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business newsHas the Global Economy Been Zapped by ZIRP?
Zero interest rate policies dominate the world's largest economies -- a situation that's contributing to the worsening pension crisis, the unnaturally buoyant equity markets, the need for quantitative easing, and even the bull market in gold.
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Historically, examples of ZIRP are few and far between – and usually very brief – but now ZIRP and near-ZIRP dominate the interest rate policies for most of the world’s largest economies. We’re in uncharted territory. More worrisome, the longer an economy embraces ZIRP, the harder it is to extricate itself. In fact, as far as I can tell, no one has exited extended ZIRP intact and voluntarily. Some, like Kyle Bass, argue that once a nation gets trapped in ZIRP for an extended period, the only escape is through debt restructuring. Others say war.
ZIRP has been the policy of the United States since 2008; it has been the policy of Japan for most of the past two decades, and it is becoming the policy of the ECB, at least in terms of ECB short-term funding. Currently, over two trillion dollars of US debt is paying zero or near zero interest, as is trillions more debt in Japan and elsewhere. This unprecedented situation has contributed to the worsening pension crisis, the unnaturally buoyant equity markets, the rescue of US banks, the need for quantitative easing, and even the bull market in gold. It has spectacularly failed in its originally trumpeted mission to restart lending to the consumer (the money multiplier is still near all-time lows). And now, central bankers are discovering that ZIRP is a poisoned chalice.
The problem is as simple and intractable as human nature. So long as there's a market willing to buy a government’s debt (or buyers who can be forced to buy said debt), ZIRP offers the promise of vast new funds with virtually no increase in carrying costs. If the problem is short-term liquidity, the theory is that ZIRP buys the time necessary to restart growth. If the problem is solvency, however, ZIRP is viewed as an alternative to a painful restructuring. In that case (e.g. Japan), the rotten debts remain on the books of the banks, hobbling the lending that is necessary for the economic growth that will enable the central bankers to wean the economy off the drug.
Faced with little or no economic growth and anemic tax receipts, central bankers keep pumping out new debt. When Japan started with ZIRP, its debt to GDP ratio was 40%. In 2003 it was 93%. Now it’s 234%, and Japan’s aging buyers (Japanese purchase 95% of the country’s new debt) are starting to spend for their retirement, rather than save. Across the Pacific in the US, debt-to-GDP was 57% in 2000; in 2008, when the US adopted ZIRP, debt to GDP was about 68%; in the three years since it has risen to 99%.
The US did begin to approach ZIRP earlier in the last decade when Alan Greenspan drastically cut rates to 1% to restart a frozen credit market. That was a defensible response to a liquidity crisis, but Greenspan kept the policy too long, fueling the housing and credit bubbles, and setting the stage for the crash of 2008. ZIRP is like a opium-based painkiller. It might get you through a crisis (if there isn’t the political will for a restructuring), but chronic use is addictive and debilitating. The mechanics of the addiction are simple: the more debt-burdened an economy becomes, the more additional debt it needs for growth, and the less growth we get for the increment. This is termed debt saturation. A dollar of new debt in 1960 produced about 90 cents of additional GDP. That ratio turned negative in the last couple of years.
At the same time, to keep the interest burden of debt from spiraling out of the control, nations are tempted to shift to shorter duration. This has the effect of leaving a country ever more vulnerable should central bankers be forced to raise interest rates. Interest payments are now just 1% of GDP and 5.7% % of US expenditures, actually fairly low (though, even at these levels, interest chews up 14% of each tax dollar collected). In fact, the interest bill for US debt is just 4.6% higher than it was in 2007 and virtually the same as in 2008 despite the fact that the debt has exploded since those years. The average rate the US pays on debt is about 3%, and is coming down as roughly half the debt gets rolled each year.
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Interest Expense on the Debt Outstanding Available Historical Data Fiscal Year End |
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| 2011 | $454,393,280,417.03 |
| 2010 | $413,954,825,362.17 |
| 2009 | $383,071,060,815.42 |
| 2008 | $451,154,049,950.63 |
| 2007 | $429,977,998,108.20 |
| 2006 | $405,872,109,315.83 |
| 2005 | $352,350,252,507.90 |
| 2004 | $321,566,323,971.29 |
| 2003 | $318,148,529,151.51 |
| 2002 | $332,536,958,599.42 |
| 2001 | $359,507,635,242.41 |
| 2000 | $361,997,734,302.36 |
| 1999 | $353,511,471,722.87 |
| 1998 | $363,823,722,920.26 |
| 1997 | $355,795,834,214.66 |
| 1996 | $343,955,076,695.15 |
| 1995 | $332,413,555,030.62 |
| 1994 | $296,277,764,246.26 |
| 1993 | $292,502,219,484.25 |
| 1992 | $292,361,073,070.74 |
| 1991 | $286,021,921,181.04 |
| 1990 | $264,852,544,615.90 |
| 1989 | $240,863,231,535.71 |
| 1988 | $214,145,028,847.73 |
But we’ve reached a place where even a historically modest rise – say 2% -- would start gobbling huge chunks of tax revenue to the point where tax revenues are flat to declining. The longer ZIRP continues, the more onerous the cost of raising interest rates. Past some unknown point, ZIRP begets more ZIRP. We may be past that point as the fed has said ZIRP will be the US policy into 2013. If the natural buyers get wary, there is always the Fed to buy the debt. What we saw earlier this year was that even as the Chinese balked at buying treasuries (down from 47% of new issuance in 2006 to 5% in 2010), the Fed stepped in through quantitative easing to buy the lion’s share of new debt. That program ended in July, but then, in the nick of time, the European sovereign debt crisis went critical, and prompted foreign buyers to show up (and the FED is still in there as it reinvests proceeds as securities roll off its balance sheet). Should the flight to safety abate, it’s highly likely QE will resume if only because this is a treadmill from which there is no escape (a recognition of which may have played into the historic S&P downgrade of US debt).
How long can this continue? In Japan it has continued for nearly 20 years, thanks to a thrifty population with $17 trillion in savings. But even that party is approaching endgame. Its massive debt has already been downgraded, now Aa3, but it still pays less than Germany, with an average interest expense of 1.12% this year. Japan’s problem is that its aging savers are becoming spenders (the savings rate dropped to 3% this year) and the population has dropped 3% in the past few years as well. So it has fewer, cash-flow negative citizens to absorb ever more debt. Long term rates and dollar swaptions have already started to edge up, and, having run huge deficits since the inauguration of ZIRP in 1993, Japan has little capacity to endure an interest rate hike. According to Kyle Bass, who analogizes a Japan short to the subprime play in 2007-08, a 100 basis point rise in debt service costs would consume an additional 25% of tax revenue. Disregard any talk that might come from Japan about raising interest rates, it simply cannot happen.
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