August 31, 2015
Robert Samuelson has a column this morning on the impact of globalization on national economies. At one point the piece tells readers:
“Globalization has also punished the United States. From 2004 to 2006, the Federal Reserve raised short-term interest rates by 4.25 percentage points, believing that long-term rates on bonds and mortgages — which affect the economy more — would follow. They didn’t. If they had, would the 2008-2009 financial crisis have been avoided or softened? Then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke later argued that a ‘global savings glut’ of dollars — flooding into bonds — kept long-term rates down.”
This comment leaves out a very important part of the story. Foreign central banks, most importantly China’s, were buying up massive amounts of U.S. government bonds in this period. Their goal was to prop up the dollar against their currencies so that they could continue to run large trade surpluses and leaving the United States with large trade deficits. The trade deficit peaked at just under 6.0 percent of GDP ($1.1 trillion in today’s economy) in 2005.
Since the central banks were buying up long-term bonds it is not surprising that long-term interest rates stayed low in spite of the Fed’s decision to raise short-term rates. The impact of the foreign central banks policy on long-term interest rates is the same as the recent Fed policy of quantitative easing. Markets don’t care if bonds are purchased by the Central Bank of China or Japan or the Fed, it has the same impact on bond prices and interest rates.
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