UBS on What's Driving Treasury Yields
From ZeroHedge:
The 10Y Treasury yield has jumped nearly 130bp from its low point in
early May. Given the tight ranges and low volatility of yields during
the most of QE era, this kind of move in just over 3 months seemed
stunning to some investors. Consequently, the question that has come up
often recently is: what has been driving Treasury yields?
As UBS' Boris Rjavinski notes, several years ago a rate strategist would give you a straightforward and predictable answer: inflationary expectations, economic growth projections, and current and future monetary policy.
The “monetary policy” part of the answer would likely simple deal with
the path of the key short-term policy rate. Terms such as “quantitative
easing”, “communication policy”, “thresholds and triggers” were foreign
to bond investors during the era of pre-credit crisis innocence.
But now, as Rjavinksi notes, central banks and politics in the driver seat. Volatility will remain elevated
as we await key messages from the Fed in September, and U.S. political
calendar will start to heat up as we approach the “drop-dead” dates to
fund the government and extent the dent ceiling.
Via UBS,
Central banks and politics in the driver seat
The relative importance of these key Treasury yield drivers has flipped upside-down in the past couple of years,
as central banks have assumed the key role. Through a host of
unconventional monetary policy tools, such as zero interest rate regime,
multiple rounds of QE purchases, new communication policy, and
unprecedented transparency regarding future policy actions central banks
have effectively crowded out the effects of economy and inflation.
Having brought its short-rate benchmark to zero, the Fed has boldly
moved out on the curve directly targeting longer maturity yields.
Politicians and policymakers have closely followed the Fed as the next important Treasury market driver. Fights
over government borrowing limit, budget deficit, taxation policy, as
well as pre-election sentiment swings and major political developments
in the eurozone have affected government bond yields in a major way.
With central banks and political risk driving the bus,
traditional factors have been pushed down to the bottom of our short
list. Figure 1 below provides a good illustration of these
developments, as it shows evolution of 10y Treasury yield relative to
some of the key developments in the recent years.
Prior to mid-2008 the 10y yield and the UBS US Growth Surprise Index have tracked quite closely,
generally trending in the same direction and matching each other’s
turning points. However, it had drastically changed starting in late
2008. The first big divergence occurred when the QE1 asset purchase
program was announced by the Fed. While the Growth Surprise index
continued to drop for a while, Treasury yields had turned higher on
expectations of higher future growth and inflation, thanks to the huge
amount of monetary stimulus. The politics had also played a role, as the
Obama administration rolled out a very large fiscal stimulus package.
Figure 1 shows that as the effects of the QE1 and the fiscal
stimulus started to fade in 2010, the two lines began to converge again.
10y yield and the Growth Surprise index even managed to march upward
together in the early stages of the QE2 in late 2010. However, the
firepower of Fed’s balance sheet through ongoing QE2 bond purchases
forced yields lower in the spring of 2011, even as the Growth Surprise
index kept going up for a while. Rising stress in the eurozone related
to Greece further strengthened bid for Treasuries....MORE
