My parents and I both agree that their generation has been robbed. With low interest rates, central bankers have stolen the retirement income that people like my parents spent decades working hard and saving for. It is impossible not to get angry thinking about it. Across the world, those central bankers have declared war on savers. I recently wrote to you about how global interest rates are now at the lowest they have been in 5,000 years. That means we are living in a world with a Stone Age monetary policy. We are in strange times... As you might expect, this absurdly low interest rate world is creating some odd things. Case in point, what I saw happen late last month... There Is No Chance That This Will End Well There are other investors who are badly hurt by 5,000-year-low interest rates: pension funds, insurance companies and other big institutions that have to try to generate a yield from their investment portfolios. These institutions have no option but to own fixed income securities. With the most secure places to earn interest income paying almost nothing, those institutions are being forced to take risks to generate yield. In the business, we call this "chasing yield," or taking on too much risk to generate too little return. When it comes to chasing yield, what some institutions were doing late last month really takes the cake. Somehow, the country of Peru was able to issue $1 billion of 100-year U.S. dollar debt at an interest rate of just 3.3%. That means institutional investors willingly handed over money to the Peruvian government to hold for the next 100 years in exchange for annual interest payments of 3.3%. Let's break that down a little bit... The best-case result for the institutions buying 100-year Peruvian bonds is a 3.3% annual return. That is if everything goes right. Now, let's think about what the worst-case scenario might be... |
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