Goldman Warns Of "Upward Shock"
To Rates, Hints At Trillions In Losses
"Recall what Goldman's Charles Himmelberg warned about just last week, namely that the record amount of debt oustanding (and duration exposure) has never been greater, leading to potentially dramatic consequences:
Then there is duration to worry about..."The total face value of all US bonds, including Treasuries, Federal agency debt, mortgages, corporates, municipals and ABS, is $40 trillion (Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association). The Barclays US aggregate is a smaller number, $17 trillion, as the index excludes some categories of debt, such as money markets, with low duration. To end up with a more palatable number, Goldman uses the Barclays measure of debt outstanding, although it admits this may lead to an understatement of the total loss potential. Using either measure, total debt outstanding has grown by over 60% in real Dollars since 2000."
"The aggregate interest rate duration across the bond market has also increased over the past several years, up over 20% vs. the 1995-2005 average level. Longer durations are largely driven by lengthening maturities on the bonds outstanding, as issuers have elected to term out their debt structures.
The US Treasury has also chosen to lengthen its debt maturity structure, with more use of long duration bonds.... In 1994, the average yield on the bond index was 5.6%, vs. 2.2% currently. Lower bond coupons means that proportionately more of the bond cashflows now comes from principal, which tends to be distributed towards the end of the bond lifetime."Doing the math, and combining a duration estimate of 5.6 years with the SIFMA total estimated notional exposure of $40trn, and current Dollar price of bonds of $105.6, indicates that, to first order, a 100bp shock to interest rates would translate into a market value loss estimate would be $2.4 trillion.
On the other hand, if - as Goldman hopes - inflation does materialize, however briefly, the resultant MTM loss will be staggering. Keep in mind that $2.4 trillion is only in the US. Now add tens of trillions of record low yielding global debt, including some $10.5 trillion in negative yield bonds around the globe, and one can make the case that the global MTM hit from an even 1% rise in rates would be somewhere between $5 and $8 trilion dollars!
So, according to Goldman, here is the rather unpleasant choice facing the world: continue slowly sinking into a deflationary singularity,
And that no man might buy or sell,
save he that had the mark,
or the name of the beast,
Revelation 13:17
