Bill Gross

Over at Equitable Growth: Why Was Bill Gross so Certain Interest Rates Were on the Rise Back in February 2011?: Tuesday Focus for September 30, 2014 by DeLong

The Pimco Perplex by Krugman

It’s fairly clear that the events of 2011 are a large part of the story of Bill Gross’s abrupt departure from Pimco; as Neil Irwin says,

A disastrous bet he made against United States Treasury bonds in 2011 led to three years of underperformance and billions in withdrawals.
And Joshua Brown has some choice quotes:

Gross compounded the move by being extremely vocal about his rationale – he went so far as to call Treasury bonds a “robbery” of investors given their ultra-low interest rates and the potential for inflation. He talked about the need for investors to “exorcise” US bonds from their portfolios, as though the asset class itself was demonic. He called investors in Treasury bonds “frogs being cooked alive in a pot.” 

But why was Gross betting so heavily against Treasuries? Brad DeLong tries to rationalize Gross’s behavior in terms of a coherent story about an impending U.S. recovery, which would lift us out of the liquidity trap. But Gross wasn’t saying anything like that. Instead, he was claiming that the Fed’s asset purchases — QE2 — were holding rates down, and warned that the impending spike in rates when QE2 ended would derail recovery. 

So why did he believe all that? It all comes down, I’d argue, to liquidity trap denial. 

Since 2008 the basic logic of the economic situation has been that the private sector is trying to run a huge surplus, and the public sector isn’t willing to run a corresponding deficit. The result is an economy awash in desired savings with nowhere to go. This in turn means that budget deficits aren’t competing with private borrowing, and therefore need not drive up interest rates. This isn’t hindsight; it’s what I and others have been saying since the very beginning. 

But a lot of people — politicians, of course, but also a lot of people in finance — have just refused to accept this account. They have clung to the view that budget deficits must lead to higher interest rates. You might think the failure of higher rates to materialize, year after year, would cause them to reassess — indeed, would have caused them to reassess years ago. 

Instead, however, many of them made excuses. Above all, the big excuse was that rates would have gone higher if only the Fed weren’t buying up the stuff. So QE2 acquired a much bigger role in their thinking than it deserved, leading to confident predictions of soaring rates as soon as it ended. And Gross put his money — and more importantly, his investors’ money — where his mouth was. 

And he was wrong. QE2 ended, and nothing happened to rates. 

You can see why I found Gillian Tett’s apologia for Gross — that he was blindsided by central bank intervention — frustrating. For one thing, that’s accepting a model that has failed with flying colors; but beyond that, Gross’s really bad call was almost exactly the opposite, his claim that rates would soar when the Fed’s intervention ended. 

As I’ve said, Gross of all people shouldn’t have fallen into this trap, since his own chief economist understood liquidity trap logic better than almost anyone. But finance people seem weirdly determined to believe in a macro canon whose hold on their perceptions appears to be completely unbreakable, no matter how much money it causes them to lose.