NIRP has proven to be a dud as far as monetary policy goes.
Europe has implemented FOUR NIRP cuts since June 2014. Throughout this period, EU inflation has barely flat-lined.
The story is similar for Japan, which implemented NIRP at the end of February 2016. Since then the Yen has surged.
While Japanese inflation is trending down:
Mr Kuroda often points to signs of stronger inflation in goods prices, with the BoJ adopting a new version of the CPI that leaves out energy but includes processed food. However, the trend has slowed in the past few months.
According to Nowcast, a company that uses supermarket scanner data to track inflation ahead of the official figures, this kind of “core-core” CPI fell from a year-on-year rise of 1.42 per cent in December to 1.31 per cent in January, 1.21 per cent in February and 1.16 per cent in March.
Source: Financial Times
Put simply, NIRP is not effective in any way at generating significant inflation. The reason is that NIRP is in fact DE-flationary as it frightens savers and investors into hoarding cash.
Psychologically people are more afraid of losing what they have than they are of missing out on potential gains. NIRP is a guarantee that you will lose some of what you have. As such, it has a hugely deflationary on consumers.
Look for Central Banks to shift further from NIRP in the coming months. The political consequences are too great and the policy too controversial to remain en vogue for much longer.
This leaves QE as the last viable Central Bank monetary policy.
Indeed, both the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank are prepping markets for another round of QE.
The Bank of Japan was flirting with the idea as far back as Japan before it implemented NIRP. Given the fallout from the latter policy, expect more QE from Japan in the near future:
A summary of the Bank of Japan's January meeting underlined that central bank officials are open to enlarging their massive quantitative easing program.
The minutes released Friday of the Jan. 28-29 policy meeting showed that officials explored an expansion of already-massive asset purchases and an introduction of negative rates before they decided to move with the latter option. The new insight will likely add to expectations that the central bank may unleash additional monetary stimulus through both channels as early as next month to revitalize its efforts to combat deflation…
One was an "expansion of QQE that consists of an acceleration in the paces of increase in the monetary base and asset purchases," the minutes said. QQE is short for "quantitative and qualitative easing," an asset-buying program through which the BOJ has pumped cash into the banking system at an annual pace of Y80 trillion since October 2014 in efforts to spur inflation.
Source: Marketwatch
Meanwhile in Europe, plans are underway to expand QE to include asset buying by national Central banks as well as the ECB:
In its implementation of the public sector purchase programme (PSPP), the Eurosystem intends to conduct purchases in a gradual and broad-based manner, aiming to achieve market neutrality in order to avoid interfering with the market price formation mechanism.
In principle, purchases of nominal marketable debt instruments at a negative yield to maturity are permissible as long as the yield is above the deposit facility rate.
According to the configuration of the PSPP, substitute purchases are conducted if purchases of marketable debt instruments issued by the central government and agencies need to be complemented to implement the relevant NCB’s share of purchases through the end of the APP. Given the extension of the APP until March 2017 and the increase in the monthly purchase pace to EUR 80 bn, some further NCBs are now expected to participate in substitute purchases. [translation= more national banks to participate in the program]
Source: ECB Europa
In short, both the ECB and Bank of Japan are preparing to expand their QE programs shortly. This is why both Gold and Silver are breaking out of long-term wedge patterns.
Central Banks are prepping the printing presses. Look for inflation hedges to hit lift off shortly.
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