RUSH: How long ago was it that the economy was booming and they were trying to say it’s Obama’s economy, right? Now all of a sudden U.S. Steel’s laying some people off, negative bond yields in Germany and all of a sudden we’re on the verge of a recession and all of a sudden it’s Trump’s economy again!
Look, I could provide you ongoing evidence of the fact that these people are losing their minds predominantly because none of what they’re doing to try to destroy Trump is sticking.
In fact, you saw just before the program began the AP has a new poll out. And don’t forget. I haven’t dropped it. Laurence Tribe claiming that Trump’s objective here is to reverse the outcome of the Civil War. How exactly would that be done? What is Laurence Tribe actually saying? That Trump is trying to bring back slavery? That Trump is trying to reconstitute slavery? Anybody paying scant attention to this can clearly see who is losing their mind and who’s off the reservation.
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RUSH: Kevin in Houston, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hello, Rush! Real quickly you and I met back in the nineties at Mile High Stadium when you did a brief broadcast of the Broncos-Bills game, and I today still have your autograph on that press pass. So thank you very much.
RUSH: (laughing) That was the opening game of the season that year.
CALLER: Yes, it was.
RUSH: The Monday night game. I remember. Thank you, sir.
CALLER: You betcha. Hey, real quickly, this inverted yield stuff, in my humble opinion, is being looked at completely wrong by virtually everybody. Let me tell you why. The two-year bond now has a greater return than the 10-year bond. Why? Because over the next two years, the Trump economy is still gonna be in play. Down the road, a couple of two-year bonds here, two-year bonds there, Trump’s economy’s gonna be in play. Ten years from now, even when Trump is reelected in 2020, he will be out of office, and it will be somebody else’s economy and probably not one you want to take a long-term bet on.
RUSH: Well, that is one way of looking at it, the two-year versus the 10-year bond. The problem is you can’t just buy two-year bonds alone. You have to buy and you have to sell a mixture. The real evolution of this story is the blockbuster news that you people have been aware was coming because you listen here. Germany actually did it. They sold 30-year bonds at a negative interest rate, meaning the people who bought bonds to finance Germany’s debt agreed to take no return on their bonds. They agreed to lose money on the deal. The reason why is what is fascinating.
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RUSH: I want to get back to the yield curve. I could go on for another 10 minutes about this because it’s so irritating. There’s big news today out of Germany. We’re talking about negative yields, particularly in the bond market, and I mentioned that I had an interview with Larry Kudlow, the council of economic advisers to the president for the latest issue of The Limbaugh Letter.
And I asked him, ’cause he was really praising the U.S. economy, speaking about it glowingly, what great shape our economy’s in. And he was going down all the things that make it strong. I said, “What’s the biggest vulnerability?” He said, “The rest of the world.” I said, “What do you mean?” He started describing the economies of our allied nations as being very, very unstable and trending down.
I said, “Well, how can this be? How can they look, Larry, at the United States economy, not just now but over the course of the history of our countrym, I mean, we’re the largest market in the world. We’re one of the youngest countries in the history of the world, and we have a higher the standard of living, we have more disposable income, prosperity, all the measures of economic success that you could have, and we dwarf the world. Why do these other nations, particularly our allies, not emulate us?”
He said, “A-ha. This is a good question.” He said the first answer is, “Well, they’ve got their own answers, Rush, and they’ve got their own computer models. And they’ve got their own ways. And they think their ways are better. They don’t want to emulate us. They’re tired of the United States being so strong.”
“But we protect ’em, Larry! We’re not their enemy!”
“But, Rush, there are a lot of socialists in these allied nations, western socialist Democracies, and they’re gonna run their economies the way they want.”
“But the model, Larry, you talk about models, the model for how to have a growing, robust economy with market freedom for the great bulk of the population is right here in the United States. He said they’re not gonna do it. They’re gonna stick to their models. They know better. They’ve been around longer than we have. And they’re not free marketeers, Rush.”
So I said, “Okay. Give me an example of the vulnerability you’re talking about.” He said there’s nowhere in the world right now. If you have money to invest, there’s nowhere in the world but the United States. This was kind of a foretelling of what happens. Would you invest in Germany right now? Would you buy bonds in Germany when the money you spend buying the bond is gonna lose value over the course of your ownership of the bond? Would you spend a thousand dollars buying a bond and in 30 years get $900 back for it? No. You wouldn’t.
So you come to the United States, you invest in the United States. Well, that causes a flood of activity in the American market. The laws of supply and demand take over. And our own yield curve ends up getting affected because there’s nowhere else in the world to invest. On the one hand it’s great. On the other hand, it creates problems.
Let’s focus on Germany. Imagine lending money to somebody and having to pay them. That is what’s happening in Germany. Or, another way to look at it. They ask you to invest, they ask you to buy bonds in Germany, government bonds to finance German debt, and they ask you how much are you willing to lose? Negative yields, negative interest rate. There is no interest rate gain of 1%, one and a half, five percent, nothing.
You buy a one-thousand-dollar bond in Germany, after it matures it’s gonna be less than a thousand dollars you get back. Why would somebody do this? There were people that made tracks in Germany, all kinds of people participated in an auction to buy such bonds in Germany yesterday. Why? Well, there is an answer. It’s coming up.
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RUSH: Anyway, on the yield curve business, here is the AP. Now take this under advisement. This is the Associated Press explanation of the negative yield bond sale in Germany because this sale of bonds, this auction, a lot of people showed up to buy bonds that were gonna cost them money. Now, why would you do that?
Well, one of the reasons is you expect the economy to be really bad for a lot of years. You expect the economy to be so bad that if you can buy a bond where it doesn’t cost you very much to buy it, you’ll be way ahead of the game. This is the epitome of pessimism and negativism. Now, given the Europeans and their economic decisions and their mass immigration and so forth, I can understand people thinking this about their economies.
We’ve been propping them up for I don’t know how long. But the real reason that people are doing this is because they think the economy in Germany is gonna be so bad for so long that this is the way to limit the damage. There aren’t people in Germany even thinking about economic growth. They’re not even thinking about finding ways to make money.
What they’re doing is buying into this notion, buy this bond, pay this little for it, and you’ll be way ahead of the game. If you wait too much longer, you’re gonna be losing even more when you buy this bond. So the presumption behind this is that there is no rosy economic future. Now, this is Germany but would include all of Europe.
“The bond market is also responding to expectations that many central banks such as the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank will respond to economic weakness and the raging trade conflict between the U.S. and China by unleashing more stimulus to try to drive down interest rates.”
So they’re trying to tell us that the smart money is buying into this because this — forget earning money. The focus now is how do you to lose the least. And the way you lose the least is to buy in early where you don’t have to lose very much to finance Germany’s debt. Do you want to play ball that way?
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