Here is a soundbite for the day.
Western central banks are actively buying their own government sovereign bonds via a mechanism called Quantitative Easing (QE).QE bond buying schemes have been prevalent in US,Eurozone and Japan since the 2008 crisis where these major central banks have bought up over 20 trillion USD equivalent of their own government debt to suppress yields and interest rates and stimulate their economies with ultra low interest rates thus pull themselves out of the 2008 recession.So overwhelming has this bond buying scheme been in Europe and Japan that sovereign debt yields have turned negative (a whooping 17 trillion of global bonds ie 1/4 of the world's debt market has negative yields) thus if an investor in Europe and Japan buys these bonds and holds them to maturity they are destined to lose money and this abnormality has pushed Eurozone and Japanese investors to seek relatively higher yielding US treasuries that yield a paltry 1.7% for the 10 year note.
Strange world we live in where Western central banks create fiat from nothing and buy their own government debt which is akin to debt monetization.The Fed is currently involved in 60 billion USD/month in short term T-Bill purchases and whooping 300 billion/day in repurchase agreements purchases to stem a liquidity crunch in Western financial markets.
Maybe the Kenyan government should cook up an equal scheme ie issue bonds and have CBK buy a large chunk of them pushing yields ever lower and thus lowering loan borrowing costs.Its this scheme that allows Western loan rates e.g. mortgage rates to become a paltry 5% but for course such activities would lead to disaster long term.
Check out this Bloomberg article
https://www.bloomberg.co...s/negative-yield-bonds/
It gets worse.Swiss Central Bank creates francs and uses it to buy US stocks like Facebook and Apple.Japanese central bank creates yen and is the biggest bond and stock ETF holder in Japan.
https://www.holdingschan...onal-bank-top-holdings/
https://asia.nikkei.com/...r-as-liquidity-dries-up
Just imagine if CBK started creating new Kenya shillings and buying stocks of Safaricom,Equity Bank and so forth
Contrarian Investor and Trader.Advocate of free markets,limited government interference in the economy and sound money