Ray Dalio: Fed's Efforts to Hold Down Rates Raises Inflationary Pressures

what we've seen this go around is the need to distribute to produce a lot of debt where did those checks come from they came from the the government the government wrote the checks but the government can't produce money the central bank can produce money so they uh the central bank had got had to print a lot of money to lend to the government um to do that and that's monetization when you get at the late part of that cycle where you're creating a lot more debt and then you're monetizing it that's the end of a that's near the end of a long-term debt cycle and that produces its own set of problems so what tells us when we're nearing the end of that cycle i mean just in recent days including this week we've seen the 10-year yield really shoot up it's still a modest number historically but it certainly shot up very quickly is it an early warning sign that maybe we've pushed it a bit far on the side because goodness know we've had a lot of stimulus yes i think let's understand what's behind that um and then you can understand what the warning signs are because it's just a manifestation when there has to be a lot of selling of bonds and bonds don't give any good return there's a guaranteed negative return in bonds relative to inflation inflation index bonds yield less minus one percent and so there's no return and there's a pile of people who own bonds and this isn't just americans but these are international investors owning bonds and they have to buy a lot more bonds because when the government has to sell a lot more debt that means they have to buy a lot more bonds there will not be enough demand for those bonds when that happens interest rates rise that's what you're seeing now and the central bank is put in a dilemma this is all classic end of cycle type of thing the central bank is put into a dilemma because either interest rates will rise a lot or they will have to print money and buy those bonds to hold them down when they print money and buy those bonds to hold rate down that lowers real rates and it accelerates a depreciation of the value of the dollar and it also um raises inflation pressures and what the imbalance the frightening thing about this is that if you get um losing money and people are losing money by holding bonds and that's not just americans those are other foreigners then they could sell bonds and if they sell bonds at the same time as the government has got to sell a lot of bonds that could produce a real dilemma that's classic late long-term debt cycle type stuff so let's talk about jay powell's dilemma right now you describe it as a dilemma uh he appeared this week and basically took a hard look at the debt market at the treasury market looked in the eye and said i'm not going to do anything to help you and they didn't like it very much and so the tenure kept going at what point is there enough pain and what form does that pain take is it really financial conditions tightening i mean does it have to get to be two and a half three three and a half four well as i said think of the economy as being um like a an individual and their pulse is dropping when the pulse is dropping the doctors come running in with the stimulant and they inject stimulant now that the economy is rebounding he's um and inflation pressures are rebounding um there's not the same pressure to administer that stimulation when it happens when it becomes a problem is first the rising interest rates start hurting financial asset prices first typically they hurt bonds then they pass through and hurt stocks because still interest rates affect stocks and when that starts to affect stocks that's one thing maybe the stock market can correct 10 or 15 percent and the federal reserve can tolerate it when it goes beyond that and starts to affect the economy that's when you see the real trade-off have to search uh sir surface so that's what that looks like okay so let's play a little dickens here and and ask about the ghost of christmas future at the very end they say is this what has to be or can i still change it somewhat can we change it somewhat and could jay powell specifically change it or for that matter the the administrative government it's not an easy thing to change because what do you do spend less money and if you spend less money you give less checks out or you can't get people to easily earn more money and change that so it's a difficult dilemma and it's a particularly difficult dilemma that i think that you're going to see particularly the part is the late this year and beyond that because late this year you're probably going to see everything be a problem um you're going to probably see higher interest rates um because growth will be stronger inflation will be stronger and that you'll see probably there won't be enough demand on it so the thing to watch out for is a signal if this happens is that you see the need to uh buy uh bonds when the economy is strong and when inflation if you take um there's this year and then there's beyond this year there's um and there's the next few years um it's a problem because how we're going to spend money is a political issue a big political issue and we're going to have to sp and there's going to be too much spending and so that'll affect the value of the dollar and or interest rates ray as we speak the federal reserve is buying something like 120 billion dollars both in treasuries and mortgage bonds right now how can you justify that when they came out and said we're gonna have six and a half percent gdp growth this year the federal reserve uh would say we're just going above their inflation targets not by much if you look at indicators like the break-even inflation rate it's about two and a half percent and they would say not yet but the important thing to convey here on inflation is that there are two types of inflation okay i just want to make this clear we're used to one type of inflation which is when the economy is too hot there's a capacity constraint and when demand presses up against existing capacity prices rise unemployment rates are low and so forth there is a thing called a monetary inflation that's when you can have stagflation and that monetary inflation means that even when the economy weakens inflation rates rise because there's too much inflation and there's the move out of that so you're seeing the move out of bonds and and cash to move into other assets like stocks and other investment assets to some extent stocks gold other currencies bitcoin and the like um and but you can start to see a monetary inflation the real risk the big risk is of a monetary inflation which would come because there would be more sellers of bonds than there are buyers and the need for a lot of printing and money so ray you're recognized as one of the great investors of our age uh so give us some investment advice here given what your analysis of how this works what's going to happen given where what we're doing right now what's the best investment we heard jamie dimon just recently say he wouldn't touch a 10-year treasury bond with a 10-foot pole well i wouldn't touch a 10-year treasury pole then you fold it either um cash is trash in other words you it looks like a low risk thing to hold but it's not because when you because when you have a zero interest rate or in some case in foreign countries slightly negative interest rate and you have an inflation rate of two percent or higher you get taxed at a rate essentially you lose buying power at a rate of about two percent a year and that's a lot you lose a lot of buying power and so this is one of those environments you don't want to hold cash if anything maybe you borrow some cash and find something that has better than a zero interest rate in it or or something that has inflation if you bought the average thing which is inflation floating at two percent or more a year you'd be better off however you uh so then the other thing you need to do is diversify well okay so don't have cash and then you need diversification and the diversification should be currency diversification country diversification as well as asset class diversification

Channel: Bloomberg Markets and Finance

Views: 533,272

Keywords: Bloomberg

Id: -wPKUoLjKLo

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Richardin_CH]

He really did not want to mention Gold or Silver! These people are very scared.