Investors have rational reasons to park some cash in U.S. Treasurys, says DataTrek’s Colas
Have investors swapped fears of surging inflation for worries about stalling global economic growth? Perhaps, but there’s still a lot of optimism about prospects for corporate earnings and the economy in the months ahead.
Those apparent growth fears, however, were holding sway on Thursday. Anunrelenting rally in longer-term U.S.Treasury pricescontinued to hammer down yields, sending the 10-year rateTMUBMUSD10Y,1.321%to a five-month low below 1.25%. As investors sought safety in the long end of the bond market, stocks tumbled, with the Dow Jones Industrial AverageDJIA,-0.75%down more than 500 points at its session low.
Yields and stocks havetrimmed their fallThursday afternoon, but remain down, with the 10-year yield off 2 basis points at 1.30%. The Dow was down around 300 points, or 0.9%. After closing at records Wednesday, the S&P 500SPX,-0.86%declined 0.8% and the Nasdaq CompositeCOMP,-0.72%shed 0.5%.
A debate has raged among investors and analysts over the explanation for the fall in Treasury yields, which seem to be driving moves across financial markets. But take them all together, and they point to a general sense of unease about what will power a stock market that’s hit a string of record highs amid what many expect to be peak economic growth.
“Our working theory is that we’re in the middle of a modest global growth scare…,” wrote Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research, in a Thursday note.
Before Thursday’s selloff, which saw large-cap growth stocks get clobbered alongside more cyclically oriented stocks, the worries had appeared largely invisible to the S&P 500 index because of its high-quality growth/big tech overweight, Colas said. But they were apparent when looking at other phenomenon that have taken place since June 1, including a higher U.S. dollar, a fall of more than 4% for the MSCI Emerging Markets indexEEM,-2.08%,and a 0.5% decline for the small-cap Russell 2000RUT,-0.94%.
And yields on foreign government bonds have also fallen, with the 10-year German bund yieldTMBMKDE-10Y,-0.305%falling to -0.3% through Wednesday from -0.11%, while the Japanese 10-year yieldTMBMKJP-10Y,0.036%dropped to 0.04% from 0.09% at the end of May.
There are individual story lines behind all those moves, Colas acknowledged, including China’s crackdown on tech companies, the Russell 2000’s overstretched rally earlier this year, and concerns about the spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 could trigger new lockdowns.
Combine the narratives, however, and it produces an environment “where investors might rationally say, ‘I’ll park some capital in Treasurys until things become more clear,'” Colas said.
He’s among the optimists, arguing that while yields could continue to fall in coming weeks, it’s too early to write the obituary for the global economic recovery. Instead, this appears to be a moment like those in past cycles where markets “temporarily stop and reassess.”
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