Controlling The Implosion Of The Biggest Bond Bubble In History
Wolf Richter
ZeroHedge.com
06/23/2013
In theory, the Fed could continue to print money and buy Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, or even pure junk, at the current rate of $85 billion a month until the bitter end. But the bitter end would be unpleasant even for those that the Fed represents – and now they’re speaking up publicly.
“Savers have paid a huge price in this recovery,” was how Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf phrased it on Thursday – a sudden flash of empathy, after nearly five years of Fed policies that pushed interest rates on savings accounts and CDs below inflation, a form of soft confiscation, of which he and his TBTF bank were prime beneficiaries. That interest rates were rising based on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s insinuation of a taper was “a good thing,” he told CNBC. “We need to get back to normal.”
A week earlier, it was Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein: “Eventually interest rates have to normalize,” he said. “It’s not normal to have 2% rates.”
They weren’t worried about savers – to heck with them. They weren’t worried about inflation either. They were worried about the system, their system. It might break down if the bond bubble were allowed to continue inflating only to implode suddenly in an out-of-control manner. It would threaten their empires. That would be the bitter end.
Andy Haldane, Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England, put it this way: “We’ve intentionally blown the biggest government bond bubble in history.” The bursting of that bubble was now a risk he felt “acutely,” and he saw “a disorderly reversion” of yields as the “biggest risk to global financial stability” [my take… Biggest Bond Bubble In History Is Turning Into Carnage].
The Rest…HERE
