No, No, This Time They Mean It

I thought he might wait a while longer given how things have played out. I guess not. Bill Gross, the former “bond king” at PIMCO, was back to advertising his position that the great bond bull market of the past quarter century is finished. In a tweet from his new employer Janus (h/t ZeroHedge) it seems there is no level for long UST yields he can’t hate. This time, it’s the 10-year crossing the 2.50% threshold for the sixth time since Reflation #3 started in the second half of 2016.

There has sprung up a cottage industry standing at the ready to shout BOND ROUT!!! at each and every uptick in longer-dated UST yields. The godfather of that business has been Bill Gross, consistently, which is not a good start as far as credibility might be concerned.

In May 2015, during the “transitory” rise in UST yields in between Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the “rising dollar”, Gross was again everywhere with the same message:

The bull market “supercycle” for stocks and bonds is approaching an end, as the unconventional monetary policies that have bolstered asset prices since the financial crisis are running out, widely followed investor Bill Gross said on Monday.

That came almost exactly two years after one of his most widely followed proclamations (May 2013), one that for a few months anyway appeared to have some small chance of actually coming true (Reflation #2).

Bill Gross said the three-decade bull run in bonds ended last week when the 10-year Treasury yield hit 1.67%, in his latest attempt to call the top in a market whose buoyancy has been aided by central-bank policy and long questioned by skeptical investors.

As early as February 2011, Mr. Gross had emptied PIMCO’s Total Return fund of all its US government debt holdings in seeing a global economic recovery. At that time he had claimed the impending end of QE2 (June 2011) would be a “d-day” for the bond market (by which he meant hugely negative for bond prices, thus rising yields). The mechanics are correct, meaning actual growth would be bad for bonds, forgetting that recovery was left in the hands of people like Ben Bernanke (he of the “global savings glut” ridiculousness).