by Michael Pento, Market Oracle:

One of the best examples of Wall Street’s propaganda machine at work is its willingness to dismiss recessionary signals. The inverted yield curve is a perfect example. Case in point, look at the story that was put out on Market Watch dated November 27th 2006—exactly one year before the Great Recession officially began, the stock market started its decline of more than half and the global economy started to collapse.

Here’s how some on Wall Street and the Fed described what was happening on the precipice of the global financial crisis regarding the inversion of the yield curve at that time: “Bernanke, and his predecessor Alan Greenspan, have attributed the inverted yield curve to a ‘global savings glut’ that has sparked fervid demand for Treasuries and U.S. corporate bonds. Economists have noted that this buying spree is inconsistent with the possibility of a looming recession. In the past inverted yield curves have been harbingers of recession, but a number of economists, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, do not think this is the case in the present instance.”

A few years earlier, Alan Greenspan told Congress during his annual testimony on November 2005 that he:

“Would hesitate to read into the actual downward tilt of the yield curve as meaning necessarily as it invariably meant 30 or 40 years ago. This used to be one of the most accurate measures we used to have to indicate when a recession was about to occur. It has lost its capability of doing so in recent years.”

In 2006, his successor Ben Bernanke appeared to be even more confident that the flat yield curve was caused by the “significant increase in the global supply of savings” and nothing to say about the faltering economy. In his March 2006 speech to the Economic Club of NY Bernanke stated he “would not interpret the currently very flat yield curve as indicating a significant economic slowdown”  instead he bloviated on about four other anomalies adding to the demand for US long term debt that was putting downward pressure on the long end of the curve. First and foremost, among his excuses was strong international demand for US debt. Perhaps it was his indifference to the curve inversion that caused him to assure investors in May of 2007 in a speech given at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago,

“Given the fundamental factors in place that should support the demand for housing, we believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited.”

In other words, he wanted investors to ignore the yield curve inversion because in the Fed’s infinite wisdom everything was just fine.

The first lady Chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, is now taking her turn assuring investors of the yield curve’s irrelevance; explaining very recently on a Fox Business Network interview dated August 14th, 2019:

“Historically, [the yield curve inversion] has been a pretty good signal of recession and I think that’s when markets pay attention to it, but I would really urge that on this occasion it may be a less good signal.”

And, turning to the current dictator of monetary policy, Jerome Powell, he said in his March of 2018 news conference that while the inverted yield curve has had its prescience in the past,

“but a lot of that was just situations in which inflation was allowed to get out of control, and the Fed had to tighten, and that put the economy into a recession.  That’s really not the situation we’re in now.”

The Fed and Wall Street are great at concocting stories to claim that it is different this time. One of their favorite and reliable false narratives is that an inverted yield curve is not a harbinger of recession. Well, this time is most likely not at all different, despite the fact that a never-ending parade of gurus come on financial news networks and explain why this time the yield curve inversion is irrelevant.

What is the major point here? Besides the fact that central bankers and Wall Street Shills never learn their lessons, it is that an inverted yield curve is not some exogenous event that is coincidently linked to recessions. It is always a sign of a slowing global economy and the imminent collapse of unstable asset bubbles that were built on cheap credit. This is because an inverted yield curve causes credit to shut down. When the difference between where banks can borrow funds (short end of the curve) and what income their assets can generate (long end of the curve) shrinks towards zero, the incentive to lend money erodes. And, since the slowing economy dramatically increases the risk of loan defaults, lending institutions become much more reticent to extend new credit at low margins to those that have higher potential to default. The result is a significant reduction in the amount of money created; the same money that fuels these asset bubbles and the overleveraged economy.

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