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Faramir:	Then farewell! But if I should return, think better of me.
Denethor:	That depends on the manner of your return.

– J.R.R. Tolkien “The Lord of the Rings” (1954)

I’m going full-nerd with the “Lord of the Rings” introduction to today’s Epsilon Theory note, but I think this scene — where Denethor, the mad Steward of Gondor, orders his son Faramir to take on a suicide mission against Sauron’s overwhelming forces — is the perfect way to describe what the Bank of Japan did last Thursday with their announcement of negative interest rates. The BOJ (and the ECB, and … trust me … the Fed soon enough) is the insane Denethor. The banks are Faramir. The suicide mission is making loans into a corporate sector levered to global trade as the forces of global deflation rage uncontrollably.

Negative rates are an intentional effort to weaken your own country’s banks. Negative rates are a punitive command: go out there and make more bad loans where risk is entirely uncompensated, or we will, in effect, fine you. The more bad loans you don’t make, the bigger the fine. Negative rates are only a bit worrying in today’s sputtering economies of Europe, Japan, and the US because the credit cycle has yet to completely roll over. But it is rolling over (read anything by Jeff Gundlach if you don’t believe me), it is rolling over everywhere, and when it really starts rolling over, any country with negative rates will find it to be significantly destabilizing for their banking sector.

There’s a reason that the Fed kept paying interest on bank reserves even in the darkest, most deflationary days of the Great Recession. Yes, it’s the Fed’s job to support full employment. Yes it’s the Fed’s job to maintain price stability.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Negative Interest Rates Already in Fed’s Official Scenario

February 2, 2016

Negative Interest Rates Already in Fed’s Official Scenario

But forget QE-4.

The Germans, with Teutonic precision, call them “Punishment Interest.” Negative interest rates are spreading from the ECB’s negative deposit rate across the bond market and to some savings accounts in the Eurozone. The idea is to enrich existing bond holders and flog savers until their mood improves. Stock prices are allowed to get crushed by reality.

Negative interest rates destroy one of the most essential mechanisms in an economy: the pricing of risk. Investors end up taking huge risks with no reward. Many of them will get cleaned out down the road.

In Switzerland, punishment interest already causes “perverse unpredictable effects,” as mortgage rates have started to soar. It’s wreaking havoc in Denmark and Sweden. Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz let the idea float that he’d unleash punishment interest to destroy the Canadian dollar. The Bank of Japan announced Friday morning – timed for maximum market effect – that it too would inflict negative interest rates on its subjects.

In the US, Ben Bernanke has been out there preaching to the choir about them. Over-indebted corporate America, except for the banks, would love this absurdity; it would allow them to actually make money off their mountain of debt.

“Potentially anything – including negative interest rates – would be on the table,” Fed Chair Janet Yellen told a House of Representatives committee in early November.

Fed Vice Chair Stanley Fischer has been publicly obsessing about them for a while. Monday, during the Q&A after his speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, he said that negative interest rates are “working more than I can say I expected in 2012.”

It seems to be just talk. But negative interest rates are already baked into the official scenario for 2016.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Who Warned “Be Careful What You Wish For… If Interest Rates Go Negative”

January 31, 2016

Who Warned “Be Careful What You Wish For… If Interest Rates Go Negative”

Now that the Bank of Japan has joined other central banks such as Denmark, Sweden, the ECB, and Switzerland into pushing its rates into what until just two years ago was considered the monetary twilight zone below the zero bound, and in the process sending a record $5.5 trillion in government bond yields negative…

… which quickly puts into in context all the recent warnings about physical cash being eliminated (because as a reminder negative rates and cash simply can not coexist as the latter provides a ready immunity from the former), such as the following:

Perhaps the only open question is which comes first i) Japan hinting at a cash ban, or ii) the Fed going NIRP as well.

So in light of all this monetary lunacy, we have dug up the following blast from the not so distant past, which contains several rather dire warnings about the dystopian future of a NIRP world:

if rates go negative, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing will likely be called upon to print a lot more currency as individuals and small businesses substitute cash for at least some of their bank balances.
I might even go to my bank and withdraw funds in the form of a certified check made payable to myself, and then put that check in a drawer.
If bank liabilities shifted from deposits to certified checks to a significant degree, banks might be less willing to extend loans, because certified checks are likely to be less stable than deposits as a source of funding.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Citi On Why Negative Rates Are Like Potato Chips: “No One Can Have Just One”

January 31, 2016

Citi On Why Negative Rates Are Like Potato Chips: “No One Can Have Just One”

Now that Japan has let the negative rates genie out of the bottle, or as DB put it, ‘opened the Pandora’s Box‘ and in the process unleashed the latest global “silent bank run” and capital flight, prepare to hear a whole lot more about NIRP in the coming weeks because as Citi’s Steven Englander put it, “Why are Negative Rates like Potato Chips? No one can have just one.”

This is what else Englander said:

You can admire the policy boldness of the BoJ move into negative rates, and recognise its powerful asset market effects – positive for equities and negative for JPY. Experience in other countries that have entered into this territory should sober you up on the likely economic and inflation impact. No country that has gone into negative rates has experienced major shifts in its growth and inflation profile – minor, yes; major, no. As a consequence every dip into negative rates has been followed by additional moves.

Negative rates are a powerful inducement for cash to leave the banking system, but there is little evidence that investors take the cash and build steel plants with it. They buy foreign and financial assets, which is probably more than enough for the BoJ.

Some further thoughts from Citi’s FX desk, and why the BOJ ultimately shot itself, and other central banks, in the foot:

As the dust settles on the BoJ reaction, USDJPY is somewhat higher and risk currencies have begun to rebound following an initial dip. However, the price action has not been one-sided. Partly this seems to reflect the tendency of many investors to dismiss the rate move as diluted given its tiered implementation. Of the investors I have spoken to since the decision, a significant majority were inclined to poke holes in the decision.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Death Throes Of The Bull

January 31, 2016

Death Throes Of The Bull

The fast money and robo-machines keep trying to ignite stock rallies, but they all fizzle because bad karma is beginning to infect the casino. That is, apprehension is growing among whatever adults are left on Wall Street that 84 months of ZIRP and $3.5 trillion of Fed balance sheet expansion, aka money printing, didn’t do the trick.

Not only is the specter of recession growing more visible, but it is also attached to a truth that cannot be gainsaid. Namely, having stranded itself at the zero bound for an entire business cycle, the Fed is bereft of dry powder. Its only available tools are a massive new round of QE and negative interest rates.

But these are absolutely non-starters. The former would provoke riots in the financial markets because it would be an admission of total failure; and the latter would provoke a riot in the American body politic because the Fed’s seven year war on savers and retirees has already generated electoral revulsion. Bernie and The Donald are not expressions of public confidence in the economic status quo.

So the dip buying brigades have been reduced to reading the tea leaves for signs that the Fed’s four in store for 2016 are no more. Yet even if the prospect of delayed rate hikes is good for a 50-handle face ripping rally on the S&P 500 index from time to time, here’s what it can’t do. The Fed’s last card—-deferring one or more of the tiny interest rate increases scheduled for this year——cannot stop the on-coming recession.

And it is surely coming. We got one more powerful indicator on that score in this morning’s data on core capital goods orders (i.e. nondefense excluding aircraft).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Bank of Japan – Ringing in the Endgame?

January 30, 2016

The Bank of Japan – Ringing in the Endgame?

Let’s Do More of What Doesn’t Work

It is the Keynesian mantra: the fact that the policies recommended by Keynesians and monetarists, i.e., deficit spending and money printing, routinely fail to bring about the desired results is not seen as proof that they simply don’t work. It is regarded as evidence that there hasn’t been enough spending and printing yet.

BoJ governor Haruhiko “Fly” Kuroda: is that a windshield I’m seeing?

Photo credit: Yuya Shino / Reuters

At the Bank of Japan this mantra has been gospel for as long as we can remember. Japan has always exhibited an especially strong penchant for central planning. We still recall that many Western observers were beginning to wonder in the late 1980s whether the Japanese form of state capitalism administered by the powerful Ministry of Trade and Industry and the BoJ wasn’t a superior economic system after all. Then this happened:

The Nikkei Index from 1989 to 2003. Japan’s seemingly never-ending boom coupled with forever rising stock prices, carefully administered by Tokyo’s powerful bureaucrats, suddenly became an intractable bust – click to enlarge.

This sudden change in fortunes should perhaps have been taken as a hint that central planning of the economy wasn’t such a good idea after all. That was not the conclusion of Japan’s movers and shakers though (or anyone else’s, for that matter). Instead it was decided that what was required were better planners, or at least a better plan.

For decades Japanese policymakers have been inundated with well-meaning advice by prominent Western economists. Even Ben Bernanke famously admonished them to just print more. According to Bernanke, holding interest rates at zero and implementing several iterations of QE were indicative of “policy paralysis” – after all, these efforts were obviously just not big and bold enough!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Disturbing Reasons Why The Bank Of Japan Stunned Everyone With Negative Rates

January 29, 2016

The Disturbing Reasons Why The Bank Of Japan Stunned Everyone With Negative Rates

As we noted earlier, in a paradoxical U-turn, one which caught everyone by surprise as a result of Kuroda’s own promise just one week ago not to engage in NIRP…

… and two months after the ECB’s December 3 disappointing announcement led to a historic surge in the EUR, today countless macro hedge funds have been left reeling with huge losses once again, as many had recently turned bullish on the Yen…

… only to be eviscerated by the BOJ’s negative rates announcement.

So what happened? Reuters has an amusing take, one which we doubt many macro HFs will find quite entertaining:

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda used classic shock tactics on Friday to push through his latest unconventional monetary policy of negative rates: deny, then strike.

The paradox, of course, is that by “striking”, Kuroda slammed precisely those who were meant to benefit the most from the BOJ’s action: financial institutions. To be sure, it is not just hedge funds who will be left reeling but Japanese banks themselves, because as a result of negative rates, their NIM will go horizontal and lead to even more pronounced losses, something European banks – such as Deutsche Bank – have discovered the hard way over the past year and a half.

There are other problems with the BOJ’s seemingly chaotic, if not panicked, decision: as Reuters adds, “a razor-thin 5-4 vote underscores the difficulty Kuroda had in winning enough board backing for his shock tactic, and illustrates the doubts among board members about the governor’s line that by sticking to a 2 percent inflation goal the BOJ can make people believe prices will rise.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trapped Inside The Zero-Bound: Crossing The Economic “Event Horizon”

January 14, 2016

Trapped Inside The Zero-Bound: Crossing The Economic “Event Horizon”

A friend of mine, a very successful tech CEO who is also profoundly astute in matters of finance, once asked his economics prof during a lecture on interest rates in his university days “could interest rates ever go negative?”.

The professor, gazing over his glasses and down his nose at what obviously had to be an imbecile in his lecture hall calmly set aside a second of his podium time to shoot the idea down: “No.”, he said quite simply, as if he couldn’t believe he had to be explaining this to university level students, “it has to be a positive number….”.

My colleague believed him. After all, being in technology he was familiar with the computer code analogy of a negative interest rate, that being the dreaded divide by zero error. Coders take great pains to avoid these because if it actually happens, the currently running program basically “shits the bed” and all bets are off.

If the currently running program was generating a balance sheet, it may set the line printer on fire instead. If it’s deploying an airplane’s landing gear it may jettison everything in the cargo bay. It’s impossible to guess what will happen. So when people who viscerally understand the kind of consequences the ERR:DIV0 can cause extrapolate it out to an entire economy, they’re the ones that end up “shitting the bed”. It’s really bad.

I always knew that ZIRP was bad, but I just thought it would be normal, run-of-the-mill bad. You know, where most normal people get screwed for a long time, and then “suddenly” everything comes unglued and the financial system implodes, followed by a government intervention while the usual suspects (free markets and capitalism) get hung from telephone poles.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fed Vice Chair Explains Why The Fed Is Still Obsessing With Negative Interest Rates

January 3, 2016

Fed Vice Chair Explains Why The Fed Is Still Obsessing With Negative Interest Rates

Two months ago, and roughly 6 weeks before the Fed’s first rate hike in 9 years, Janet Yellen warned that if the “outlook worsened, the fed might weight negative rates” adding that “negative rates could help encourage banks to lend.”

Moments ago, in a speech titled “Monetary Policy, Financial Stability, and the Zero Lower Bound” delivered before the American Economic Association in San Francisco, the Fed’s second in command, Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer while discussing the equilibrium real interest rate, or r* (or the real interest rate at which the economy would settle at full employment and with inflation at 2 percent, provided the economy is not at the ZLB), unexpectedly hinted once again at the potential advent of negative rates in the US, two weeks after the Fed’s raised the interest rate to a 25-50 bps corridor except of course for December 31 when as we noted, the Fed Funds dropped to 0.12%, suggesting that banks are perfectly ok with hiking rates… except when it comes to quarter and year-end window dressing for regulatory, compliance and public filing purposes.

Specifically, Fischer discussed what steps, if any, can be taken to mitigate the constraints associated with the ZLB? His second answer: NIRP. To wit:

Another possible step would be to reduce short-term interest rates below zero if needed to provide additional accommodation. Our colleagues in Europe are busy rewriting economics textbooks on this topic as we speak-and also helping us to remember earlier discussions of negative interest rates by Keynes, Irving Fisher, Hicks, and Gesell.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will 2016 Bring Another 2008-Type Crash? Pt. 1

January 2, 2016

Will 2016 Bring Another 2008-Type Crash? Pt. 1

The world is lurching towards another Crash.

Japan, which has been ground zero for Keynesian insanity, is back in technical recession. This comes after the Bank of Japan launched the single largest QE program in history: a QE program equal to 25% of GDP launched in April 2013.

This program bought an uptick in economic growth for just six months before Japan’s GDP growth rolled over again. Similarly, an expansion of QE in October 2014 pulled Japan back from the brink, but GDP growth collapsed again soon after, plunging the country into technical recession earlier this year.

Japan is completely insolvent. The country has no choice but to continue to implement QE or else it will go crash in a matter of months. However, with the Bank of Japan already monetizing ALL of the country’s debt issuance, the question arises, “just what else can it buy?”

We’ll find out in 2016. But Japan is now officially in the End Game from Central Banking.

Europe is not far behind.

The ECB has cut interest rates to negative, cut them further into negative, launched a QE program, and then cut interest rates even further into negative while extending its QE program.

EU GDP growth has flat-lined at barely positive.

But the economy is having serious difficulty fending off deflation.

When your ENTIRE banking system is leveraged by 26 to 1, as is Europe’s, even a 4% drop in asset values renders the system insolvent. Without significant inflation, the EU’s banking system will crash.

ECB President Draghi better have more in his bazooka that what he’s fired so far, or the EU’s $46 trillion banking system will crash. However, as is the case with the Bank of Japan, the ECB is facing a shortage of viable assets to buy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Perverse, Unpredictable Effects” of Negative Interest Rates: Mortgage Rates Soar in Switzerland

December 17, 2015

“Perverse, Unpredictable Effects” of Negative Interest Rates: Mortgage Rates Soar in Switzerland

The unintended consequences of NIRP.

Negative interest rates – called “punishment interest” in Germany – have morphed from sheer impossibility to solid reality in Europe. Having seen how they work, the Bank of Canada has invoked them now, and Fed Chair Janet Yellen, has put them “on the table” before a House of Representatives committee.

In Europe, after they became established as the latest method of flogging savers until their mood improves, all kinds of absurdities saw the light of the day. For example, bailed-out national governments can now fund their deficits at negative rates, extracting money from their bondholders, rather than paying them. Perhaps the coolest notion was that banks would be “paying your mortgage.”

That may have been an illusion – at least in Switzerland, where the Swiss National Bank slashed its benchmark rate on “sight deposits” to negative 0.75% on January 15, the day of the epic “Frankenschock.” That day, the SNB abandoned its cap on the franc, which within the blink of an eye, soared nearly 40% against the euro and the dollar, wiping out currency speculators in the process and shaking up global currency markets.

The negative benchmark rate had the effect that by now, 70% of franc-denominated corporate bonds trade with negative yields, according to Credit Suisse. And the theory was that mortgages would certainly head that way.

Initially, interest rates on 10-year fixed-rate mortgages plunged to about 1%, with some quoted below 1%, and folks were already speculating about 0% mortgages or negative-rate mortgages. But then something funny happened on the way to the bank: unintended consequences kicked in.

Swiss banks somehow decided, for whatever inexplicable reason, to make a living. That’s hard to do for banks when they lend out money in a negative interest-rate environment. So the biggest Swiss banks accomplished a unique feat: they’ve jacked up mortgage rates since then, with the 10-year fixed-rate now at about 2% and the 15-year fixed-rate at about 2.5%.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are Negative Rates Fueling Deflation?

December 14, 2015

Are Negative Rates Fueling Deflation?

Those in power never understand markets. They are very myopic in their view of the world. The assumption that lowering interest rates will “stimulate” the economy has NEVER worked, not even once. Nevertheless, they assume they can manipulate society in the Marxist-Keynesian ideal world, but what if they are wrong?

By lowering interest rates, they ASSUME they will encourage people to borrow and thus expand the economy. They fail to comprehend that people will borrow only when they BELIEVE there is an opportunity to make money. Additionally, they told people to save for their retirement. Now they want to punish them for doing so by imposing negative interest rates (tax on money) to savings. They do not understand that lowering interest rates, when there is no confidence in the future anyhow, will not encourage people to start businesses and expand the economy. It wipes out the income of savers and then the only way to make and preserve money becomes ASSET investment, as in the stock market — not creating business startups.

So lowering interest rates is DEFLATIONARY, not inflationary, for it reduces disposable income. This is particularly true for the elderly who are forced back to work to compete for jobs, which increases youth unemployment.

Since the only way to make money has become ASSET INFLATION, they must withdraw money from banks and buy stocks. Now, they are in the hated class of the “rich” who are seen as the 1% because they are making money when the wage earner loses money as taxation rises and the economy declines. As taxes rise, machines are replacing workers and shrinking the job market, which only fuels more deflation. Then you have people like Hillary who say they will DOUBLE the minimum wage, which will cause companies to replace even more jobs with machines.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stephen Poloz Considers Negative Interest Rates

December 10, 2015

Stephen Poloz Considers Negative Interest Rates

Price controls on interest rates are the latest fad.

A 100-year-trend that’s picked up steam in the last 15 years, where central banks have been confident enough to blatantly ignore the supply and demand for loans and keep rates as low as possible.

How low can you go?

For Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz, it’s below zero.

In a four-page pamphlet, the BoC makes its case for negative interest rates because, “the nominal return for holding currency is negative, due to storage, transportation, insurance and other costs associated with securing and storing bank notes, particularly in large quantities. These costs make it possible for nominal interest rates to fall somewhat below zero.”

Poloz makes it sound inevitable.

In his worldview, interest rates are like playing with the shower faucet. Sometimes too much water is coming out, sometimes it’s not enough. Sometimes the water is too hot, sometimes it’s too cold.

It is the Bank of Canada’s job, so goes the thinking, to regulate this flow of water as to “promote the economic and financial well-being of Canada,” or even more hilarious, “to preserve the value of money by keeping inflation low and stable.”

That’s not what interest rates are for.

Interest rates coordinate production and consumption decisions over time. Some sectors are more sensitive to rates than others.

If interest rates rise, people won’t spend less in general. They will spend less on particular things, most likely real estate.

Low oil prices and a “weak” loonie (73 cents to the American dollar at the time of this writing) are not the fault of some mysterious force in capitalism.

It is the belief of central banks and governments that cutting rates is a fine way to get oneself out of an economic recession.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Swiss Bank “Goes There”, Applies Negative Rates To Retail Deposits

November 23, 2015

Swiss Bank “Goes There”, Applies Negative Rates To Retail Deposits

Back in September in “How Mario Draghi Can Force The Swiss National Bank To Go ‘Nuclear On Depositors,” we discussed the implications of the ECB’s (likely) decision to plunge further into NIRP-dom at the bank’s December meeting.

In short, DM central banks – with the possible exception of the Fed which is about to create a rather meaningful policy divergence with its core CB brethren – are in a proverbial race to bottom. It’s a beggar-thy-neighbor monetary policy regime and the more stubborn inflation expectations prove to be, the more aggressive the tit-for-tat easing, as everyone involved scrambles to protect their currency in the face of incessant competitive devaluations on all sides.

As we outlined in great detail in the post linked above, the ECB’s ultra dovish lean has the potential to create a lot of problems for the Riksbank, the Norges Bank, and the SNB.

Sweden is running out of options for a QE program that’s already broken once (see here and here) and although Stefan Ingves will probably tell you there’s more room to cut in the event Draghi moves on the depo rate, the Riksbank is already at -0.35 and the housing bubble has reached epic proportions. Of course staying on hold in the event of an ECB cut means the krona will soar and then, well, there’s goes any hope of hitting the elusive inflation target.

Norway, on the other hand, can’t even begin to think about QE because frankly, they’re too rich. That is, the Norges Bank wouldn’t have enough assets to buy without breaking the market pretty much immediately. That leaves rate cuts and to be sure, at +0.75 (yes, that’s right, not everyone is in NIRP), there’s probably a bit of breathing room there for Oeystein Olsen and he may need it come next month.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

They’re coming for your cash

November 15, 2015

They’re coming for your cash

It might sound like a conspiracy theory spun by right-wing crazies. But judging by the increasing desperation of governments to reboot the world economy, it just might happen.

“It” is the recall or confiscation of cash, i.e., dollars, euros, pounds, etc., in physical form. And a key justification that those calling for this radical measure cite is that it reinforces the ability of central banks to impose negative interest rates.

Negative rates mean that lenders literally pay businesses and consumers to borrow money. They also penalize savers for hoarding it. The Danish and Swiss national banks have gone the farthest into negative territory, with interest rates of -0.75%. That means €100,000 in a euro-denominated account in Switzerland would be worth only €99,250 after one year. While these rates apply only to “excess reserves” banks maintain at the central bank, nothing stops banks from requiring depositors to share the pain.

But that’s not enough, according to some economists. Citicorp’s chief economist, a technocrat named Willem Buiter, thinks the US needs much lower interest rates to push the economy out of the doldrums. He thinks negative interest rates around -6% would do the job. But there’s one condition: For his plan to work, he says, the government must abolish cash.

It’s easy to understand why Buiter might not have warm and fuzzy thoughts about cash. After all, if your bank is taking 6% from your savings, $100 in your account would be worth only $94 at the end of one year, $88.36 after two years, and $83.06 after three years. On the other hand, a $100 bill with Ben Franklin’s picture on it would still be worth… well, $100. Buiter understands that as long as cash exists, no one will voluntarily keep their savings in accounts with negative interest rates.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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