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The Dollar – Best House on a Bad Block
I’m here to draw your attention to something alarming happening in currencies at the moment. Here is a picture of the US Dollar, which has lost a huge amount of value in the past year.
Now, before certain ones of you get all excited and say that this proves Trump is ruining the dollar and forcing foreigners to vamoose out of the United States, take a look at the Euro.
I’m not going to tease you too much with this. The first chart is just the dollar in terms of ounces of gold; the second is the Euro in terms of ounces of silver. Don’t worry, longtime readers: I’m not about to go all gold-bug on you. I could have done those charts with almost any currency against a wide variety of commodities: the Bloomberg Commodity Index is up 23% since mid-August, and +12% since the end of the year. So this isn’t just a precious metals story, and it isn’t just a dollar story. It’s a fiat currency vs ‘stuff’ story.
The recent breathless coverage of the melt-up in precious metals seemed to me to miss the bigger point of what it means. It’s awesome if you’re long precious metals. But the abrupt turn vertical is – or should be – alarming. But nothing looks alarming when it’s pointed higher.
Treasury Secretary Bessent, as I write this, just came out and stated that the United States has a strong dollar policy and has not intervened (at least not yet) to push the dollar lower against the yen. That’s all very nice but I don’t worry a lot about the level of the dollar against other currencies in the medium term and here’s why.
Let’s look at the monetary pipes, which to me imply an increase in the dollar and/or a sharp increase in long-term interest rates regardless of what happens to overnight policy rates. (Many people are concerned about long-term rates because of some vague sense that we are borrowing too much or because everyone is going to sell their US bonds – to buy what with the dollars they receive, no one seems to mention – but there is a mechanical/accounting relationship could cause that outcome).
To this end, the illustration below (Source: Enduring Investments[1]) is a helpful visual guide. For this analysis we are interested in the flows of the dollar system, more than its stock. And the important flows are – or have been – pretty stable. The US has for a long time run a substantial budget deficit, which means the government needs to source dollars by borrowing them. The three sources of those dollars have historically been foreign investors, the Fed, and domestic savers. Foreign investors have extra dollars because the trade deficit means that Americans send more dollars to foreign producers than foreign consumers send to US producers, and those extra dollars are invested in the US into government bonds (spigot on the lower left) or otherwise invested in markets or direct investment (spigot on the lower right). The Fed balance sheet, over the last decade or so, has often been a supplier of dollars to the system when it has been expanding more often than not. Finally, there are domestic savers who buy Treasury bonds among other things (but consider that when they’re buying US stocks, for example, the dollars are just sloshing from one domestic saver to another – that’s why there’s no flow shown for domestic savers buying US stocks). Those three ‘suppliers of dollars’ are the top hoses filling up the barrel of dollars in the illustration below.
Those flows tend to reach stasis via automatic stabilizers. For example, if the government is draining more money (with a big budget deficit) than is being supplied elsewhere, then either interest rates rise to induce domestic savers to provide more money, or the trade deficit expands. My concern is that automatic stabilizers tend to take time to stabilize, and currently there are some big changes. See the next illustration and focus on the differences compared with the prior one.
The cessation of the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet has been happening for a while, and the balance sheet has even been shrinking a little. But the Trump Administration’s trade policies have caused two major changes: first, the trade deficit has been shrinking sharply (see charts below, source Bloomberg; the first shows the net trade balance monthly and the second shows the recent trends of declining imports and rising exports).
Some of this may be ‘payback’ for the surge in imports at the beginning of the year by importers trying to beat the imposition of tariffs, but there seems little question now that the trade deficit really is closing substantially. At the same time, foreign companies have been tripping all over each other to start making substantial investments into the US. In the second ‘barrel of money’ chart above, note the spigot at the lower right is really gushing, and two of the hoses supplying dollars have slowed to a trickle or stopped.
If that’s a fair representation, then what are the implications? If those trends persist, then the demand for dollars is going to outweigh the supply of dollars, leading to two outcomes. One of those is that in order to induce more dollars to fund the federal deficit, interest rates will have to rise. The Fed can control the policy rate, but in order to keep long-term rates down the Committee may eventually be forced to start up their hose again – intervening to buy Treasuries in the market to prevent long rates from rising, and expanding the balance sheet. The market stabilizer here would be for interest rates to rise and induce more domestic savings; if for policy reasons the Fed doesn’t want that then they’ll have to add more money themselves, with inflationary consequences. (It’s inflationary either way, but if interest rates rise it’s only indirectly inflationary in that higher interest rates also increase money velocity).
The other implication is that the dollar would strengthen on foreign exchange markets, since if foreigners are going to invest in the US in financial markets (or with direct investment, building new plants and so forth) they will need dollars to do so and the trade deficit is no longer providing a surplus of those dollars. It’s likely also that, with fewer dollars being sent abroad, domestic stock and bond markets would struggle more than they have been. A stronger dollar would be disinflationary at the margin, helping to hold down core goods prices, but this effect is fairly small…especially in the broader context I’ve mentioned, which is that all fiat currencies right now are getting smashed versus real stuff.
These are the implications of the recent large changes in financial flows. There are potential offsets available. If the trade deficit declines and the federal budget deficit declines also, it diminishes upward pressure on interest rates since domestic savers do not have to be incentivized to provide as much of the dollars in deficit. You can infer this from the barrel illustrations as well: if the federal budget moves towards balance, it lessens the net change in the system.
And there had been some positive signs on that score. The tariff revenue has been large, and some of the spending priorities of the prior Administration have been de-emphasized. These are positive developments which could lessen the pressure on the dollar and interest rates…except that the Trump Administration has been mooting the idea of ‘tariff dividend checks,’ increased defense spending, buying Greenland, and other significant spending initiatives.
It is also possible, even probable, that the Fed or Congress could change banking liquidity regulations in such a way that banks are forced to hold more Treasuries, which would add an additional hose to the top of the barrel. However, the more assets that banks are required to hold, worsening the return on assets of traditional banks, the more banking functions will start to move to non-bank entities or into crypto, increasing the money supply while decreasing the Fed’s control of it.
The upshot of all of these changes is that – based on the flows as we see them now, which could change – I believe we are going to see a significantly steeper yield curve and a significantly stronger dollar over the next few years.
Having said all of that, let me circle back to the start of this note – while the USD is not likely to collapse against other currencies, the movement against commodities (not to mention equities) and other real assets is disturbing. The US money supply has been accelerating recently; M2 is only +4.6% in the last 12 months, but that’s near (or may even be above) the maximum rate that is sustainable without causing inflation in a country that is deglobalizing and in demographic reverse. I am not bullish on gold and silver at these levels, and am more cautious on commodities than I have been in a while. But while I am a dollar bull against other currencies, I am a bear of fiat currencies against real assets generally…and I am concerned that the recent waterfall-like behavior of fiat presages a re-acceleration of CPI-style inflation. Commodities feed broadly into prices, but so do wages and lots of other things that are measured in terms of dollars. If the problem is fiat, and not gold and silver themselves, then it’s a bullish signal for inflation.
[1] These images were generated using AI image generation tools to create an illustrative representation for explanatory purposes.
Gold Prices Are Getting Frothy
Behold, my roughly-annual blog post on gold.
I recognize that there is a good case for gold at a time when the price level is rising steadily and there are upside risks to inflation and downside risks to the dollar. Let me start there.
I get a little confused trying to decide whether, if we find out that Fort Knox doesn’t have as much gold as we thought, that’s bullish or bearish. I think the consensus is that is bullish because it means there’s one less holder that could potentially sell into the market…but doesn’t that mean there is more actual floating supply? Because that gold is out there somewhere. Anyway, that is all idle speculation anyway until we find out whether the unaudited stockpiles at Fort Knox are intact. (As an aside, the whole monetary history of why there are gold stockpiles at Fort Knox or the New York Federal Reserve is fascinating. I just finished reading Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, which is a little unfair of a title but really interesting.)
But the $2,910 question is whether the case for gold at the current price is good or not. Okay, let’s be real – if people still believed that the current price mattered for future returns then most of the Magnificent 7 stocks wouldn’t be where they are…most of the rest of the equity market, probably too. Certainly bitcoin. For today, though, let’s pretend that trees don’t grow to the sky and that your future returns depend at least a little bit on the price you buy at relative to the future price you will sell at.[1]
Erb and Harvey wrote a paper in 2013 called “The Golden Dilemma” which had a wonderful chart in it (Exhibit 5) that showed the annualized 10-year real gold return versus the starting real price. The key insight is the translation to real values. Because the gold nominal price does, in fact, rise with the price level over time to reflect the diminishing value of the dollar. But whether it is likely to rise faster than the price level, or slower, or even decline over some period of time is obviously really important to the question of whether gold right now is a good inflation-hedging asset.[2] The chart below shows the Erb and Harvey chart, updated to today and with a more meaningful x axis priced in terms of the starting real price. The vertical line is the current gold price. All other gold prices are converted to their values in terms of today’s price level, and then the return calculated over the subsequent ten years.
The chart highlights that when the gold price is high in a real sense…when it has outrun inflation for a while…it is likely to underperform inflation going forward. When it has lagged inflation for a while it is likely to outperform inflation going forward. There is a fork on the chart of two different periods, the first being the gold prices when we used to care about value more (the lower fork, where the lowest point is January 1980), and the second being the more recent period where value mattered, but less so. The most-recent point for which we can calculate the 10-year real return is January 2015 when the nominal price of gold was $1278 but in terms of today’s dollars it was $1738 because we’ve had 36% inflation since then. Either way, the current price of gold would suggest that while the nominal price may rise over the next decade, that’s likely only to be the case if the price level rises more (that is, negative real returns for gold). That says that while gold is probably a better investment right now that equities – which have deeply negative expected real returns from the current price – it’s not likely to be as good an inflation hedge as, say, 10-year TIPS at 2% real yields.
Now, I have to address one possibility. There are nuts out there who will say “the fork here is evidence that the changes made to CPI caused it to understate inflation by 2% per year – gold, relative to the price level, is suddenly doing 2-5% per year better than it would historically have done.” It is crazy talk, but given the chart it is due a reply. There are two parts of the refutation. The first part is that the bottom fork doesn’t end in 1980; in fact that was the only fork evident in the Erb and Harvey 2013 piece. If CPI was monkeyed with in a serious way as the conspiracy nuts claim, it happened in the early 1980s. Maybe no one figured it out for a quarter century. I think a better argument is that the first gold ETF, GLD, launched in 2004. The abrupt ease in the difficulty of owning and holding gold almost certainly led to an increase in the allocation to gold in global investment portfolios. If that’s the cause, then the happy fork in this card should be the aberration and we should start to converge on the lower fork over time once that change in the acceptance of gold as a portfolio allocation has been fully realized.
The second part of my refutation is to point to another way that it looks like gold might be a bit frothy. People have pointed to the divergence of gold from TIPS (including me, back in 2024), since gold tends to behave like a long-term zero-coupon inflation-linked bond – in other words, it has a lot of real duration, but for some reason not recently. But showing the deviation of TIPS from gold could mean that gold is expensive or that TIPS became cheap. Look instead at the following chart, which relates two zero-coupon real assets: owned homes, and gold. The line is the price of gold divided by the Existing Home Sales Median Sale Price in thousands (so, one ounce of gold will currently buy 0.726% of a median home right now or, conversely, you need about 138oz of gold to buy the median existing home.
The chart shows three distinct extremes prior to the current rise. The peak in 1980 and the trough in the early 2000s are both obviously gold phenomena. The spike in 2010-2012 is a consequence of the housing bust after the GFC, when home prices drastically overcorrected to clear the excess inventory. And then we have the current increase in the ratio, which either means that gold prices are getting too high, or home prices are getting too low.
I think it’s hard to make the argument that home prices are getting too low.
[1] It is really hard to imagine how it cannot be true that today’s price matters for your return experience. The only way it could be irrelevant is if the growth rate of the asset is independent of the price, so that when today’s price goes up the expected future price goes up the same amount. But this leads to the absurdity that there is no price at which you wouldn’t buy an asset. I know this is really, really obvious to most of us but you have to realize that the belief that future prices are untethered to any fundamental value is the only reason the price of BTC – which can be redeemed for exactly zero, forever – is not zero. So lots of people clearly believe that everything has a ‘value’ if someone else will buy it today, even if no one will buy it tomorrow.
[2] People also hold gold for an end-of-the-world/fiat-collapse hedge. This is in my mind a separate case. If the price level goes up 500%, then the question of whether gold returns 490% or 510% is fairly irrelevant to me. The argument I am making is only salient for inflation at non-hyperinflation sorts of levels. Just want you to know I recognize that.
A More Optimistic Outlook for Gold? Or Not?
Something interesting has been happening in gold over the last decade.
I know that sounds strange, but what has been happening is interesting in a very specific way: gold has been outperforming a priori expectations for returns, by a significant margin. So far, that’s still not very interesting since just about every asset class has been outperforming a priori expectations for returns for quite a while. That’s what excess liquidity provision will do (and is supposed to do), after all. But what’s interesting about gold is that for a very long time the relationship between the starting real price of gold and the subsequent real return has been very strong, and it still is – but the relationship seems to have shifted.
Naturally, the key to good long-term returns is buying at low prices and selling at high prices. But the question of what “high” and “low” prices are is the squishy part. In gold, though, it turns out that going back for quite a while the subsequent real return to gold has been strikingly regular. The chart below is snipped from Erb and Harvey’s “The Golden Dilemma,” an excellent paper published in 2013. It shows the subsequent 10-year annualized after-inflation return to gold, as a function of its starting real price (defined by E&H here as simply the gold price divided by the CPI Index).
The chart below shows this relationship as I’ve recreated it, but putting the prices relative to the current spot price (that is, adjusting past prices by the ratio of the current CPI price level index to the CPI Index at that time). This is for periods starting 1975-2000 and ending therefore 1985-2010. Unsurprisingly, it matches Erb & Harvey except for the different ending point, and the choice of how the x-axis is represented. I’ve also drawn a log regression line here. Obviously there should be a bit more curvature to the line but you get the idea. It’s a pretty decent fit: tell me the starting price in today’s dollars and I can give you a pretty accurate guess at the future real return. Lower prices lead to better subsequent real returns. The current price, though (where the vertical line is drawn), is not encouraging.
But here’s where the interesting part comes in. The next 10 years’ worth of starting points and ending points, after those plotted above, still fall on a very nice curve. But the curve is a lot higher.
This is much more encouraging! Whereas the original curve suggested that the expected real return to gold, starting from the current price, is presently about -8% per annum, the more recent curve suggests that the expectation should be roughly a 0% real return. That is, gold ought to approximately keep up with the price level. The curve in red is also more encouraging in that it suggests that while you can have great real returns by buying gold when it occasionally gets quite cheap, it shouldn’t drastically underperform inflation even when it gets kinda expensive. That’s great news for owners of gold, if we can believe it.
I have one mild concern, though – what caused this shift in curves? Clearly, gold has done wonderfully since 2001 partly because it started at a very low real price but also partly because the tremendous liquidity that has been a feature of the financial landscape for the last 13 years (at least) has raised all “real” boats. Because it turns out that gold – moreso than a lot of other commodities – also reacts fairly directly to real interest rates. In a study that we did as part of our work with Simplify Asset Management, we found that for one-year horizons gold has approximately 4 times as much duration with respect to real interest rates than it does to the price level, and the delta to the 10-year real interest rate is about 10x. That is, if real interest rates drop 1%, then that effect alone will influence gold to rise about 10%.
Thus, at least some of what is happening here is that the ‘new curve’ reflects the steady decline in 10-year real interest rates since the late 1990s, from a bit above 4% to the neighborhood of -1% now. Given the (current) starting real price of gold, our expectation for gold’s return over the next decade is that it should be roughly equal to the aggregate inflation over that time frame. The caveat, though, is significant. If real interest rates rise during that time, then gold will probably underperform inflation. Only if real interest rates fall appreciably further – which seems unlikely – can we concoct a scenario where we would think a priori that gold should beat inflation comfortably. And that means that even if you think the red dots in the plot above are a better basis for a forecast, the net message should still not be overly bullish for gold. The most optimistic guess would be that gold’s return equals the change in CPI, unless interest rates collapse further.
However, that circumstance is not damning to gold alone; just about every asset class is subject to the same law of liquidity/gravity. Take away liquidity, and real interest rates tend to rise. Take away liquidity, and prices of all sorts of assets decline – to some level where they’ll offer a better future return from a lower starting price.
Some Thoughts on Gold, Real Yields, and Inflation
TIPS-style inflation-linked bonds (more properly known as Canadian-style) pay a fixed coupon on a principal amount that varies with the price level. In this way, the real value of the principal is protected (you always get back an amount of principal that’s indexed to the price level, floored in the case of TIPS at the original nominal value), and the real value of the coupon is protected since a constant percentage of a principal that is varying with the price level is also varying with the price level. This clever construction means that “inflation-linked” bonds can be thought of as simply bonds that pay fixed amounts in real space.
I have illustrated this in the past with a picture of a hypothetical “cake bond,” which pays in units of pastry. The coupons are all constant-sized cupcakes (although the dollar value of those cupcakes will change over time), and you get a known-sized cake at the end (although the dollar value of that cake might be a lot higher). That’s exactly what a TIPS bond is essentially accomplishing, although instead of cupcakes you get a coupon called money, which you can exchange for a cupcake. This is a useful characteristic of money, that it can be exchanged for cupcakes.
The beauty of this construction is that these real values can be discounted using real yields, and all of the usual bond mathematics work just perfectly without having to assume any particular inflation rate. So you can always find the nominal price of a TIPS bond if you know the real price…but you don’t need the nominal price or a nominal yield to calculate its real value. In real space, it’s fully specified. The only thing which changes the real price of a real bond is the real yield.
All TIPS have coupons. Many of them have quite small coupons, just like Treasuries, but they all have coupons. So in the cake bond, they’re paying very small constant cupcakes, but still a stream of cupcakes. What if, though, the coupon was zero? Then you’d simply have a promise that at some future date, you’d get a certain amount of cake (or, equivalently, enough money to buy that certain amount of cake).
Of course, it doesn’t have to be cake. It can be anything whose price over a long period of time varies more or less in line with the price level. Such as, for example, gold. Over a very long period of time, the price of gold is pretty convincingly linked to the price level, and since there is miniscule variation in the industrial demand for gold or the production of new gold in response to price – it turns out to look very much like a long-duration zero-coupon real bond.
And that, mathematically, is where we start to run into problems with a zero-coupon perpetuity, especially with yields around zero.
[If you’re not a bond geek you might want to skip this section.] The definition of Macaulay duration is the present-value-weighted average time periods to maturity. But if there is only one “payment,” and it is received “never,” then the Macaulay duration is the uncomfortable ∞. That’s not particularly helpful. Nor is the mathematical definition of Modified duration, which is Macaulay Duration / (1+r), since we have infinity in the numerator. Note to self: a TIPS’ modified duration at a very low coupon and a negative real yield can actually be longer than the Macaulay duration, and in fact in theory can be longer than the maturity of the bond. Mind blown. Anyway, this is why the concept of ‘value’ in commodities is elusive. With no cash flows, what is present value? How do you discount corn? Yield means something different in agriculture…
This means that we are more or less stuck evaluating the empirical duration of gold, but without a real strong mathematical intuition. But what we think we know is that gold acts like a real bond (a zero coupon TIPS bond that pays in units of gold), which means that the real price of gold ought to be closely related to real yields. And, in fact, we find this to be true. The chart below relates the real price of gold versus the level of 10-year real yields since TIPS were issued in 1997. The gold price is deflated by the CPI relative to the current CPI (so that the current price is the current price, and former prices seem higher than they were in nominal space).
When we run this as a regression, we get a coefficient that suggests a 1% change in real yields produces a 16.6% change in the real price of gold (a higher yield leads to a lower gold price), with a strong r-squared of 0.82. This is consistent with our intuition that gold should act as a fairly long-duration TIPS bond. Of course, this regression only covers a period of low inflation generally; when we do the same thing for different regimes we find that the real gold price is not quite as well-behaved – after all, consider that real gold prices were very high in the early 1980s, along with real yields. If gold is a real bond, then this doesn’t make a lot of sense; it implies the real yield of gold was very low at the same time that real yields of dollars were very high.
Although perhaps that isn’t as nonsensical as it seems. For, back in 1980, inflation-linked bonds didn’t exist and it may be that gold traded at a large premium because it was one of the few ways to get protection against price level changes. Would it be so surprising in that environment for gold to trade at a very low “gold real yield” when the alternative wasn’t investible? It turns out that during the period up until 1997, the real price of gold was also positively related to the trailing inflation rate. That sounds like it makes sense, but it really doesn’t. We are already deflating the price of gold by inflation – why would a bond that is already immunized (in theory) against price level changes also respond to inflation? It shouldn’t.
And yet, that too is less nonsensical as it seems. We see a similar effect in TIPS today. Big inflation numbers shouldn’t move TIPS higher; rather, they should move nominal bonds lower. TIPS are immunized against inflation! And yet, TIPS most definitely respond when the CPI prints surprise.
(This is a type of money illusion, by which I mean that we are all trained to think in nominal space and not real space. So we think of higher inflation leading to TIPS paying out “more money”, which means they should be worth more, right? Except that the additional amount of dollars they are paying out is exactly offset by the decline in the value of the unit of payment. So inflation does nothing to the real return of TIPS. Meanwhile, your fixed payment in nominal bonds is worth less, since the unit of payment is declining in value. Although this is obviously so, this ‘error’ and others like it – e.g. Modigliani’s insistence that equity multiples should not vary with inflation since they are paying a stream of real income – have been documented for a half century.)
For now, then, we can think of gold as having a very large real duration, along with a price-level duration of roughly one (that is just saying that the concept of a real price of gold is meaningful). Which means that higher inflation is actually potentially dangerous for gold, given low current real yields, if inflation causes yields (including real yields) to rise, and also means that gold bugs should cheer along with stock market bulls for yield curve control in that circumstance. Inflation indeed makes strange bedfellows.
Gold Has Barely Beaten Inflation, and That’s About Right
Okay: I’ve checked my door locks, made sure my kids are safe, and braced myself for the inevitable incendiary incoming comments. So, I feel secure in pointing this out:
Gold’s real return for the last 10 years has been a blistering 1.07% per year. And worse, that’s higher than you ought to expect for the next 10 years.
Here’s the math. Gold on July 19, 2008 was at $955. Today it is at $1223, for a gain of 28.1%. But the overall price level (CPI) was at 218.815 in June 2008, and at 251.989 in June 2018 (we won’t get July figures for another month so this is the best we can do at the moment), for a 15.2% rise in the overall price level.
1.07% = [(1+28.1%) / (1 + 15.2%)] ^ 0.1 – 1
It might be even worse than that. Gold bugs are fond of telling me how the CPI is manipulated and there’s really so much more inflation than that; if that’s so, then the real return is obviously much worse than the calculation above implies.
Now, this shouldn’t be terribly surprising. You start with a pile of real stuff, which doesn’t grow or shrink for ten years…your real return is, at least in units of that real stuff, precisely 0%. And that’s what we should expect, in the very long run, from the holding of any non-productive real asset like a hard commodity. (If you hold gold via futures, then you also earn a collateral return of course. And if you hold warehouse receipts for physical gold, in principle you can earn lease income. But the metal itself has an a priori expected real return of zero). Indeed, some people argue that gold should be the measuring stick, in which case it isn’t gold which is changing price but rather the dollar. In that case, it’s really obvious that the real return is zero because the price of gold (in units of gold) is always 1.0.
So, while everyone has been obsessing recently about the surprisingly poor performance of gold, the reality is that over the longer time horizon, it has done about what it is supposed to do.
That’s actually a little bit of a coincidence, deriving from the fact that at $955 ten years ago, gold was reasonably near the fair price. Since then, gold prices soared and became very expensive, and now are sagging and getting cheaper. However, on my model gold prices are still too high to expect positive expected returns over the next decade (see chart, source Enduring Intellectual Properties).
The ‘expected return’ here is derived from a (nonlinear) regression of historical real prices against subsequent real returns. To be sure, because this is a market that is subject to immense speculative pressure both in the bull phases and in the bear phases, gold moves around with a lot more volatility than the price level does; consequently, it swings over time from being very undervalued (1998-2001) to wildly overvalued (2011-2013). I wouldn’t ever use this model to day-trade gold! However, it’s a useful model when deciding whether gold should have a small, middling, or large position in your portfolio. And currently, despite the selloff, the model suggests a small position: gold is much more likely to rise by less than the price level over the next decade, and possibly significantly less as in the 1980-1990 period (although I’d say probably not that bad).
DISCLOSURE: Quantitative/systematic funds managed by Enduring Investments have short positions in gold, silver, and platinum this month.
Gold and TIPS – Related or Not?
Because I spend so much time digging into inflation data and learning about how inflation works (and how securities and markets work, in different inflation regimes), I am always delighted when I come across something new, especially something simple and new that I could have previously stumbled on, but didn’t.
Recently, a friend sent me a link to an article by Scott Grannis (aka Calafia Beach Pundit). I occasionally read Scott’s stuff, and find it to be good quality. I’m not writing this article to either criticize or support most of his column, but rather to point to one particular chart he ran that amazed me. Specifically, he showed the 5-year TIPS yield against the nominal price of gold. Here is his chart:
He also showed the price of gold versus TIPS on a longer-term basis. I’ve replicated that here, although I’ve deflated gold by the CPI since the longer the time frame, the less the nominal price of gold will resemble its real price. It’s still basically the same picture:
This is an amazing chart, even allowing for the divergence in the 2000s (which some people would call prima facie evidence that the Fed eased too much back then). And it just tickles me because I’ve never noticed the correlation at all, and yet it’s really quite good. But here’s the really amazing part: there is no immediately obvious reason these two series should be related at all.
One of them is a price index. In Scott’s version, which isn’t adjusted for inflation, it should march upward to the right forever as long as the general price level continues to rise. Obviously, real yields will not march ever lower forever. When we adjust for the general level of prices, the real price of gold should, like real yields, oscillate (since the long-term real return to gold is approximately zero) so we have removed the tendency for nominal prices (unlike yields) to have a natural drift. But even in real terms, apples-to-apples, it’s an astonishing chart. What this chart seems to say is that when expected growth is poor, gold is worth more and when expected growth is strong, gold is less valuable. But that seems a bit crazy to me.
Okay, one possible interpretation is this: when expected returns from other asset classes such as stocks and bonds and inflation-linked bonds are low, then the expected return from gold should also be low, which means its price should be high. That makes sense, although it is hard to find many gold investors who think as I do that the expected forward-looking real return to gold right now is negative. Heck, I wrote about that last month (see “The Gold Price is Not ‘Too Low’”). It makes some sense, though. But the implication is that as inflation rises, and yields – both real and nominal – rise, then gold prices should fall. I think you’d discover it difficult to find an investor in gold who would think the gold price should fall if inflation picks up!
Where you would think to see more of a relationship is in inflation expectations versus gold. When inflation expectations are high, you’d think you would see gold prices high and vice-versa. But that chart has really nothing suggestive at all, possibly since inflation expectations have really been fairly grounded for the last twenty years. Gold prices, however, have not!
So going back to the original Grannis chart, I am still very suspicious. Fortunately, some time ago we developed a very long history of real interest rates, using a more advanced approach than had previously been applied (you can see the long-term series in this article). That series is derived, rather than observed as the TIPS series is, but it’s probably pretty close to where TIPS yields might have traded had they existed during that period. And when we look at real gold prices versus 5y TIPS yields…
…we get a pretty disappointing chart. What I see is that in the 1970s and early 1980s, high gold prices were associated with high real yields; in the 2000s and 2010s, a high gold price was associated with low real yields.
So, this is a bit of a bummer in one sense but a relief in another sense. That initial chart suggested some very weird dynamics happening between real yields, inflation expectations, and the price of a real commodity. I think this latter chart indicates that the relationship we saw was not some fundamental previously-undiscovered truth – sadly, I guess – but rather something more prosaic: an illustration of how the relative values of all assets tend to move more or less together. TIPS are expensive. Bonds are expensive. Stocks are expensive. Gold is expensive. Unfortunately, I don’t think that tells us a lot that we didn’t already know (although I have strong opinions about the relative ordering of the richness/cheapness of those asset classes).
The Gold Price is Not ‘Too Low’
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Before I start today’s article, let me say that I don’t like to write about gold. The people who are perennially gold bulls are crazy in a way that is unlike the people who are perennial equity bulls (Abby Joseph Cohen) or perennial bond bulls (Hoisington). They will cut you.
That being said, they are also pretty amusing.
To listen to a gold bull, you would think that no matter where gold is priced, it is a safe haven. Despite the copious evidence of history that says gold can go up and down, certain of the gold bulls believe that when “the Big One” hits, gold will be the most prized asset in the world. Of course, there are calmer gold bulls also but they are similarly dismissive of any notion that gold can be expensive.
The argument that gold is valuable simply because it is acceptable as money, and money that is not under control of a central bank, is vacuous. Lots of commodities are not under the control of a central bank. Moreover, like any other asset in the world gold can be expensive when it costs too much of other stuff to acquire it, and it can be cheap when it costs lots less to acquire.
I saw somewhere recently a chart that said “gold may be forming a major bottom,” which I thought was interesting because of some quantitative analysis that we do regularly (indeed, daily) on commodities. Here is one of the charts, approximately, that the analyst used to make this argument:
I guess, for context, I should back up a little bit and show that chart from a longer-term perspective. From this angle, it doesn’t look quite like a “major bottom,” but maybe that’s just me.
So which is it? Is gold cheap, or expensive? Erb and Harvey a few years ago noticed that the starting real price of gold (that is, gold deflated by the price index) turned out to be strikingly predictive of the future real return of holding (physical) gold. This should not be terribly shocking – although it is hard to persuade equity investors today that the price at which they buy stocks may affect their future returns – but it was a pretty amazing chart that they showed. Here is a current version of the chart (source: Enduring Investments LLC):
The vertical line represents the current price of gold (all historical gold prices are adjusted by the CPI relative to today’s CPI and the future 10-year real return calculated to derive this curve). It suggests that the future real return for gold over the next decade should be around -7% per annum. Now, that doesn’t mean the price of gold will fall – the real return could be this bad if gold prices have already adjusted for an inflationary future that now unfolds but leaves the gold price unaffected (since it is already impounded in current prices). Or, some of each.
Actually, that return is somewhat better than if you attempt to fit a curve to the data because the data to the left of the line is steeper than the data to the right of the line. Fitting a curve, you’d see more like -9% per annum. Ouch!
In case you don’t like scatterplots, here is the same data in a rolling-10-year form. In both cases, with this chart and the prior chart, be careful: the data is fit to the entire history, so there is nothing held ‘out of sample.’ In other words, “of course the curve fits, because we took pains to fit it.”
But that’s not necessarily a damning statement. The reason we tried to fit this curve in the first place is because it makes a priori sense that the starting price of an asset is related to its subsequent return. Whether the precise functional form of the relationship will hold in the future is uncertain – in fact, it almost certainly will not hold exactly. But I’m comfortable, looking at this data, in making the more modest statement that the price of gold is more likely to be too high to offer promising future returns than it is too low and likely to provide robust real returns in the future.
TIPS and Gold – Cousins, Not Brothers
A longtime reader (and friend) today forwarded me a chart from a well-known technical analyst showing the recent correlation between TIPS (via the TIP ETF) and gold; the analyst also argued that the rising gold price may be boosting TIPS. I’ve replicated the chart he showed, more or less (source: Bloomberg).
Ordinarily, I would cite the analyst directly, but in this case since I’m essentially calling him out I thought it might be rude to do so! His mistake is a pretty common one, after all. And, in fact, I am going to use it to illustrate an important point about TIPS.
The chart shows a great correlation between TIPS and gold, especially since the beginning of the year. But here’s the problem with drawing the conclusion that rising inflation fears are boosting TIPS – TIPS are not exposed to inflation.
Bear with me, because this is a key point about TIPS that is widely misunderstood. Recall that nominal interest rates represent two things: first, an amount that represents the return, in real terms, that the lender needs to realize in order to defer consumption and instead lend to the borrower. This is called the real interest rate. The second component of the nominal interest rate represents the compensation the lender demands for the fact that he will be paid back in dollars that (in normal times) will be able to buy less. This is the inflation compensation.[1] Irving Fisher said that nominal interest rates are approximately equal to the sum of these two components, or
n ≈ r + i
where n is the nominal interest rate, r is the real interest rate, and i is the inflation compensation.[2]
In a world without TIPS, you can only trade nominal bonds, which means you can only access the whole package and nominal interest rates may change when real rates change, expected inflation changes, or both change. (And when interest rates are negative, this leads to weird theoretical implications – see my recent and fun post on the topic.) Thus changes in real interest rates and changes in expected inflation affect nominal bonds, and roughly equally at that.
But once you introduce TIPS, then you can now separate out the pieces. By buying TIPS, you can isolate the real interest rate; and by trading a long/short package of TIPS and nominal bonds (or by trading an inflation swap) you can isolate the inflation expectations. This is a huge advance in interest rate management, because an investor is no longer constrained to own a fixed-income portfolio where his exposure to changes in real rates happens to be equal to his exposure to changes in inflation expectations. Siegel and Waring made this argument in a famous paper called TIPS, the Dual Duration, and the Pension Plan in 2004,[3] although it should be noted that inflation derivatives books were already being managed using this insight by then.
Which leads me in a roundabout way to the point I originally wanted to make: if you own TIPS, then you have no exposure to changes in inflation expectations except inasmuch as there is a (very unstable) correlation between real rates and expected inflation. If inflation expectations change, TIPS will not move unless real rates change.[4]
So, if gold prices are rising and TIPS prices are rising, it isn’t because inflation expectations are rising. In fact, if inflation expectations are rising it is more likely that real yields would also be rising, since those two variables tend to be positively correlated. In fact, real yields have been falling, which is why TIP is rising. The first chart in this article, then, shows a correlation between rising inflation expectations (in gold) and declining real interest rates, which is certainly interesting but not what the author thought he was arguing. It’s interesting because it’s unusual and represents a recovery of TIPS from very, very cheap levels compared to nominal bonds, as I pointed out in January in a piece entitled (argumentatively) “No Strategic Reason to Own Nominal Bonds Now.”
Actually (and the gold bugs will kill me), gold has really outstripped where we would expect it to go, given where inflation expectations have gone. The chart below (source: Bloomberg) shows the front gold contract again, but this time instead of TIP I have shown it against 10-year breakevens.
No, I don’t hate gold, or apple pie, or America. Actually, I think the point of the chart is different. I think gold is closer to “right” here, and breakevens still have quite far to go – eventually. The next 50bps will be harder, though!
[1] I abstract here from the third component that some believe exists systematically, and that is a premium for the uncertainty of inflation. I have never really understood why the lender needed to be compensated for this but the borrower did not; uncertainty of the real value of the repayment is bad for both borrower and lender. I believe this is an error, and interestingly it’s always been very hard for researchers to prove this value is always present and positive.
[2] It’s technically (1+n)=(1+r)(1+i), but for normal levels of these variables the difference is minute. It matters for risk management, however, of large portfolios.
[3] I expanded this in a much less-famous paper called TIPS, the Triple Duration, and the OPEB Liability: Hedging Medical Care Inflation in OPEB Plans in 2011.
[4] What the heck, one more footnote. I had a conversation once with the Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Markets, who was a bit TIPS booster. I told him that TIPS would never truly have the success they deserve unless the Treasury starts calling ‘regular’ bonds “Treasury Inflation-Exposed Securities,” which after all gets to the heart of the matter. He was not particularly amused.
Commodities Beat-Down Continues
The recent commodities sell-off has been breathtaking. This is especially true since the most-recent downturn occurred from a level where the expected future returns from commodity index investment were reasonably good – and, as a spread above expected equity or bond returns, probably around the best levels ever.
But investors have a strong tendency to use the current level, rather than some esoteric measure of value, as the level from which expected market moves are evaluated. What I mean by that is this: in theory, if some event happens in the capital markets, the reaction in the market should depend on whether that event has already been “discounted” in the current price. That is, if we are all expecting Microsoft to raise its dividend, then the price of Microsoft should reflect that change already, and when it subsequently actually happens it should have no effect on price. Indeed, if the market has overestimated the change in fundamental value, then the price of Microsoft should retrace somewhat when the news is actually announced. From that, we get the old saw that one should “buy the rumor, sell the news.”
The fact that this isn’t really what happens is not exactly news. In the early 1980s, Bob Shiller demonstrated that the volatility in the equity marketplace was much greater than the changes in the real underlying values should support.
In practice, investors don’t behave rationally. The same event can be discounted over, and over, and over again. Each investor, it seems, hears news and assumes the current price does not incorporate that news, no matter what has happened previously to the price. Based on my own unscientific observation, I think this is more true now that there are more retail investors, and news outlets that benefit from making everything sound like new information. If my supposition is true, one implication is that markets can deviate further and further from fundamental values. In other words, we get more bubbles and inverse bubbles than we would otherwise.
As a great current example, we might consider commodities. The slowdown in China’s economic activity is discounted anew almost every day, as more information comes out from that country that its economic engine is (at least) sputtering. One would think that China was the only consumer of industrial metals and energy, and that its consumption is going to zero, based on the behavior of these markets. And with every tick higher in the dollar, every commodity seems offered. It’s risk-off, then risk-off again, then risk-off again, ad infinitum.
Now, there is no doubt that commodities in 2008 were overvalued, and arguably in 2011 they were also expensive. But the four-year beat-down of commodities – pretty much the only asset class that has declined in value over that time period – is breathtaking in its depth and, as it turns out, its breadth. I was curious about whether the recent break of major commodities indices to new lows – below the lows of 2008, when it felt like the world was ending (see chart above, source Bloomberg) – was broader, in that it seemed like every commodity was participating. So I put together a chart that shows the proportion of commodities (considering only the 27 major traded commodities that are in the Bloomberg Commodity Index) that were above their 200-day moving averages. The chart is below (Source: Enduring Investments).
It isn’t quite as bad as I had thought. The recent slide has taken the proportion back to 18% (meaning 82% are below their 200-day moving averages), but commodity prices have been sliding for so long that the 200-day averages are now generally declining pretty smartly. Notice in general the post-2011 average, compared to the pre-2008 average. Even without seeing the price chart, you can tell the 2011-2015 bear market from the 2002-2008 bull market!
One other observation about commodities, to be fair. The chart I showed, above, of the Bloomberg Commodity Index, incorporates carry in commodities. That is, it adds the futures roll, and collateral return, to the movement in spot commodities. Over the last few years, the collateral return hasn’t been very good and the roll return has actually been substantially negative, so that the return of spot commodities has in fact been better than the return to commodity indices. The chart below (source: Bloomberg) shows the Bloomberg Spot Commodity Index; you can see that we are still above the 2008 lows.
Being “above the 2008 lows” doesn’t strike me as a strong performance. Stocks are also above the 2008-09 lows, by 200% or so. LQD, the investment-grade bond ETF, is about 45% higher. HYG, the high-yield ETF, is 41% higher. Heck, M2 money supply is around 50% higher than it was in early 2009.
And yet, every time we hear more news about China, investors behave as if it is new information, and sell commodities off some more. As I said above, these moves can last longer these days than they did in the past – but this is unsustainable. With commodities, an added complexity is that investors don’t know how to evaluate expected return (since there are no cash flows), and so it is hard for them to compare “value” to other asset classes. But the value is there.
Proper Seasonal Gold Chart
In an excellent (and free!) daily email I receive, the Daily Shot, I ran across a chart that touched off my quant BS alert.
This chart is from here, and is obviously a few years out-of-date, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is that the chart suggests that gold prices rise 5.5% every year. If you buy gold in January, at an index value of 100, and hold it through the flat part of January-June, then you reap the 5% rally in the second half of the year.
No wonder people love gold! You can get a 10% annual return simply by buying in July and selling in December!
The problem is that this is not the way you should do a seasonal chart. It has not be detrended. We detrend data because that way, we can express the expected return for any given day as (the normal expected return) plus (the seasonal component). This is valuable because, as analysts, we might have a general forecast for gold but we will want to adjust that forecast to a holding period return based on a seasonal pattern. This is very important, for example, with TIPS yields and breakevens, because inflation itself is highly seasonal.
Now, the seasonal chart done correctly still suggests that the best time to own gold is in the second half of the year, but it no longer suggests that owning gold is an automatic winner. (It is a separate argument whether we can reject the null hypothesis of zero seasonality altogether, but that’s not my point here).
If I was doing this chart, I would also include only full calendar years, so if I move the start date back to January 1, 1982 and the end date to December 31, 2014 here is what I get:
Frankly, I would also use real prices rather than nominal prices, since it is much easier to make a statement about the expected real return to gold (roughly zero over time, although it may be more or less than that based on current valuation metrics) than it is to make a statement about the expected nominal return to gold, since the latter includes an embedded assumption about the inflation rate, which I would prefer to strip out. And I would also include data from the 1970s.
