Americans should be celebrating a robust job market and the gradual return to pre-COVID norms. Yet people are bummed out, and many voters blame President Biden.
Employers created a remarkable 336,000 new jobs in September, far beyond forecasters’ expectations. For months, economists have been expecting a slowdown in hiring, and maybe even a recession, since that’s what normally happens when the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates, as it has been doing, to combat inflation.
Something feels wrong, all the same. Inflation has come down from a peak of 9% in June of 2022 to a more manageable 3.7%. That’s obviously good, but consumers are still feeling shocked by the price hikes of the last two years. Income gains have failed to keep up with inflation during most of Biden’s presidency, and they’ve only begun to catch up during the last few months.
Now comes an unexpected surge in interest rates that seems unrelated to what the Fed is doing. The Fed hikes short-term rates, which has an indirect effect on longer-term rates that determine what consumers pay for mortgages, car loans, and credit card borrowing. The Fed’s last interest rate hike was in July, and many investors think the central bank is done raising rates.
Yet longer-term rates have been rising anyway. Since the Fed’s last rate hike, which was just one-quarter of a percentage point, the rate on the 10-year Treasury bond has jumped by nearly a full percentage point. It’s now at 4.8%, the highest level since 2007, when the Great Recession began.
The 10-year Treasury may be the world’s most important bond, since it’s the benchmark for trillions of dollars in consumer loans and an easily accessible investing alternative to stocks. As bond rates rise, at least two things happen that affect stock values: One, corporate borrowing costs rise, which means lower profits. And two, bonds become a more attractive alternative to stocks, since the return rises.
The bond market doesn’t announce why rates are going up, leaving it up to investors to figure out. And several factors seem to be part of the cause. A slowdown in China means less Chinese demand for US Treasuries, and China is normally one of the biggest buyers. A rise in interest rates in Japan makes those bonds a more appealing alternative to US bonds. Weakening demand for bonds means the issuer has to offer higher prices — interest rates — to find buyers.
Traders work on the New York Stock Exchange floor in New York City, on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2023. Treasury yields surged in September and sapped the energy from a strong stock market as investors came to terms with the likelihood that interest rates will remain high well into 2024. (Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo, File) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
America’s gigantic national debt may also be a factor — finally. Some economists have been predicting for a long time that “bond vigilantes” would eventually punish the United States for recklessly racking up trillions of dollars of debt with no plan for how to deal with it. Yet interest rates stayed low, even as total US debt more than tripled, from $10 trillion in 2008 to $33 trillion now.
America’s privileged treatment by the bond market may finally be ending. In 2015, the annual deficit was a relatively modest $442 billion. It hit $984 billion in 2019 — the last year before COVID — then ballooned to $3.1 trillion in 2020 and $2.8 trillion in 2021. The back-to-normal deficit for 2023 will likely be around $1.6 trillion — four times the 2015 level — and deficits will only drift upward for the foreseeable future.
S&P Global downgraded the US credit rating for the first time ever in 2011. Fitch downgraded the United States in August of this year, and Moody’s suggested it may do so as well if there’s more fiscal chicanery. And there almost certainly will be more fiscal chicanery now that Republicans have fired House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, making a government shutdown in December more likely and basically halting all budget planning until who knows when.
The recent rise in rates is what a bond-market rebellion against America’s dysfunctional debt politics would look like. And it seeps directly into the real economy. Mortgage rates now average 7.5%, the highest in 23 years. That’s contributing to a searing housing affordability crisis. Stocks have slumped since the end of July, during the same window that rates have been creeping up.
Americans have been overlooking the strong job market and signaling they’re very unhappy with the Biden economy, pushing Biden’s approval rating below 40% in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of polls. Voters may not understand the intricacies of the bond market, but they’re sniffing out trouble, and now the bond market seems to be saying, yep.
A three-month surge in interest rates doesn’t automatically doom Biden’s reelection effort. Some economists think rates should ease as inflation continues to decline and the Fed definitively signals it’s done boosting short-term rates. The Fed could even start cutting rates again if a recession blows in. But a bumptious bond market in 2023 could hint at further pain facing some president before long, be it Biden or otherwise.
