How Dumb are T-Bond Investors?

aeliodon · Oct 21, 2007

I'm not one of those people that believe that real world inflation is 10%.

But even if real world inflation is 'only' 3% and the CPI states that it is 2% then that means CPI is understating inflation by 33%. And remember a lot depends on this number including: rent increases, social security payments, pension payments, wage increases, etc.

Now the joke is that CPI is a very accurate number so long as you don't use any food or energy. I remember an interview Maria did with Alan Greenspan who explained that the reason food and energy were excluded was that they assumed that the price fluctuations for food and energy were random and would always revert to the mean. He went on to say that he no longer believes that the price fluctuations are random and that we need to seriously reconsider excluding those numbers from the CPI.

aeliodon · Oct 21, 2007

The bottom line is that you are a complete idiot for 'investing' in an asset with a negative net yield. You're better off spending that money or trading it with leverage to earn a much higher return (assuming you know how to trade).

Its no surprise hedge funds, the derivatives, LBOs, etc. have been so hot recently - this is the smart money trying desperately to avoid the negative returns that the benchmark T-Bonds offer by taking on more risk.

Bowgett · Oct 21, 2007

Quote from aeliodon:

But even if real world inflation is 'only' 3% and the CPI states that it is 2% then that means CPI is understating inflation by 33%.
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CPI is 3% if you look at last week's BLS report.

http://www.bowgett.com

Bowgett · Oct 21, 2007

Quote from u21c3f6:

"How Dumb are T-Bond Investors?"
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Let's consider scenario like this:

Today's inflation 5%
10y bond yields 4%

Are you dumb if you buy it? Not at all. If inflation stays at 5% for first year - you lose 1% but if inflation drops to 2% for the next 9 years you get 2% real return which is not bad at all.

If you trade then of course all this doesn't matter because you are not going to hold it 10 years to maturity.

daddyeaux · Oct 21, 2007

decent summary of how CPI is political arithmetic

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20070930/news_1b30inflate.html

The Kin2 · Oct 21, 2007

Good article. The stupid T-Bond investors are allowing America to live beyond its means at their expense. Might as well continue until foregin central banks get the message.

aeliodon · Oct 21, 2007

great article

If you're like the average American, when you fill your car up at the gas pump, you're paying 84 percent more than you were in 2000, for an average price rise of 12 percent per year, according to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Many of the goods in your grocery basket â such as bread, eggs, orange juice, lettuce, tomatoes and ground chuck â have risen between 4 percent and 5 percent per year. The cost of electricity has risen 4 percent a year, while natural gas has risen 8 percent. And medical care has gone up about 5 percent a year, according to those same data.

Those rates of inflation â the kind of price rises that Americans feel on a daily basis â are often far higher than the official rate of inflation, which has increased an average of 2.6 percent per year since 2000.

Although the official inflation rate includes many items that decline in price, such as consumer electronics, discrepancies such as that lead many economists to question whether the government is undercounting the inflation rate.

âAny housewife can tell you that the official inflation rate is just not true,â said William Rutherford, a former Oregon state treasurer who runs an investment management firm near Portland.

âIf you don't drive or don't eat, maybe the CPI (consumer price index) has a little resemblance to your life. But I don't see how anybody with any ordinary experience could see the CPI is being accurate,â Rutherford said.

Rudolph-Riad Younes, a co-manager of the Julius Baer International Equity Fund, told Barron's magazine this month that if the government counted home prices and energy correctly, the real inflation rate would be between 7 percent and 10 percent.

John Williams, a Dartmouth-trained economist who works as a consultant for a number of Fortune 500 companies, says the only reason the inflation rate is so low is because the Reagan and Clinton administrations rewrote the way the CPI is calculated.

In his monthly online newsletter Shadow Government Statistics, Williams has painstakingly attempted to recreate the inflation rate using its older guidelines. Under his calculations, inflation is actually running at an annualized rate of 9.95 percent.

Steve Reed, an economist at the Bureau of Labor Standards, which maintains the CPI, conceded that âyou do get a lower (CPI) because of the changes we've made.â He said that today's CPI might be between half a point and a full point higher using the old methods of calculation.

âThe numbers (that Williams uses) don't jive with what I've seen,â Reed said.

He said the current CPI rate is accurate, but added that the government does have a vested benefit in keeping the rate lower.

Understating the inflation rate can save businesses and the government money, although it can be a burden on the elderly, people on fixed incomes or salaried workers, since wage raises, pension benefits, welfare payments, Social Security payments and other items are tied to the CPI.

âEven if the CPI was one percentage point higher, it could cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars,â Reed said.

Inflation is likely to spike further, thanks to the Federal Reserve, which last month pumped money into the economy to support an interest rate cut.

âSince the increased supply of money does not come from productivity and savings, there is no increase in goods and services to absorb the new money,â said Michael Pento, a market strategist with Delta Global Advisors in Huntington Beach. âAnd therein lies the problem: The result of an increased money supply without increases in productivity is higher prices. Inflation.â

One of the first major revisions to the CPI came in 1983, in Ronald Reagan's first term in the White House. One of Reagan's campaign themes was an attack on the inflation rate, which averaged more than 12 percent in the last two years of Jimmy Carter's presidency.

Inflation remained at 10 percent in 1981, Reagan's first year in office. Thanks to Fed Chairman Paul Volcker's restrictive monetary policies, it dropped to 6 percent the next year. But it took some changes to the method of counting inflation to get it to 3 percent in 1983.

Toward the end of the Clinton administration, the inflation rate was still 3 percent. But economists in the government and Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve said that was too high and once again changed the way inflation was calculated. In 1998, the first year after the recalculation, the CPI was cut in half to 1.6 percent â the lowest rate since 1965.

One change that draws criticism is the CPI's use of âsubstitutions.â

The consumer price index assumes that if prices get too high, consumers will start buying cheaper products. For instance, if steak gets too expensive, they will switch to ground beef.

As a result, when items in the CPI's basket of goods get too expensive, the weight that they are given in the index is lessened and more weight is put on cheaper substitutes. Naturally, that helps keep the CPI lower.

Williams said that such a move âviolates the original intent, purpose and concept of the CPI,â which was to measure the costs of the same goods year after year.

Reed disagreed. âWe're not substituting beef for chicken, or driving for flying,â he said. âThe weight of academic expertise would argue that what we did was right.â

Another factor that draws ire is the CPI's reliance on high-ticket items â DVD players, audio equipment, televisions. Six percent of the CPI is based on video and audio equipment, sporting goods, cameras and recreation, compared with 8 percent that is spent on food at home.

Critics say that the concentration on high-tech items â which typically decline in price over time â disguises the price rises in other areas. They also say that the CPI reflects upper-class tastes and expenses that might not catch the price hikes for poorer individuals.

âIf I'm not a terribly wealthy person, that might not reflect how I'm spending my money,â Reed said.

The mix of items in the CPI has left some critics scratching their heads.

Since the Reagan administration, for instance, the CPI costs for housing have been based on rental costs, rather than home ownership. As a result, between 2000 and 2006, when home prices were skyrocketing, the CPI showed a price rise of only 3.3 percent per year. Property tax payments, which typically rise with the value of a house, are not counted in the CPI.

âWe wanted to be out of the business of dealing with interest rates and interest expenditures,â Reed said. âThe true value is more accurately reflected in its rental value.â

The low growth rate in the CPI can have surprising consequences.

Over the past four years, for instance, the cost of construction materials rose 28 percent, while the CPI rose only about 13 percent.

When construction companies work on government projects â where contracts are typically tied to the CPI â they sometimes have to cut corners to make up for the fact that their supply costs are rising more than twice as fast as the inflation rate, said Kenneth Simonson, an economist for the Associated General Contractors.

John Browne, a former British parliamentarian who is now a financial commentator in Florida, said the low inflation rate also helped fuel the bubbles in dot-com stocks and real estate.

âThe great inflation lie enabled the banking system â first under Greenspan and now under Bernanke â to lend lots of money at rates that were sometimes below the rate of inflation,â Browne said. âIf you can borrow for less than inflation, you can buy anything, including assets like houses.â

Now that the housing bubble is bursting, Bernanke's response has been to inject more money into the economy, which economists fear will create more inflation.

Market strategist Pento says that even if the CPI doesn't show strong inflation now, other measures do, including this year's surges in the price of gold and the money supply.

âGold and the money supply are true inflationary indicators,â Pento said. âIf they're growing at that pace, inflation is at least in the upper single digits. At least.â

Pento warned that it is risky for the Federal Reserve to start cutting interest rates when inflation is running at such âvery dangerous levels.â

David Joy, chief market strategist for RiverSource Investment, said he worries that the latest interest rate cut means that âeventually, and possibly sooner now than otherwise, the Fed will be forced to deal with higher inflation, accelerating the day of reckoning and making it more painful.â
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aeliodon · Oct 21, 2007

So basically the SMART MONEY doesn't lend at 4-5% - they BORROW at 4-5%. Then the LEVERAGE it on assets that are growing faster that 4-5%.

US T-Bond investors are probably the DUMBEST MONEY out there. I exclude the Arabs, Chinese, and Japanese from this statement because they are getting fat trade surpluses in exchange for investing in T-Bonds.

BJL · Oct 21, 2007

yeah those dumb T-Bond investors looked really stupid last july/august and way back in 2001/2002.

kashirin · Oct 21, 2007

Quote from BJL:

Bit of double accounting if you use both inflation and devaluation ??
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check Canada, they have inflation_higher_ than USA and Canadian Dollar appreciated 25% from this year lows!