The prevailing fiction pervading Wall Street right now is that economic growth is picking up in a sustainable fashion and that interest rates will merely rise slowly. Then, soon level off at historically low levels. In other words, they are selling a fairytale; and a dangerous one at that.
This premise is blatantly false. The Fed’s reverse QE program, Government debt levels and Nominal Gross Domestic Product, all dictate that the 10-year Note Yield should be now swiftly on its way to at least 4.5%, from the artificial level of 1.4% found in July of 2016.
Therefore, there is no perfect outcome for the market and the economy and no safe path for the Fed to normalize rates. If they stop raising rates, or just move too slowly, inflation picks up even more steam, and long rates will mean revert rather quickly by rising another few hundred basis points from where they are now. On the other hand, keep on hiking short-term rates, according to the Fed’s dot plot there will be three to four increases this year and several more scheduled for 2019–along with the draining a couple of trillion dollars from the balance sheet–and the yield curve will invert much sooner rather than later.
In either case, a recession, along with an epoch stock market crash is destined to occur…and there is no way of avoiding that inevitability. Such are the ramifications of counterfeiting trillions of dollars to push interest rates into the basement, recreating asset bubbles and force-feeding more debt on to an already debt-disabled economy.
The truth is that debt and deficits have already risen to extremely daunting levels. And those levels are especially frightening when viewed in relation to our phony, ZIRP-inflated GDP. But when combined with interest rates that have been manipulated into a gargantuan bubble, the situation becomes downright catastrophic; and ensures that the eventual interest rate normalization process will be an incredibly chaotic mess.
When the current implosion of bond prices slams into the record bubble in equities, it won’t be a pretty scenario. At nearly one and a half times the underlying economy, the market value of stocks is at the most preposterous level in history.
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