What does that mean? Your selling off stocks?
I heard last night that China's economy is slowing down and Japan's market dropped about 7% overnight. Do you think it's started?
A post I made back on 3rd of May... Japan is now printing money, almost as fast as we are...
Meaningful to global economic and financial market outcomes ahead will be the Bank of Japan monetary extravaganza of a generation that lies directly in front of us. Will Japan be so lucky as to have little to no headline inflationary impact while printing historic amounts of money? Or could it be different this time relative to the US monetary and inflationary experience of the last four to five years? Although not given much recognition amongst the high fiving over recent Japanese equity market levitation, there is one critical difference between the backdrop against which the Fed has operated compared to the landscape the BOJ faces.
If we step back and take a view of the current cycle, a keynote fingerprint character point of Fed monetary policy is that it has played out in the direct aftermath of a US credit cycle bust. In terms of the timing and sequencing of potential cycles of inflation, this is important to keep in mind. In one sense what the Fed has sponsored with its own balance sheet growth has simply offset in magnitude balance sheet contraction in other sectors of the US economy, probably none more dramatic than the damage we’ve seen done to the asset backed markets over the last half decade.
Key point being, the BOJ ahead will be operating in no such environment of immediate prior period credit contraction. The credit contraction, if you will, in Japan already occurred long ago. So if we think about Japan as a total system, BOJ money printing will be expanding the total balance sheet as there is no offsetting individual sector balance sheet contraction of consequence.
As a bit of a visual proxy, let’s have a look at Japanese bank loans outstanding since the early 1990’s. Bank loan contraction bottomed eight years ago. And as you can see, on a rate of change basis, year over year Japanese bank lending is in positive territory where it has spent precious little time if we look across a number of decades.
As of the moment, the US and Japan find themselves in different credit cycle bust aftermath time sequences. And so we should expect similar inflationary outcomes under historic monetary policy experiments? I think not. Of course the second large and differentiating factor so far is relative currency movement. We all know what has happened to the Yen over the last five months. The US dollar never experienced this type of decline anywhere over the current 2009 to present cycle. Bottom line being, we should not be surprised to see a quite different outcome with inflationary pressures in Japan than has been the recent case in the US under similar monetary extremes.
Finally, as investors we need to think about and monitor whether actions of the BOJ could transmit inflationary pressures globally, much as the actions of the US Fed have done, especially in emerging markets. We already know financial asset inflation, especially stock prices, is a key target of BOJ policy. Without question, additional Japanese capital moving out of the Yen will impact global equities (HARD). But credit markets are the key watch point as they will price in potential accelerating inflationary pressures long before equities. In the US, it’s the TIPS implied inflation breakeven rates that I continue to monitor. The US Fed began its latest round of monetary largesse at the highest implied breakeven rates of the current cycle. We’re just not that far from breaking out to “new highs” not only for the current cycle, but for the prior decade. What scares me is the Fed might just start believing the hype, that things are improving..