Low Rates: Dead or Alive?

It’s the duel of the newsweekly pundits! Is God dead, or is God alive? (And

by God, of course, I mean the era of low interest rates.) Put Justin

Fox clearly in the atheist

camp:

Something with far more impact on most Americans’ lives than a stock-market

correction has already happened.

That something is the close of a remarkable era of easy money. Cheap credit

helped fuel the stock bubble at the end of the past millennium and almost

entirely fueled the real estate boom of the first years of this millennium.

It kept us spending through the tough years that followed the stock market’s

collapse, and it allowed the Bush Administration to finance big budget deficits

without strain. Easy money also helped enable the rise of private equity as

a major economic force.

Now, though, it’s history.

Meanwhile, BusinessWeek’s Michael Mandel is still preaching

the gospel, armed with the power of the Market Bunny of Doom. (You’re just

going to have to click through to understand what I’m talking about there.)

"It’s still a low-rate world," says Mandel, with the 10-year Treasury

at 5.02%, just 29 basis points above its level when he wrote a cover

story headlined "It’s a Low, Low, Low-Rate World: Why money may stay

cheap longer than you think".

Can it be that both esteemed columnists are right? That God, a bit like Schrödinger’s

cat, can be both alive and dead at the same time? I think so.

The thing to realize is that even though rates are low, credit

is getting tighter. It’s a replay, in much milder form, of the flight to quality

we saw in 1998. Private equity shops are finding

it harder to raise cheap debt, because that debt was not priced in accordance

with its underlying credit risk for the past couple of years. But if you look

at risk-free interest rates, they show no signs of going up very much. In fact,

they might even go down if risk-averse investors start rotating out of structured

credit and into more traditional safe havens. Asset-backed triple-As might not

be junk, as Floyd Norris’s headline

today would have you believe, but they’re certainly not as safe as Treasuries.

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