Janet Yellen can take the next year off: Greg Valliere

The Brexit is the bane of central bankers.

Forget a July rate hike. Forget September. Forget November, December and February (2017). Markets that predict whether or not the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates at a given future meeting are signaling no rate hike for the foreseeable future.

To the contrary, it’s more likely the Fed will cut rates later this year or early 2017. If that’s the case, maybe Janet Yellen will have to return to work in six months. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do except jawbone and provide temporary liquidity. And let’s not forget that only this week she said that she has full legal clearance to pursue negative rates right here in the U.S.

Speaking of negative rates, Bank of Japan president Haruhiko Kuroda is conducting a grand monetary experiment that is figuratively blowing up in his face. Aside from Mark Carney at the Bank of England, he’s getting hit the hardest. The yen strengthened against the dollar by nearly 7% overnight Friday, while the Nikkei plummeted by 8%.

Capital is fleeing every risk market in the world and is seeking the safety of the least dirty shirts in the laundry basket. That would be government bonds of the US, Japan, Germany and Switzerland.

The Brexit is the bane of central bankers

The Brexit is a central banker’s worst nightmare. They’ve all been fighting to avoid a deflationary spiral since the financial panic—sometimes winning, sometimes losing. They fear that when asset prices decline, such as houses and stocks, it feeds on itself, while they increasingly lose ammunition to fight it.

Lower prices are good for consumers, but bad when their wealth is evaporating. Central bankers believe the antidote is to print money—flood the banks with liquidity and watch it trickle down. That’s what QEs 1, 2 and 3 were about. That’s what negative rates are about.

The problem is that the Fed’s QE programs only lifted asset prices. The “recovery” is the worst since World War II, as it’s taken seven years to get back to reasonable unemployment levels. Every time one central bank raises the stakes, another shortly follows. It’s a competitive race to the bottom.

Donald Trump thinks a devalued currency is good. “The pound is down … and they’re going to do more business,” he said early Friday in Scotland. The UK might export more goods in the future because they’ve suddenly become much cheaper in international markets. But there’s a flip side. Imports correspondingly become more expensive.

And that’s a problem because the UK currently imports more than it exports—to the tune of $48.5 billion, or $757 per every man, woman and child, according to data compiled by Yahoo Finance. Actually, those numbers are pre-Brexit. The currency devaluation just increased the total by $3.9 billion. Every Briton paid a $61 exit tax Friday—and that’s only the beginning. In the long run, they may or may not be better off, but it will have nothing to do with currency devaluation.

It’s going to take years to sort this out, and will take months for the markets to heal. As Mohamed El-Erian of Allianz wrote Friday, “the stunning outcome of the UK's referendum provides more questions than answers…The heightened uncertainty, fueled by sudden institutional instability now compounding long-standing economic fragility and financial fluidity, is likely to cause an unprecedented mix of political turmoil, financial volatility and economic damage in the weeks ahead.”

Enjoy the time off, Yellen.

Advertisement