Riccardo Rebonato, Professor of Finance, EDHEC Business School and EDHEC-Risk Institute factor investing fixed income lead expert, EDHEC Business School is specialist in interest rate risk modelling with applications to bond portfolio management and fixed-income derivatives pricing. He comments on the latest FED's meeting.
The Fed began producing its ‘dot plot’ (otherwise known as ‘the blue dots’) in January 2012 to give clear guidance to the market of where the members of the Monetary Committee saw the more likely value for the Fed funds at different horizons in the future.
For short horizons, it is not too surprising that these projections may change, as information about the speed of the recovery, inflationary pressures, unemployment and other macrofinancial variables is progressively revised.
The ‘last blue dot’ should be different. This last point represents the projection over the ‘very long run’ of the most likely level for the Fed Funds – as made by the very people in charge to set the rate! Barring truly secular in nature, this quantity should be very stable, as it reflects a combination of expectations about long-term inflationary pressures and real growth in the economy.
In reality, as Fig 1 shows, it has been anything but. When the Fed began communicating its monetary intentions via the dot plot (as recently as January 2012, ie, almost exactly 8 years ago), it expected the Fed funds in the distant future to be as high as 4.12%. At the last Committee meeting, the same long-term expectation of the Fed funds was 2.54%: more than 150 basis points lower.
At every single meeting, the expectation has either remained unchanged, or has drifted lower. It has done so by changing (always downwards) far more than the dispersion of opinions (which has a very stable standard deviation of about 30 basis points) would justify. What has been happening?
Make no mistake: when monetary economists predict a future nominal ‘short rate’ as low as 2.50%, they must either believe that the Fed will not be able to prevent a collapse in inflation (which can only be associated with difficult economic conditions); or that the real rate of growth will be extremely low; or both. A far cry from what the equity valuations seem to imply at the moment. Either the economists or the S&P500 must be wrong.
With such a dramatic fall in expectations, one could be forgiven for expecting that risk premia should have widened. After all, the nominal yield that we see should be the sum of expectations (that have fallen) and risk premia. Hardly so. The 10-year nominal yield, as of this writing, is around 160 basis points. Suppose that the expected inflation is 2.00% (below the official target), and that there is no compensation for inflation risk. The sum of the real rate and the real-rate risk premium is therefore around minus 50 basis points. Even a rather gloomy projection for 10-year real growth of 1% forces the risk premium to be a negative -150 basis points. How can this make sense?
The only way to rationalize this extremely low value is to remember that a positive risk premium is compensation for being paid well in good states of the world, and poorly when you would need the money. Conversely, a negative risk premium attaches to assets that pay well when you feel poor, and vice versa. As we move beyond 10 years of almost uninterrupted rise in the equity market, the value of the ‘Greenspan (now Powell) put’ is becoming more and more keenly felt. If you add in the complications of an election year, and a US President who is happy to lean on the Chairman of the Fed as robustly as few Presidents have done in recent memory, and it is easy to see that the market is betting the farm on the Fed cavalry coming to the rescue at the next serious bump in the road.
If looked at in this light, the 150 basis points of negative risk compensation are the risk premium investors seem to be willing to pay to offset their equity risk. For this to be a ‘good insurance price’, the Treasury hedge has to work close to perfection. The room for error that current yield levels leave is extremely thin.
Riccardo Rebonato is Professor of Finance at EDHEC Business School. He was previously Global Head of Rates and FX Research at PIMCO. He also served as Head of Front Office Risk Management and Head of Clients Analytics, Global Head of Market Risk and Global Head of Quantitative Research at Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). Prior joining RBS, he was Head of Complex IR Derivatives Trading and Head of Head of Derivatives Research at Barclays Capital. Riccardo Rebonato has served on the Board of ISDA (2002-2011), and has been on the Board of GARP since 2001. He was a visiting lecturer in Mathematical Finance at Oxford University (2001-2015). He is the author of several books, in particular having published extensively on interest rate modelling, risk management, and most notably books on SABR/LIBOR Market Model pricing of interest rate derivatives, as well as on the use of Bayesian nets for stress testing and asset allocation. He has published articles in international academic journals such as Quantitative Finance, the Journal of Derivatives and the Journal of Investment Management, and has made frequent presentations at academic and practitioner conferences. He holds a doctorate in Nuclear Engineering (Universita' di Milano) and a PhD in Science of Materials (Condensed Matter Physics, Stony Brook University, NY).
