The Shadows Of The Bond Market’s Past, Part II

This is the continuation of The Shadows of the Bond Market’s Past, Part I.  If you haven’t read part I, you will need to read it.  Before I start, there is one more thing I want to add regarding 1994-5: the FOMC used signals from the bond markets to give themselves estimates of expected inflation.  Because of that, the FOMC overdid policy, because the dominant seller of Treasuries was not focusing on the economy, but on hedging mortgage bonds.  Had the FOMC paid more attention to what the real economy was doing, they would not have tightened so much or so fast.  Financial markets are only weakly representative of what the real economy is doing; there’s too much noise.

All that said, in 1991 the Fed also overshot policy on the other side in order to let bank balance sheets heal, so let it not be said that the Fed only responds to signals in the real economy.  (No one should wonder who went through the financial crisis that the Fed has an expansive view of its mandate in practice.)

October 2001

2001 changed America.  September 11th led to a greater loosening of credit by the FOMC in order to counteract spreading unease in the credit markets.  Credit spreads were widening quickly as many lenders were unwilling to take risk at a time where times were so unsettled.  The group that I led took more risk, and the story is told here.  The stock market had been falling most of 2001 when 9/11 came.  When the markets reopened, it fell hard, and rallied into early 2002, before falling harder amid all of the scandals and weak economy, finally bottoming in October 2002.

The rapid move down in the Fed funds rate was not accompanied by a move down in long bond yields, creating a very steep curve.  There were conversations among analysts that the banks were healthy, though many industrial firms, like automobiles were not.  Perhaps the Fed was trying to use housing to pull the economy out of the ditch.  Industries that were already over-levered could not absorb more credit from the Fed.  Unemployment was rising, and inflation was falling.