Loans and Interest rates

Longtime readers of my commentaries may recall that I have been waiting for the dollar to fall while US interest rates rise at the same time. Even though it may not be intuitive that the dollar could fall while interest rates rise, I think current events in both China and Japan are setting the stage for it to happen.

Since 1992 more than four trillion dollars of foreign capital have been invested in the US. This capital influx was due to a series of currency crises, beginning with the Brazilian Real in 1992. Capital, seeking a safe haven, poured into the United States.

Initially, this influx of capital caused US interest rates to fall, US corporate profits to rise and consumer spending to increase. The resultant bull market in stocks and bonds was fertile ground for investor speculation and gave rise to the high-tech, or Internet bubble.

When the high-tech bubble burst, the Federal Reserve reacted by artificially driving interest rates even lower, causing a real estate bubble in the US and averting the collapse of the broader US stock market.

When the Southeast Asian currency crisis began in 1996 with the fall of the yen, the extraordinary amount of capital that flowed into the US caused an unprecedented rise in the US dollar exchange rate.

This increase in the US dollar exchange rate in turn caused a decrease in the price of all things priced in dollars: oil, commodities, metals, gold and, of course, all US imports. Lower import prices in the US in turn lead to an expansion of the US trade deficit.

At the same time we also saw the emergence of China as an economic powerhouse, with a massive shift of manufacturing capacity away from North America and Europe to China. In order to maximize the benefit of the strong US dollar, both China and Japan elected not to sell the trade dollars they were receiving back into foreign exchange markets. Instead, they bought US Treasuries with those dollars.

Under normal circumstances, when a country such as Japan receives trade dollars due to its trade surplus with the United States, it sells those dollars in the foreign exchange markets. By selling dollars and buying yen, the trade imbalance would lower the exchange rate of the dollar and increase the exchange rate of the yen, thus increasing the cost of exports from Japan and increasing the cost of imports in the US, which would eventually neutralize the trade imbalance.

But because both China and Japan (and several other Southeast Asian countries) withheld their trade dollars from foreign exchange markets, their export prices and US import prices were kept low. This caused an exacerbation of the US trade deficit, and it also kept US interest rates low since the bulk of those dollars were invested in US bonds.

Oil and metal prices declined precipitously during the late 1990s because of the rise in the US dollar exchange rate. Declines in metal and oil prices were far less pronounced in many other currencies and, in fact, the gold price increased in some currencies even while it was falling in US dollars. I realized during the late 1990s that the gold price (in US dollars) would not sustain a rally until we saw the end of the rise in the dollar itself.

Between 1999 and 2001 the dollar rally petered out and by 2002 the dollar was entrenched in a bear market as the combination of falling interest rates in the US and the trade deficit took their toll. Oil, commodities, metals and gold prices started rising.

The increase in most metals and commodity prices were initially just a reflection of the falling US dollar exchange rate; however, because of the expansion occurring in China, among other things, some commodities and metals prices rose more than what could be accounted for by the dollar alone.

The gold price, on the other hand, was almost exactly paired to the US dollar exchange rate up to the middle of 2005.

Now we can evaluate the current situation with the twin deficits of the United States.

The US trade deficit simply means that US residents buy more imports than what they export. The net result of the trade deficit is that US dollars are being sent to other countries, and, as mentioned earlier, under normal circumstances those dollars would have been sold in foreign exchange markets, putting downward pressure on the dollar.

A weaker dollar would translate into higher prices for US imports and lower prices for US exports and that would in turn cause a reduction, or elimination, of the trade imbalance. Therefore, the US trade deficit will eventually cause the US dollar to decline. The only reason it has not yet done so is because China, Japan, and several other countries are not selling their US dollars, but investing them in US Treasuries instead.

That brings us to the US fiscal deficit. A fiscal deficit arises when the government spends more than it receives from taxes. The US fiscal deficit is much larger than the budget deficit and contrary to what the media and politicians would like you to believe, the US fiscal condition is worsening, not getting better.

The current debt limit for the US government is $8.184 trillion and if that limit is not raised by the middle of the month the government will likely go into default. All it means is that lawmakers will vote to increase the debt limit.

But the amount by which they will increase the debt limit is what is interesting. The current proposal is for an increase of $781 billion. Why $781 billion? Probably because that is more or less what they expect the fiscal deficit will be for the next twelve months, or so.

During fiscal 2005 (that ended on September 30, 2005) the government's debt increased by $554 billion. Since then the debt has increased by $337 billion, which, when annualized, comes to $814 billion. Don't be misled by budget deficits: politicians can budget all they like but their spendthrift ways become evident in the increase in debt.

As an aside, the current debt of $8.27 trillion does not include unfunded liabilities of the US government, such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Including unfunded liabilities the US government is approximately $46 trillion in the hole.

The fiscal deficit means the US government continually has to issue more and more debt to finance its spending and the issuance of debt means an increase in the supply of US bonds that will ultimately lead to lower bond prices and higher interest rates. This is where the trade deficit and the fiscal deficit meet. Just like the trade deficit implies the dollar will fall, the fiscal deficit will ultimately cause US interest rates to rise.

Recall that China, Japan, and others were buying US Treasury debt (bonds) with their trade dollars instead of selling those dollars into foreign exchange markets. That is what kept the dollar afloat, but it is also what kept US medium to long term interest rates so low since no matter how much more debt the government issued, these nations stood ready to buy it.

Looking at this I realized that we are going to witness an unexpected turn of events. When China and Japan decide to stop buying US Treasuries with their trade surplus dollars, the US dollar exchange rate will fall simultaneous with rising US interest rates. This is not intuitive since common dogma suggests currencies rise when interest rates rise and fall when interest rates fall. Yet I believe that the US dollar is going to fall while US interest rates rise.