 "Barack Obama")
Barack Obama will go down in history as having sold more Treasuries and at lower interest rates than any US president. He’s also leaving a debt burden that threatens to hamstring his successor.
Obama’s administration benefited from some unprecedented advantages that helped it grapple with the longest recession since the 1930s. The Federal Reserve kept rates at historically low levels, partly by becoming the single biggest holder of Treasuries. The US could also rely on insatiable demand from international investors, led by China deploying its hoard of reserves. Global buyers added $3 trillion of Treasuries, doubling ownership to a record.
Now those tailwinds are turning around. The Fed is telegraphing more hikes at a time when interest costs on the nation’s bonds are already the highest in five years. The government’s marketable debt has more than doubled under Obama’s stewardship, to a record of almost $14 trillion. And the deficit is expanding again, after narrowing for four straight years, just as overseas holdings of Treasuries are shrinking at the fastest pace since 2013.
“We’ve really got ourselves into a pickle here,” said Edward Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research in New York, who’s been following the bond market since the 1970s. “All these years we’ve been kicking the can down the road, and suddenly we’re seeing a brick wall.”
The deteriorating backdrop for the world’s biggest bond market risks spoiling the plans of Tuesday’s winner, whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Both have promised measures to foster growth and create jobs. The prospect of the three-decade bull market in bonds approaching a turning point has implications for everything the candidates want to tackle, from infrastructure spending to national security to tax cuts.
Also Read
In some ways, Obama lucked out. The Fed bought $1.7 trillion of Treasuries from 2009 to 2014, soaking up the equivalent of a quarter of the increase in debt outstanding. While its securities purchases helped support the bond market, the era of extraordinarily low rates also crimped returns for fixed-income investors. Treasuries have earned about three per cent annually on average since 2009, the skimpiest since at least the Reagan administration, according to Bank of America data.
Benchmark 10-year yields have averaged about 2.5 per cent during Obama’s terms, compared with about 4.4 per cent under his predecessor, George W Bush. Yields fell even as the economy recovered from the financial crisis and added jobs for six straight years.
Stocks fared better than Treasuries: the S&P 500 Index generated a 15 per cent annualised return under Obama, compared with an average of about 10 per cent from 1980 through 2008.
America’s economic expansion hasn’t kept the debt burden from consuming an ever-greater share of the nation’s financial resources, promising to complicate the next president’s decisions. Though the deficit shrank as crisis-era spending ended, debt levels have still increased to pay for rising entitlement outlays. In FY16, the Treasury shelled out $433 billion in interest payments on the obligations, an amount that will swell as rates rise, as the Congressional Budget Office projects.
A measure known as net interest cost, which balances what the government receives in interest payments against what it pays on debt, will nearly triple by 2026, to $712 billion, the CBO forecasts. The expense would more than double as a share of the economy, to 2.6 per cent.
Bloomberg
