Loading ...What QE in the Eurozone will do is enable fiscal fraud in the peripheral countries and a further inflation of already lunatic valuations of sovereign debt. It is now an established fact that the Italian government, for example, cannot get out of its own way, and that its public debt is in a death spiral. Yet today the Italian 10-year is trading at a 1.9% yield because the fast money traders are happy to hold it on zero cost repo—- until the ECB takes it off their hands at an enormous windfall gain a few months down the road.
The above pictures are no more anomalous than today’s 35 bps yield on 10-year JGBs——the debt of a government which is hopelessly bankrupt and for which there is virtually not a single bid anywhere outside of the open market desk of the BOJ. Nor does it make any more sense than today’s heated rip on Wall Street based on the word “patient” at a point in the cycle where 71 months of free carry trade money has already inflated financial asset values to the nose-bleed section of history.
In short, the central banks of the world are embroiled in a group-think mania so extreme and irrational that it puts one in mind of the spasm of witchcraft trials that erupted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony nearly four centuries ago. As a practical matter, this mania amounts to a race to the currency bottom and the final extinguishment of the price discovery mechanism in every financial market on the planet.
Flying blind, the financial markets are thus bubbling–in the delirium phase—-like never before. That is, until they don’t.