EDITOR’S COMMENT: I thought these comments were especially timely, since the Federal Reserve announced earlier today that it was pledging to keep interest rates low through the end of 2014, an extremely long period of time. Additionally, the Fed said that it is “prepared to provide further monetary accommodation if employment is not making sufficient progress towards our assessment of its maximum level, or if inflation shows signs of moving further below its mandate-consistent rate.”

The main conclusions to be drawn from these statements are that the Fed is not, at this time, looking for any dramatic growth here in the U.S over this time frame, and that savers/investors will continue to be paid negative real rates of return, after adjusting for the impact of inflation. This is NOT a healthy monetary situation, as discussed in this article, which concludes “It also means that the pension crisis will continue to worsen, and that the already dire situation for retirees will continue to worsen, with implications for burdens on various levels of government as well as for consumer spending.”

By Eugene Linden

Zero interest rate policies dominate the world’s largest economies — a situation that’s contributing to the worsening pension crisis, the unnaturally buoyant equity markets, the need for quantitative easing, and even the bull market in gold.

Eclipsed by Europe’s sovereign debt agony has been one overriding, but overlooked factor that will increasingly distort economies and the financial markets as 2012 unfolds: the Zero-Interest-Rate-Policy. ZIRP is now as encompassing and pervasive as the air we breathe, and this in itself is unprecedented.

Historically, examples of ZIRP are few and far between – and usually very brief – but now ZIRP and near-ZIRP dominate the interest rate policies for most of the world’s largest economies. We’re in uncharted territory. More worrisome, the longer an economy embraces ZIRP, the harder it is to extricate itself. In fact, as far as I can tell, no one has exited extended ZIRP intact and voluntarily. Some, like Kyle Bass, argue that once a nation gets trapped in ZIRP for an extended period, the only escape is through debt restructuring. Others say war.

ZIRP has been the policy of the United States since 2008; it has been the policy of Japan for most of the past two decades, and it is becoming the policy of the ECB, at least in terms of ECB short-term funding. Currently, over two trillion dollars of US debt is paying zero or near zero interest, as is trillions more debt in Japan and elsewhere. This unprecedented situation has contributed to the worsening pension crisis, the unnaturally buoyant equity markets, the rescue of US banks, the need for quantitative easing, and even the bull market in gold. It has spectacularly failed in its originally trumpeted mission to restart lending to the consumer (the money multiplier is still near all-time lows). And now, central bankers are discovering that ZIRP is a poisoned chalice.

The problem is as simple and intractable as human nature. So long as there’s a market willing to buy a government’s debt (or buyers who can be forced to buy said debt), ZIRP offers the promise of vast new funds with virtually no increase in carrying costs. If the problem is short-term liquidity, the theory is that ZIRP buys the time necessary to restart growth. If the problem is solvency, however, ZIRP is viewed as an alternative to a painful restructuring. In that case (e.g. Japan), the rotten debts remain on the books of the banks, hobbling the lending that is necessary for the economic growth that will enable the central bankers to wean the economy off the drug.

Faced with little or no economic growth and anemic tax receipts, central bankers keep pumping out new debt. When Japan started with ZIRP, its debt to GDP ratio was 40%. In 2003 it was 93%. Now it’s 234%, and Japan’s aging buyers (Japanese purchase 95% of the country’s new debt) are starting to spend for their retirement, rather than save. Across the Pacific in the US, debt-to-GDP was 57% in 2000; in 2008, when the US adopted ZIRP, debt to GDP was about 68%; in the three years since it has risen to 99%.

The US did begin to approach ZIRP earlier in the last decade when Alan Greenspan drastically cut rates to 1% to restart a frozen credit market. That was a defensible response to a liquidity crisis, but Greenspan kept the policy too long, fueling the housing and credit bubbles, and setting the stage for the crash of 2008. ZIRP is like a opium-based painkiller. It might get you through a crisis (if there isn’t the political will for a restructuring), but chronic use is addictive and debilitating. The mechanics of the addiction are simple: the more debt-burdened an economy becomes, the more additional debt it needs for growth, and the less growth we get for the increment. This is termed debt saturation. A dollar of new debt in 1960 produced about 90 cents of additional GDP. That ratio turned negative in the last couple of years.

At the same time, to keep the interest burden of debt from spiraling out of the control, nations are tempted to shift to shorter duration. This has the effect of leaving a country ever more vulnerable should central bankers be forced to raise interest rates. Interest payments are now just 1% of GDP and 5.7% % of US expenditures, actually fairly low (though, even at these levels, interest chews up 14% of each tax dollar collected). In fact, the interest bill for US debt is just 4.6% higher than it was in 2007 and virtually the same as in 2008 despite the fact that the debt has exploded since those years. The average rate the US pays on debt is about 3%, and is coming down as roughly half the debt gets rolled each year.

But we’ve reached a place where even a historically modest rise – say 2% — would start gobbling huge chunks of tax revenue to the point where tax revenues are flat to declining. The longer ZIRP continues, the more onerous the cost of raising interest rates. Past some unknown point, ZIRP begets more ZIRP. We may be past that point as the fed has said ZIRP will be the US policy into 2013. If the natural buyers get wary, there is always the Fed to buy the debt. What we saw earlier this year was that even as the Chinese balked at buying treasuries (down from 47% of new issuance in 2006 to 5% in 2010), the Fed stepped in through quantitative easing to buy the lion’s share of new debt. That program ended in July, but then, in the nick of time, the European sovereign debt crisis went critical, and prompted foreign buyers to show up (and the FED is still in there as it reinvests proceeds as securities roll off its balance sheet). Should the flight to safety abate, it’s highly likely QE will resume if only because this is a treadmill from which there is no escape (a recognition of which may have played into the historic S&P downgrade of US debt).

How long can this continue? In Japan it has continued for nearly 20 years, thanks to a thrifty population with $17 trillion in savings. But even that party is approaching endgame. Its massive debt has already been downgraded, now Aa3, but it still pays less than Germany, with an average interest expense of 1.12% this year. Japan’s problem is that its aging savers are becoming spenders (the savings rate dropped to 3% this year) and the population has dropped 3% in the past few years as well. So it has fewer, cash-flow negative citizens to absorb ever more debt. Long term rates and dollar swaptions have already started to edge up, and, having run huge deficits since the inauguration of ZIRP in 1993, Japan has little capacity to endure an interest rate hike. According to Kyle Bass, who analogizes a Japan short to the subprime play in 2007-08, a 100 basis point rise in debt service costs would consume an additional 25% of tax revenue. Disregard any talk that might come from Japan about raising interest rates, it simply cannot happen.

ZIRP turns out to be a trap that ensnares everybody, and not just the countries that adopt the policy. During a briefing an economist from Tejas made the comment that once a major economy adopts ZIRP, Central Banks all over the world lose control of their monetary policy. I was puzzled about the mechanics of that until I came across an example from Israel.

The transmission mechanism is the carry trade.  Starting in 2009, despite its precarious geopolitical situation, Israel saw its currency strengthen as investors came in searching for yield. According to Michael Pomerleano writing in the Financial Times, as the shekel strengthened against the dollar, its central bank was forced to intervene to buy Shekel’s lower interest rates and weaken the currency, even though the bank actually wanted to raise rates to combat alarming inflation in the housing sector.

While foreign money might be enticed to borrow in ZIRP countries and invest elsewhere, domestic institutions like pension funds and insurers are driven to search for yield to meet the estimated returns embedded in their models. A pension fund using an 8% expected return is going to find itself ever deeper underwater if it is stuck in fixed income in such an interest rate regime. This is one reason hedge funds haven’t gone out of fashion even though their returns have been more dismal than not since 2008. The search for yield has also underpinned the recovery of the High Yield market since  the crash. ZIRP may have saved pensions and insurers from an immediate crash in 2008, but it has subjected them to a merciless squeeze ever since.

Individual savers find themselves caught between embracing risk and spending principal. This is not the choice retiring baby boomers expected, particularly since most were under-saved for retirement even as other safety nets develop holes.

Other unintended consequences have to do with the freeze up in interbank lending. With short term yields virtually non-existent, there is no incentive for the big banks to use funds in excess reserves to lend to smaller banks. Why take any risk in interbank lending when your reward is virtually the same as holding cash. The lack of liquidity in the interbank market in turn disrupts the forward market for FX futures (according to Stamford economist Ronald McKinnon), and this in turn makes lenders less willing to back letters of credit for exporters – something that happened in the midst of the crisis in 2008.

There have been positive benefits of ZIRP, including cheap debt for those companies lucky enough to have access to the credit markets. Most notably, has been the relationship between ZIRP’s evil twin, quantitative easing, and the buoyant stock market. Nothing makes this point as starkly as a simple chart of the S&P in 2011. The first half year was relatively smooth under the protective umbrella of quantitative easing, while the second half looks like the EKG of a heart attack (see below).

Ben Bernanke is a brilliant economist, and I’m certain that he is more aware than I am of the pitfalls of employing ZIRP for an extended period. So why did he do it? My guess is that he went to ZIRP because he felt he had no choice. In 2008 he was caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he desperately needed to funnel money and a yield curve to the banks. All well and good, but the defensible solution–the course taken by Sweden in 1993–would have been to saddle the taxpayers with these costs only after the banks’ shareholders and debt holders had shared the pain. As one pundit put it: a nation needs banks, but a nation doesn’t need these particular banks.

So again, why didn’t Bernanke recognize that? A few people know, and they haven’t been saying. One suspicion is that our major creditors in Asia and the Mideast were also huge holders of bank shares and debt and threatened mutually assured destruction if they were forced to write down these holdings. Another, simpler explanation, is that US pension funds were also huge holders of shares and debt of the banks as well as of mortgage-backed securities, and that an omnibus write down of all these assets would cause a pension crisis the likes of which this country had never seen.

ZIRP, in concert with the various bailout programs and the stimulus, offered a way to buy time, and that’s what happened. But what happens next?

Right now, this question is still at the edges of the radar. When ZIRP is discussed at all, it is in the context of inflation fears. Indeed, inflation is one way a debt burden might be reduced, but when that day comes, soaring interest rates will force defaults and restructurings. The Goldilocks solution is to grow our way to exit. Given that both governments and households are still burdened with trillions in excess debt (as well as the issue of debt saturation), it is difficult to imagine how we could finance that growth even if an obvious and politically viable path to growth presented itself. This suggests that we will do what Japan has done and string out ZIRP until something – internal or external – forces a change.

This means that the economy and the markets will remain in this surreal context of ZIRP for an indeterminate period, even as awareness grows that there will be no controlled ending for this halcyon period. It means that there will be further episodes of quantitative easing, either overt or by stealth.

This money will likely flow into equity markets as it has in the past. It also means that government institutions will likely be major players in interbank lending for the indefinite future and that consumer lending will be constrained for the indefinite future. And with major economies printing money to maintain the illusion that there is a market for their sovereign debt, it means that commodities will continue to find a bid, even as the global economy contracts (though there will be dramatic downdrafts on specific events such as noticeable cooling in China).

It also means that the pension crisis will continue to worsen, and that the already dire situation for retirees will continue to worsen, with implications for burdens on various levels of government as well as for consumer spending.

And then, of course, ZIRP, though encompassing, is but one of the factors that will be influencing our markets in the coming months. The unresolved sovereign debt issues in the EU, a cooling China economy, and a host of US issues, also cloud the future. For the moment ZIRP hovers at the edges of the mindspace of a financial community focused on Europe and other critical issues. But, make no mistake, we’re in unknown territory as far as knowing at what constitute’s ZIRP’s event horizon, the point beyond which there is no escape. Has Japan crossed that point? Is the US approaching it? One hopes that we don’t discover this answer in retrospect. (my emphasis)

By Eugene Linden for Minyanville

By permission Minyanville

www.minyanville.com