Interest rates today are neither too high nor too low. Like Goldilocks, you might even say they are “just right.”
This certainly puts in a different light the intense debate currently about whether the Federal Reserve will raise rates, lower them, or keep them the same. Many insist that interest rates are at historically low levels and need to be raised, not only to tamp down any inflationary pressures but also to restore the Fed’s firepower so that it can respond forcefully when the next economic downturn occurs.
On the other hand are those who — like President Donald Trump— believe rates are already so high, they will cause that same economic downturn, and therefore need to be cut ASAP. In this scenario, a failure to cut rates could cause broad U.S. markets averages such as the S&P 500 SPX, -0.01% to tumble.
One big reason why this debate is so intractable is that both sides are guilty of what economists refer to as “money illusion” or “inflation illusion.” That is, they focus on nominal interest rates and thereby ignore the role of inflation. That’s a huge error.
Another factor both sides too often ignore here is taxes. Of course, not all bond owners pay taxes, since a significant chunk of the fixed-income market is held in tax-deferred or tax-free accounts. But at the same time it would be wrong to insist that taxes play no role in the interest rate level set by the marketplace.
A recent study circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) devised several sophisticated methods for determining the net, real-world role that taxes play in setting interest rates. The study, “Are Interest Rates Really Low?,” was conducted by Ivo Welch, chair of the finance department at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business; Clinton Tepper, a PhD candidate at UCLA, and Daniel Feenberg, a research associate at NBER. They estimated that “the financial-market relevant taxation on interest payments” is currently at a rate of between 20% and 25%.
When adjusting nominal rates by both inflation and this “financial-market relevant” tax rate, a far different picture emerges than when focusing on nominal rates. Consider the yield on the U.S. one-year Treasury bill TMUBMUSD01Y, +0.13% , which currently stands at 1.93%. After taxes and inflation, that yield is minus 0.76%. And while that might seem low, it in fact is higher than the average over the last 15 years, which stands at minus 0.91% — as you can see from the chart below.
To be sure, the current real, after-tax one-year interest rate is not in a significant statistical sense higher than the 15-year average. It is just 0.2 standard deviations above that average, in fact. Instead, the proper conclusion to draw is that current interest rates are neither particularly high nor particularly low — but “mundane,” as the NBER researchers put it.
This conclusion doesn’t help us forecast what the Fed is likely to do at its rate-setting meetings this year. But it does force us to reframe our arguments. If we are basing our arguments for what the Fed should do on claims that interest rates are either well-above or well-below average, we need to come up with new rationales — or give up our arguments altogether.
The broader investment lesson is that we should always subject prevailing opinions to historical and statistical scrutiny. That should go without saying, but in this social-media age we can all too easily fall into the trap of thinking that if enough people “like” something we say, it must be true.
In fact, as Humphrey Neill, the father of contrary analysis, liked to remind investors: “When everyone thinks alike, everyone is likely to be wrong.”
Mark Hulbert is a regular contributor to MarketWatch. His Hulbert Ratings tracks investment newsletters that pay a flat fee to be audited. Hulbert can be reached at mark@hulbertratings.com
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