(Bloomberg) — Good luck trying to find a debt investor who viewsnegative interest-rate policies in a positive light.
More often than not, words like “scared,” “cautious” and “worrisome” are used to describe reaction to a distortion of markets that is defying conventional investing logic.As BlackRock CEOLarry Fink put it in a recent article, “Let’s be clear: Negative interest rates are terrible.”
Proportion of Non-U.S. Sovereign BondsWith Negative Yields
46%
This fear and concern have taken on new urgency in the past few months after Japan jumped on the bandwagon with a negative- yield policy in January. While European central bankers first started experimenting with this tool in 2014, the volume of such notes has ballooned in recent months, now accounting for more than 46 percent of all non-U.S. sovereign bonds, according to an analysis by Jim Bianco, president of Bianco Research in Chicago.
“We’re making this leap into this unknown and we’re trusting that it’s all going to work out,” Bianco said in a phone conversation on Monday. He comparedthe negative-yield project to the creation of Frankenstein’s monster.
It’s as if central bankers are saying, “We’re doing it because we can,” Bianco said. “Well, should we? I don’t know.”
So what distortions are investors looking at that gets them all worked up?
First of all, a $23 trillion index of developed-market sovereign bonds isyielding less than 1 percent on average, near the record low of 0.75 percent in February, down from almost 4 percent in 2007. In some cases, funds are charging bigger management feesthan yields on the debt they own.
And then there’s the fact that Japanese investorsare getting so desperate to move their money out of their country that they’re paying big premiums to borrow U.S. dollars. Those payments have become so large that it’s actually become profitable for foreigninvestors to buy negative-yielding Japanese securities based on the currency swap, as Bloomberg News reporters Kevin BucklandandShigeki Nozawa pointed out. The consequences of an unraveling of this trade are unknown.
Meanwhile, investors are still trying to wrap their heads around even the concept of negative-yielding bonds. Theoretically, investors would lose money by holding this debt to maturity, but so far these notes have really just been bonds with zero or minimal coupons sold at a premium.
What governments haven’t done is go the extra step of sellingdebt with negative coupons because that opens all sorts of other questions, Bianco noted. For example, how would a government round up all the investors in its negative-yielding debt to collect their coupon payments? What happens if the investors fail to pay the borrowing government in a timely manner? Is that a default?
The Federal Reserve has been looking at negative-yielding rates but has demonstrated little appetite for the measure in the world’s biggest economy. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi hintedlast week that rates in that region may have reached their lower bound.Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has said there are no limits to how far central banks can ease monetary policy.
Perhaps all the nervous debt investors are wrong and these groundbreaking tactics will save the global economy from what would otherwise be a paralyzing downturn. But the onus is on central bankers, Kuroda in particular, to showdebt buyers how these policies will be beneficial.
While the Bank of Japan didn’t lowerthe nation’s interest rates further into negative territory this week, itmay do so later this year. Kurodasaid he doesnt have to wait to see the full impact of the negative rate before his next move.
For now, investors aren’t convinced that this unprecedented policy is helping in any way, and it’s hard to blame them.
