A regular reader asked what I think about REITs in a comment last Friday.  I thought I’d answer him here, starting in a more general way.

One of the safer conclusions we can draw from the US election results is that interest rates are going to be rising over the next couple of years.  Most likely this will happen at a more rapid rate than under the Washington gridlock scenario a Hillary victory would probably have perpetuated.

Two reasons:

–the US appears to be at or near full employment, as evidenced by recent wage gain acceleration, so rates would be rising to fend off future inflation in any event, and

–Republicans, who have been blocking Obama’s infrastructure spending proposals (for no good economic reason), are in favor of fiscal stimulus now that they will get the credit. This will remove some of the pressure the Fed is now under to compensate for congressional failure to do its part to restore economic stability.

What happens to stocks and bonds as rates go up?

cash

— a point of merely academic interest right now, but something to tuck away in the back of our minds, there could come a time when the returns on cash are high enough to draw money to it that would otherwise have gone to stocks and bonds.  I don’t know what that point might be, just that it’s a long time away.  The question to answer is:  if the expected return for stocks is 8% a year and I can get, say, 4% in a savings account, am I willing to take the greater risk of owning stocks?

government bonds

–if we take the simplest case, a government bond is a high-quality promise (i) to pay a specified amount of interest for a set period of time, and (ii) to return the principal at the end of the bond’s term.

The annual return on a bond should be the return on cash + a premium to compensate for tying one’s money up for a long period of time.  At the moment, the rate for a 10-year Treasury bond is about 2.16%.  That compares with, say, 0.5% for overnight money.

Suppose the rate on overnight money rises to 2.0%.  A newly-issued 10-year would likely have to yield at a minimum, say, 3.25% to draw buyers (yes, the time premium normally fades as rates rise).  This implies that an already-existing 10-year yielding 2.16% must be worth less than par (since the going rate for a bond at par is 3.25%).

In other words, as interest rates go up, the value of an existing bond goes down.  There’s nothing the issuer can do to change that dynamic.  Since the issuer has the use of what is now cheap money, he will presumably have no desire to change it, either.

More tomorrow.