In the early 1920s, University of Chicago economist Frank Knight famously drew a distinction between calculable risk and unknowable uncertainty. He overlooked a third domain: unintendedness — where what happens is not what was supposed to happen.
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Law of Unintended Consequences Caused the Great Bond Rout — Niall Ferguson
There is only one true law of history, and that is the law
of unintended consequences. In the early 1920s, University of Chicago economist Frank Knight
famously drew a distinction between calculable risk and unknowable uncertainty.
He overlooked a third domain: unintendedness — where what happens is not what
was supposed to happen. Those whose job it is to manage risk today tend
to focus on the things to which probabilities can be attached and shrug their
shoulders about everything else. They might do better if they simply assumed
that most grand designs will go awry.
Take the sudden surge in nominal and real interest rates we
are witnessing, which has seen the yield on a 10-year US Treasury rise from
0.66% in April 2020 to 4.88% this week. The last time the 10-year yield moved
this much in the space of three years was 1979-82 — back when Fed Chairman Paul
Volcker was slaying the 1970s inflation dragon — a period that saw not one but
two recessions.
I am not the only one getting that nasty 1980s feeling. Last
week my Bloomberg Opinion colleague John Authers was curdling investors’ blood
by recollecting the way a comparable rise in bond yields was followed by the
Black Monday stock market crash in October 1987 — “still the single most
terrifying day in market history” (which is a little hard on the black days of
October 1929).
Yet it is worth looking further back in history. In terms of total returns, this is the biggest bond market rout in 150 years. Last year was in fact US bond investors’ worst year since 1871, with a total return of minus 15.7%, even worse than the annus horribilis of 2009. For 2023, the year-to-date return has been almost minus 10%; annualized, that’s minus 17.3% — even worse than 2022. We are looking at bond investors’ two worst years in a century and a half.
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