If I had an easy way and a non-risk way of shorting a whole lot of 20- or 30-year bonds, I’d do it,” said our favorite uncle Warren Buffett on CNBC. These kinds of bonds have been on a terrific bull run ever since Paul Volker, as Chairman of the Fed, cracked down on inflation. But now, even the avuncular face of capitalism would bet against them.
He was behind the curve. On April 22, Bill Gross, at Janus Capital, tweeted that 10-year German government debt was “The short of a lifetime.” The “only question” was “Timing.” Other bond gurus have jumped into the fray. Selling bonds outright, or selling them short if you didn’t already own them, particularly European government bonds, has become the thing to do in certain circles. Now valuations are falling, and yields are soaring off their ludicrously low levels.
So within the last 30 days, the 10-year US Treasury yield jumped from 1.83% to 2.23% as I’m writing this;
the German 10-year Bund yield, instead of dropping below zero, skyrocketed from 0.05% to 0.60%; the Italian 10-year yield soared from 1.18% to 1.93%. And so on. Sharply rising long-term yields are percolating through the system.
In the era when several trillion dollars of even crappy government debt is so overpriced that it sports negative yields, thanks to central-bank machinations, this bout of selling is somewhat inconvenient.
Bonds with long maturities are particularly vulnerable. That’s what Buffett, the ultimate “smart money,” would focus on. And
selling them is exactly what companies are doing at a record pace while there are still eager buyers for them out there......
So far this year, according to Bloomberg, companies have sold $39 billion in bonds that mature in over 30 years. That’s over five times more than during the same period in 2014.
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Companies have sold $627.2 billion in bonds so far this year, up 6.57% from last year at this time, which had already been a record year. For the full year 2014, total issuance hit a vertigo-inducing $1.57 trillion.
So, companies are borrowing a record amount to fund share buybacks, acquisitions, and other mouthwatering hocus-pocus goodies. They’re leveraging up their balance sheets with these records amounts of debt, and they’re venturing at a record pace into maturities that exceed the remaining lifespan of many bond-fund investors.
These companies, too, are the ultimate smart money. They’re doing what Buffett would like to do, and what the shorts are now doing, this being the deal of a “lifetime”: they’re selling bonds that mature so far in the future that redeeming them is going to be another generation’s problem.
Heck, governments do it too. Even Mexico, ...But for the buyers, for the very folks who have been scrambling over each other to grab a piece of this reeking pie, for the yield-desperate bond-fund managers, insurance companies, and others that have been driven to near-insanity by years of interest-rate repression and QE, for all those eager buyers who’ll end up owning these bonds in their conservative-sounding bond funds, for them, these bonds might curdle.
...... if there is a big bout of inflation at any one time during the next many years or decades – a lot of stuff happens in 30 or 40 years – that record amount of debt, issued during times of super-low interest rates, will become the scourge of those who own it......
wolfstreet.com/2015/05/06/...to-profit-from-bond-market-swoon/