Wednesday 15 June 2016

Will the Fed's hesitancy lead the market to see more risk?

Wait and see; that's the approach expected to be taken by the US Federal Reserve at today's announcement around its decision on interest rates that are yet to see further hikes after initiating the first such increase in rates in almost a decade following the Fed's December meeting. Since then the market has been largely affected with issues like China's economic growth stagnancy, a European refugee crisis and now a possible exit from the EU by the United Kingdom.

All these events have prevented the Fed from acting on their aspirations of seeing the Fed Funds Rate sit at a targeted level of 1.4%...pretty rich coming from a central bank that's been artificially fuelling asset bubbles since the introduction of Quantitative Easing.

Many at the time shot down the FOMC's projections by reiterating the weak global economic outlook that seemingly took hold of proceedings in the latter half of 2015 that was expected to last throughout the entire 2016. We've seen those conditions escalated in the first half of this year with advanced economies taking the front seat in terms of uncertainty, all showing signs of dragging down global growth.
Brexit might be the excuse used this time but the Fed knows very well that if it continues to stall hiking interest rates the higher the likelihood will be for it to renegade on its normalisation policy.

The real risk presenting itself in the global financial system resides in the fact that central bankers are losing their influential hold on directing their economies by allowing world government's to fall back on monetary policy to reboot the global economy.

This no longer stands as a strong deterrent of deflation that poses a risk to an ever increasing debt mound that injected myopic confidence into a system with the results proving unsuccessful. It also shows a worrisome sign for the economic outlook that partly fed the miniscule economic growth numbers we've seen up until now.

Questions are being asked whether US Treasury's will follow in the footsteps of fellow nations such as Japan, Switzerland and now German in dipping below negative yields?

I don't think the answer to the question should be to speculate whether they could but rather what are the implications if they do and these nations should decide to start the normalisation process considering their bond instruments are amused "safe" and investors continue to flock into them to weather the financial storm.  

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