One very important point being raised in this article from the Economist: "Controlling for the range of things that influence interest rates, from growth to demography, economists have attempted to gauge the impact of reserve accumulation. Francis and Veronica Warnock of the University of Virginia concluded that foreign-bond purchases lowered yields on ten-year Treasuries by around 0.8 percentage points in 2005. A recent working paper by researchers at the European Central Bank found a similar effect: increased foreign holdings of euro-area bonds reduced long-term interest rates by about 1.5 percentage points during the mid-2000s."
Which brings us to the idea of the 'savings glut' over the 2000s. I covered this in this article concerning the twin threats of supply and demand side-driven secular stagnation.
The Economist give us one side of that equation: Sovereign Reserves
All of which has two implications:
- The commodities bubble bursting will have a second order effect on longer-term expected cost of Government borrowing in the advanced economies by removing the surplus of savings accumulated in the official accounts in the Emerging Markets. Which makes unwinding monetary policy excesses (from the balancesheets of the Central Banks in the advanced economies) so much harder. The knock on effect of this will be lower solvency of the Western pensions funds in the longer run; and
- Depletion of savings on the sovereign side will require increased savings on the private sector side. Which will have compounding effect on demand.
Both points reinforce the adverse impact on global growth prospects.
