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Meditations In An Emergency
It’s now less than a week to go until the USA decides who is going to be their next President. The state of the political discourse recalls the ‘dramatic crossroads’ meme, where the respective labels attached to the sunny uplands and the grim castle of doom is a Rorschach test to confirm our political priors.
I’ve chosen my words deliberately to say that the USA will be deciding on their next President - rather than the next ‘leader of the free world’ - because one of the options on the table is a more isolationist approach to trade and foreign policy where the USA may decline to perform the leadership role, instead prodding oftentimes recalcitrant allies into shouldering more of the global security burden.
That could draw the curtain on the ‘Team America World Police’ neocon phase, or even Woodrow Wilson’s “making the world safe for democracy” idyll, if you prefer to cast your view further back. What’s now clear is that the bond market and the DXY is becoming sensitized to the potential implications of another Trump win.
US 10-year yields were down almost 3bps overnight, but are up more than 55bps since the Fed cut rate in mid-September. Americans who had been holding out for rate cuts before they went house shopping are again contending with mortgage rates beginning with a 7-handle, because US mortgages tend to be priced off the long end of the yield curve.
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