Why the bond market should be given the benefit of the doubt

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Here are two reasons that the bond market’s rout has gone so far — that it will rally in coming months, columnist ​​MktwHulbert writes.

If that happens, it certainly would be good news to beleaguered retirees and near-retirees who have an outsize portfolio allocation to bonds. As they already know all too well, long-term bonds have lost just as much as the stock market this year—and therefore failed to provide conservative investors with any protection against the bear market on Wall Street.There are several reasons to believe that bonds’ bear market has gone too far, and I’ll discuss two of them in this column.

Note carefully that you can’t attribute the increasing real yield to the latest CPI numbers, which show that inflation is running at the highest pace in over four decades. Since TIPS are indexed to the CPI, they are automatically hedged against those increases. The quoted TIPS yield represents what additional amount investors receive besides inflation.

The results are plotted in the accompanying chart. Sure enough, the nominal 10-year yield has tended to fall when real yields are positive, and vice versa. These differences are significant at the 95% confidence level that statisticians often use when determining if a pattern is genuine.The second reason I want to mention for thinking that bonds will rally in coming months is that a recession seems increasingly likely.

This one exception was during the recession that lasted from November 1973 to March 1975, which marked the beginning of the stagflation era. Since some today are worried that we may be entering a similar period, this exception does seem ominous. I am tempted not to put undue importance on it, however, since interest rates declined in the other two recessions that also occurred in the decade that lasted from 1973 to 1982.

 

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MktwHulbert Why have you used a picture of Bond in the film are you that useless when it comes to advertising?

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