorenzen pointed out that while QE had failed to spark inflation across the broader economy, it had achieved something else: “the principal transmission channel to the real economy has been… lifting asset prices.” That however has required continuous CB balance sheet growth, and with the Fed, ECB and BOJ all poised to “renormalize” over the next year, the global monetary impulse is set to turn negative in the coming year. Meanwhile, as financial markets scramble to maximize every last ounce of what central bank impulse remains, we get such bubbles as London real estate, bitcoin and vintage cars, or as Citi puts it: “the wealth effect is stretching farther and farther afield.”
Three months later, the latest to tackle the issue of central bank bubble creation, is BofA’s Barnaby Martin, who in a note released overnight asks rhetorically “are bubbles becoming more “bubbly”?
Just like Lorenzen, Martin observes the blanket central bank “lower for longer” rates intervention, which leads to “speculative behavior in assets.” Well, technically, Martin hedges by calling it a “risk”, but one look at the chart above and below shows that the bubbles created by central banks are all too real. And as Martin, whose topic is the unprecedented buying spree across credit, notes it’s not just credit markets that are seeing exceptional investor demand at this point in the cycle: so is everything else, or as he puts it:
“As chart 3, over the page shows, asset bubbles seem to be becoming more “bubbly” as time goes by.”
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