William White, along with others, answered a question posed by the editors of The International Economy for their Winter 2022 edition: “To what extent is today’s massive global ocean of liquidity breaking all the rules in US financial markets?” White suggests (page 10) that nominal bond rates have stayed low, in part, because the Fed has convinced the bond markets that real rates are “naturally” low, and that higher inflation is only transitory. Should either of these arguments be contested, and White notes there are good grounds to believe they might be, then nominal rates might rise sharply. In this case, ” the effects on an overleveraged global economy would not be pretty”.
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