The distorted pricing cause by regulatory pressures is amplified by a kind of conditioned response among bond investors. As inflation and interest rates have fallen steadily over the past 30 years, bond investors have been consistently rewarded for treating every temporary uptick in interest rates as a buying opportunity. This experience has created a Pavlovian reflex to “buy on dips” that can be broken only by many months or perhaps even years of negative experience. This reflex has been strongly apparent in the past two months. Whenever stock markets have fallen sharply, as they did in early February and again after Trump announced his trade sanctions on China, the bond-buying instinct became irresistible, bond prices rallied, and the resulting reductions in long-term interest rates stabilized stock markets.
At some point, the bond market’s Pavlovian behavior will stop, and long-term interest rates will move much higher. But until this happens, investors’ unshakable belief that low inflation is a permanent feature of economic reality will allow the US government to pursue increasingly inflationary policies. And the bizarrely low long-term interest rates set by complacent bond markets will provide a safety net for global financial markets – at least until complacency proves to be unsustainable.
Anatole Kaletsky is chief economist and co-chairman of Gavekal Dragonomics. A former columnist at the Times of London, the International New York Times and the Financial Times, he is the author of "Capitalism 4.0, The Birth of a New Economy," which anticipated many of the post-crisis transformations of the global economy.