Given that my preferred explanation for low real interest rates are the changes that have been wrought within the developed world’s financial markets — and in particular the growth in collateralized inter-bank lending, I read with interest the newly released report, Low for Long? Causes and Consequences of Persistently Low Interest Rates by Sir Charles Bean, Christian Broda, Takatoshi Ito, and Randall Kroszner.
The authors establish the basic facts:
the world long-term real risk-free rate has been drifting down remorselessly from around 4% in the late 1990s to just below zero today.
And:
The very low level of long-term risk-free real interest rates in the advanced economies is historically most unusual. Real rates have rarely been so low; when they have been, it has almost invariably been during or after a war, when there was a degree of financial repression and/or inflation was elevated. The present configuration of low real rates with low inflation appears to be unprecedented.
In Chapter 2 the authors discuss the various explanations for why real interest rates have declined “remorselessly” from 1998 or 1999 on. While the authors do discuss shifts in preferences in favor of “safe assets,” they do not even mention what I would consider the most important explanation for such a demand shift: the increasing collateralization of financial exposures on the part of our biggest financial institutions. (As was noted in my previous post, data on this is available from the ISDA.) Indeed, the only source of an increase in demand for safe assets that the report cites which is consistent with the timing of the drop in rates is the increase in emerging market demand for foreign exchange buffers subsequent to the Asian financial crisis. All of the other explanations in this subsection refer to sources of increased demand subsequent to the crisis (post-crisis recognizing of the extent of possible bad outcomes, post-crisis regulatory requirements for banks to hold larger buffers of safe assets, and the demand for safe assets created by central bank quantitative easing policies.)
What is missing from the report is this: the latter stage of the Asian financial crisis coincided with the LTCM failure. The LTCM failure led to a significant increase in the collateralization of financial sector exposures. Collateralization ramped up continuously over the early years of the current millennium as laws supporting collateralization regimes were adopted in the US, the UK, and Europe. It is remarkable that this potential explanation of prolonged low rates on “safe assets” which has the same timing as the emerging markets savings glut explanation and therefore meets one of the most important criteria considered by the report has been entirely omitted from it.
This lapse strikes me as evidence that the financial sector is invisible to modern macroeconomists. I, of course, can’t help wondering whether this blindness is generated by the models they work with. In my view, we need to take a long and hard look at modern finance and how it has changed the way the real economy operates.
Synthetic Assets 