Friday, April 10, 2015

Can we fit 2 trillion in debt rollovers into the Ten year TIPS market?

Investors have an estimated risk budget that accounts for price distortion.  The risk is independent of the mix of bonds offered to insure against it.

Here is a graph stolen from Market Realist. Ten year inflation adjusted bond sold by Treasury come to about $250 billion a year, less than 15% of the total debt sales needed to rollover .just the $12 trillion in public debt (not including social security).  The term structure of the US debt is about six years.

The total debt help is greater than our GDP, (including social security). What happens if most of the ten year bonds  went into the TIPS market over a  six year period?  Well, the TIPS market is an insurance policy to protect the normal ten year bond from inflation )or deflation) effects. So, the yield would simply rise to reflect the risk adjusted yields,  since all ten year bonds would then be protected.  But the most likely scenario is continued deflation over the next six years. No matter, the combined TIPS and constant maturity yields will contain risk adjustment. 
This is our effective interest rate, the total DC interest costs divided by the total debt, the red line. The blue line is the ten year rate. They match, and almost always match.  The green line is the real growth rate since 1970, the purple is nominal GDP.  Notice that only recently has the rate DC pays matched the real growth rate.

There is no way to fudge these figures.  They are taken straight from the FRED site. Currently, the last five years is the first time in 40 years that all these lines tend to converge. The implicit price deflator, which measures total inflation, is near zero as we see the real and nominal GDP converge.  It is not rising anytime soon, we are price accurate, inflation.deflation zero.

Brad Delong's point is that money is cheap, not so.  It is simply priced right at the moment, and will remain priced right when adjusted for price distortion.

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