Jupiter Merlin Weekly: Taking stock of a momentous year
The Jupiter Merlin team look back on 12 months that have seen geopolitical earthquakes, as the tectonic plates of power inexorably shift.
“Russia, China and Iran will all enjoy their moment of hubris about the US and NATO’s humiliation (not least President Putin seeing the tables turned after the Russians were defeated in the 1980s by the Afghan Mujahedeen who were funded and trained by the CIA). Further, the lack of NATO members willing fully to participate in ISAF (the multi-national International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan), even after later terrorist atrocities in Europe, will not be lost on NATO’s potential foes. The cumulative effect of Biden’s various foreign policy failures may embolden these key players to push the boundaries even further than they already are. Afghanistan might sit squarely in central Asia, but the geopolitical ripples of apprehension are likely to be felt as far afield as the Baltic States, Ukraine and Taiwan”.
We saw spreading ripples of apprehension. However, lest we might be seen to be blowing our own trumpet, we had no crystal ball foresight; alongside just about every other market commentator, we certainly did not predict a major war in the centre of Europe beginning within six months!
If the aim was to isolate the Taliban, to bring it to heel, it failed miserably: in fact, all it did was to impoverish and punish the entire population. Reduced under the yoke of the Taliban to almost medieval standards of living and facing acute famine but with the Taliban itself increasingly ideologically divided between the hard-line religious radicals and a more pragmatic, ‘moderate’ wing (it is all on a relative scale), the country is reportedly a social tinderbox potentially on the verge of exploding into civil war. That a year on, and in complete contravention of Trump’s Doha Agreement, the Taliban is still provenly harbouring international terrorist groups is merely the latest indictment of a misguided, inept and ultimately failed western policy towards Afghanistan. We have discussed before the competing interests and sensibilities of Afghanistan’s neighbours: Pakistan, Iran, Russia and its satellites to the north (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan), and China. A potential civil war which creates a vacuum which might then draw any of them in or creates political tensions for them at home would be deeply unhelpful.
One thing is for sure, weighing up the possibilities in his strategic and tactical calculations, General Secretary Xi will be taking copious notes on Putin’s own very obvious strategic errors and tactical mistakes from the invasion of Ukraine, and making sure he does not repeat them were he to use military force against Taiwan (bearing in mind also that an amphibious operation is a much more challenging prospect than Putin’s relatively straight forward land attack). He will also be weighing up the potential western response having seen the reaction of NATO towards Russia and noting the publicly hopelessly confused and contradictory messages emanating from the White House and the Pentagon about US obligations (or not, as the case may be) to Taiwan.
Taiwan is a potential military flashpoint but is only one element of the wider strategic threat posed by China through its neo-colonialist ambitions encompassed in the One Belt One Road project and the maritime ‘String of Pearls’ development, and its active and very current militarisation of the South China Sea through its creeping appropriation of the Spratley Islands.
Still stung by the hullabaloo of ‘sexed-up’ intelligence, dodgy dossiers, and the accusations of being partial with the facts ahead of the Second Gulf War and toppling Saddam, all levelled against the intelligence community, the security services are now highly sensitive to further charges of crying wolf or making unsubstantiated claims. As it was, they were spot on about Russia and Ukraine. So it is interesting that in only a handful of years, augmented by the political rhetoric from Beijing a year ago on the centenary of the CCP’s founding when Xi was unequivocal about his intention to restore Taiwan to mother China, the western narrative on Taiwan has shifted markedly from one of virtually dismissing the possibility of annexation, to speculating if China might take it back again, now to one of it WILL happen and it is just a question of how China does it and when it thinks it can get away with it. Oh, and we might have a nuclear war.
Russia alone is causing enough grief. But a conflict with China would be of a different order of magnitude in its economic effect. Russia ranks as the 11th biggest economy globally but at $1.9 trillion of GDP it is only a tenth the size of China. Russia is obviously important in a global context thanks to its wealth of natural resources and its significant commodity exports. But beyond that, it is a trading minnow. China, on the other hand, at 18% of global GDP, is embedded in the very foundations of global manufacturing, woven into the fabric of the world’s supply chains. In the event of 100% mutual sanctions being imposed, for us in the UK for example, based on the Department for International Trade’s 2021 direct trade data, the impact to the UK economy would be £17.5bn attached to Russian trade (we export £4.6bn and import £12.5bn), but £82.4bn in respect of China (we export goods worth £18.8bn to China, importing £63.6bn from it). This ignores any collateral disruption and its associated significant frictional costs.
But where is the heightened geopolitical risk being reflected in bond yield curves today, let alone any other long-term risks, including the next industrial revolution as the world migrates (probably far from seamlessly) towards a carbon net-zero society by 2050?
The answer is that the risk is apparently not reflected at all. Look at the yield curve for US government bonds: for a bond with one year until maturity the yield is around 3.10%, two years until maturity it is around 3.06%; five years 2.80%; ten years 2.70%; and thirty years 2.98%. You’ll note that those numbers don’t change much, and in fact even trend lower over time – this is known as an ‘inverted’ yield curve.
The near-term yield is entirely dominated by the markets’ perceptions of Federal Reserve interest rate policy, as it attempts to contain inflation, and the increasing likelihood of it wrecking the economy in the process. But if one travels further forward in time, looking at bonds with more time until their maturity date, the market is current ascribing virtually zero additional investment risk from the future’s inherent uncertainty. Indeed, the inversion of the yield curve implies that the market sees today’s economic risks as being far greater than tomorrow’s broader geopolitical ones, or next year’s, or any year’s all the way out to 2032. Even by 2052 the amount of perceived risk is negligibly different to 2027’s, let alone today’s.
This is important because the US 10-Year government bond yield is the world’s accepted proxy for a ‘risk-free’ rate of return for capital projects with a duration of a decade. Such is investors’ seeming confidence that all the market demands today for a ‘risk-free’ investment over a decade period is a paltry 2.7%. Yet 12 months ago, investors, treasury ministers and central bank policy makers were unable to predict that in less than a year, thanks to Covid and Putin, inflation would be running away at 4/5 times the central bank mandated targets and, far from enjoying the growth boost of the post-pandemic ‘re-opening trade’, the wheels would be falling off the economy.
Inevitably the situation is more complex than this. The trajectory of bond yields is capable of being heavily influenced by central banks, as we have clearly seen since the global financial crisis. We say ‘influenced’ rather than explicitly manipulated: while manipulating the curve to target a specific yield is the official policy of the Bank of Japan, such strategies are forbidden for the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. The brutal volatility seen in recent months in US, eurozone and UK government bond yields demonstrates that most bond markets are beyond the direct control of their central banks. Of course, other agencies exert their own pressures too, for example in the UK the Pensions Regulator dictating what minimum percentage of pension funds’ assets must be held in bonds to match their liabilities.
But, technicalities aside, viewing it at the high level, there are only two logical conclusions: that in ascribing no discernible term risk premium, investors either see no greater risk in the future, or, more likely they have filed it away for another day, labelled TBD, ‘To Be Decided’. Or is it more prosaically and more accurately ‘Too Bleeding Difficult’?
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