Markets Wrap: Bond Market Turmoil, Inheritance Tax and AI risks

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2:46Welcome to the Merrin Talks Money Market Wrap, where we talk about the biggest moves in markets this week and what's driving them. I'm John Stebbick, senior reporter and author of the Money to Stilt newsletter. Merrin's out today, but joining me in the studio is Bloomberg's team leader for Markets Live, David Goodman. David covers UK markets today and Squawk in London. In today's show, we thought we'd probably chat about, well, basically what's been going on in markets this week. We've got the kind of, I hate using the word carnage, so I'll just say sort of like the messiness in the bond markets.

3:19We'll have a wee chat about AI as well and maybe a wee chat about what happened at the Tory conference and specifically what they mentioned about inheritance taxes. I think that was probably the most eye-catching thing to come out of that. David, thanks very much for joining us. It's good you take time out of a rather hectic markets week to talk to us. So yeah, what's been the big driver in markets this week? I think that's a really good question because you said bond markets are messy. that feels like a bit of an understatement i mean i was kind of preparing for this looking at where markets were and then you know you leave your desk a half now and then there's been a massive bond rally so trying to get a handle on this is is quite tricky and i think one of the concerning things about this i think particularly you know in europe is that i haven't really seen like a big trigger for anything i mean obviously we have concerns about france and french risks but if you look you look at france now versus france say say a month ago when the spread was below 100 the german the french german spread actually this is the gap between french government bond yields and german government bond yields yeah so the kind of bond premium that that is a kind of measure how much riskier france is then and france and germany used to be seen as similarish credit i mean you know germany was always the the kind of benchmark but france was kind of there we call it kind of semi-core and like it wasn't a big risk but it wasn't like the safest credit but so that that spread was below 100 basis points even in mid mid-september it's now kind of blown out to 150 no i didn't i mean take any guess where it is now and you'll be wrong in five minutes time but it's it's been massive but and that's something just to be clear we haven't seen since the eurozone crisis because now yeah the thing that struck me was that i remember saying oh that's the highest it's been since June 2012 and then realising that July 2012 was when Mario Draghi made his whatever-it-takes speech.

5:12So you really are talking about this was the crisis period here. Yeah, I mean, interestingly, back then France wasn't the problem, I think. It was Spain, it was Italy, it was obviously Greece. There were all these other countries who were a bigger problem and France looked relatively OK. But obviously what the ECB did in response to that, after that whatever-it-takes speech, closed these spreads down massively. and i remember i was getting kind of geekily excited this time last year there's you know the spread between germany and any of the eurozone bond is i can't remember where it was but it was like there was a 70 basis point spread across the whole market so that just is mad when you i mean i started my career in 2011 2012 when we had spreads that completely huge blown out massively and we're really causing causing problems so and obviously we're seeing some of that come through today but and at the moment but i think you know if you're france nothing has really changed fundamentally in the last two weeks there's been some political noise yeah and obviously we've kind of got the unrest which is a big a big social problem but i think it's interesting that the in the past we've had these episodes in french debt it's been a clear kind of political trigger either the fall of the government and no confidence for budgets getting through we haven't really had this time it's almost just like there was this big vibes shift where something was like oh france is a problem yeah as soon as that thought entered people's minds selling was the the kind of default mode and then we've just seen this move it's kind of gathered pace and but the worrying thing about it is that it's spread out into into other european countries i mean italy's been moving pretty much bang in line with france yeah despite you know we were we were talking earlier in this year about italy being you know people people are positive in italy like they like what's going on there that hasn't really helped them i i mean this might mark me out as a complete but i was looking at the belgium germany spread i don't think anyone's looked at that in the terminal for for quite some time but this is the point is it's spreading beyond france and i think that's when it becomes a real problem that we we can deal with idiosyncratic risk and i mean yeah the uk has had its fair share of that over the over the years but once it kind of becomes something that spreads beyond one country then it becomes more of a problem for the ECB and other people.

7:24And how much do you think this is to do with basically the oil price? Because obviously that's been, it feels as if this week we had another sorry, we've been swinging from, oh this is nearly over to, oh no it's getting worse and this week it's felt like when I was, oh no it's getting worse weeks and obviously oil went back above$100 a barrel and today again it kind of spiked about 105 for a bit and i'm just wondering if we're slightly because obviously france is blown out and obviously france does have its problems and and you know i guess the fact that we're trying to get another budget through perhaps started to make people think about it but at the same time we do also have this kind of oil prices just automatically push up inflation push up interest rate expectations and maybe it's just it's a kind of global move but france is just the very obvious tip of the spear yeah i think so because i mean the oil price is an interesting one because it has kind of just been around 100 a barrel in either direction for quite a while and you know we've got a three percent we had a three five percent move today that would have been huge a few a few years ago and now it's just kind of par for the course but it's just thursday we haven't seen that kind of step change from say like 80 to 100 which I think is what sparked another leg of bond selling later in the summer.

8:52But also it hasn't gone up again and it ratchets higher. But I think if you're thinking about how central banks respond to this, we have entrenched high energy prices now. And I think there were still some hopes that there was going to be an off-ramp in the conflict in Iran and that was going to allow inflation to mechanically come down. And it is that threat of those second-round effects now that I think perhaps people are worried about where inflation feeds into wages, feeds into inflation, and that kind of develops that cycle. I think that is actually one of the key differences between now and the debt crisis in Europe in 2011-12 that you mentioned.

9:28There's been a lot of talk about that, but I think back then central banks had room to react and they had the mandate to react because of just the situation and they had all the tools at their disposal. Now we've come up a decade where central banks have cut rates to zero, and qed and so much and now we're seeing a big inflation spike and where inflation is now it's just it's a lot harder for any bank to come out and say we're going to cut rates because they just lose their credibility and then you kind of reinforce this this spike in yields because people just think that central banks aren't serious about inflation mandates so therefore they they sell bombs so the the kind of tools to solve this crisis perhaps aren't as obvious as they were back then and that's kind of this slightly worrying thing and also when you know we get technical and we talk about spreads but just in terms of absolute yields as well yeah france is whether or not you know the spread over germany is 150 if germany was at zero that would be fine but germany's germany's at three and a half france is nearly at five now so that is a real problem for governments that they're having to pay these high high interest rates and i think you know that's perhaps what makes this worse for particularly for budgetary concerns and again coming back to the uk we see this in the the interest bill that the government's facing it's just ballooned beyond kind of anything we've seen before and when interest rates get entrenched like this it becomes very difficult to to kind of get your way out of that yeah and when i suppose the other problem here and i've kind of mentioned this before but and and it sounds i think well obviously historically this is a normal interest rate and the post 2010 rates of kind of kind of near zero were incredibly abnormal and so on the one hand this is in a funny kind of way it's almost healthy but the flip side of that is that it's easy saying that but now you need to adjust to having been at zero for 10 years and everyone's finances have shifted to accommodate zero so you know that's why people's mortgages are getting more expensive and it's all very well saying well when I took out my first mortgage in 2001 that was like 7 % but also your house price was about like a third of the cost that it is now so I think that on the one hand yes this is normal on the other hand getting from where we were to the new normal is causing an awful lot of pain and as you say it's the same thing on the government balance sheets because the last time interest rates were this high debt to GDP wasn't sitting at 100 % it's quite an obvious point but it's also one i think that needs to be kind of made repeatedly it's after the period of the pandemic where government spent huge amounts of money yeah FGB went so much higher and all that was funded at yeah near zero yeah i mean negative negative rates used to have in the eurozone and yeah that was kind of a big thing but i think just as you know homeowners need to refinance government needs to refinance

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16:57risks to take and i think you're right that i think we got used to having these rock bottom rates and even talking about normalization of interest rates the amount of time people spent about talking about is the boe going to height rates from 0.5 to 0.75 i mean i was one of the people writing these things but like the amount of words that we spent on that and it felt like these really big deal at the time and also i think there was this concern that it was gonna to you know some break the economy if you hike rates yeah by a tiny amount and i suppose looking at this in a slightly positive way we had interest rates go above five percent and the economy didn't break the housing market didn't break it slowed and transactions slowed down i remember we were talking and we had this conversation probably four or five years ago about some of the more lurid house price forecasts they're going to crash 10 yeah and obviously there has been a real terms hit but in terms of absolute levels i think basically just saw transactions fall off a cliff we didn't see prices and i think prices the only there's prices have fallen in specific sectors like the that was like the whole prime central london's quite an eye-catching one but you're right i mean so prime central london's down like 27 since 2014 but you absolutely wouldn't say that for the average UK-wide house.

18:19Flats are a bit trickier. Well, there's a whole bunch of other things going on. There's a lot of other reasons for that, and quite right too, actually. But I mean, that is a really good point, because I suppose one thing that Britain and other countries that really suffered a hit in 2008 have on their side is that consumers did deleverage. So by the time we got to the big bouncing rates in 2021, 2022, the housing market just wasn't as big. It wasn't as big in bank balance sheets. It wasn't as big in consumer household balance sheets. And everyone had a fixed rate mortgage as well. Whereas in 2008, everyone was like, you know, there's like two and a half percent equity and an interest only loan.

19:02And their kind of payments kind of, they were just massively overstretched. But I think it's, yeah, so I think that it's important that we don't get, I guess, overly apocalyptic about it. But there's definitely the pain and the kind of public sector balance sheet does not look... No, and I think obviously that's for the UK and the budget that's coming up, there isn't the drama that you've got around France, like, will they get through that? It's good, obviously, we've got a different political system. But the trade-offs are super clear and you can see that when you have this interest rate bill hanging over your head and also you're so the bond market is in this mood where it can move very quickly very don't move very fast on not very much i mean that's come back to the french front that's obviously what we've seen there so there's quite a narrow landing zone for yeah for the government to get this right because you know we've we've obviously had some budgets in the past that have caused massive reactions but then we've had relatively small things over the last two years that have done the same thing yeah and so i think and some of it is just to do with the mood in the markets at the time and i think if you know if healy comes out and say cuts headroom a lot or or doesn't show that he's kind of serious about both sides of the ledger then that could be a moment that the uk which is i think hasn't been as much as vulnerable during this latest bonds as it has in the past definitely not you go back to started this year or even last year when we had these episodes of bond stress the uk we used to have a joke that like the markets basically basic reaction was you know you worry about bonds and then you sell uk 30 years yeah that's that was the pain point and for various reasons this time around i think partly that investors are given burnham a bit of a yeah a kind of window of opportunity to to kind of at least to benefit the doubt and partly some of the stuff to be all you've done around um their bond holdings that they've kind of cancelled some of their longer dated sales and the uk is selling less of this stuff anyway so that's kind of helped bring some solidities to the um to the long end but you can see that ending and the uk could very quickly like become the focus of the bond market again if you're the focus of the bond market that's very rarely a good thing yeah it's not fine I mean, that's interesting because one thing I thought in turning to the Tory party conference was that, and their own kind of reporters mentioned this, it's almost like there's now getting a more traditional split again between Labour and Tory in that you have, the Tories kind of talk about tax cuts and you've got Labour basically talking about tax rises to pay for extra public sector spending.

21:48And that's something that we're kind of used to is what you expect from the left versus right party. But the one thing I kind of was thought, well, I think it's probably of interest to our listeners, but this idea that if the Conservatives get in, they're going to raise the inheritance tax threshold to a million pounds for a couple. So 500 ,000 pounds each from the current 325 ,000 pounds. and instead of having this kind of resident your family home allowance where you get a certain amount of extra IHT threshold as long as you pass your home on to your direct descendants it's going to be basically any value of house that can be passed on your direct descendants and much as I am not a fan of IHT this strikes me as being rife with potential problems for the housing market um well it's only you but the the whole i thought part of the points was we want to old people to downsize um this this this doesn't feel like it encourages by the biggest tax you can is a kind of tax efficient vehicle yeah you know that i mean i think from a purely market perspective right now i don't i didn't see any kind of conversation around yeah i think it's you know it's one of those things where people often talk about the leader of the opposition is one of the hardest jobs in politics i think when you're making a speech and spending money that you know you're not in control at that moment it's probably one of the easiest because you can have these kind of eye-catching policies without necessarily having to i know the stories have laid out a plan of how they're going to play them but it's kind of untested one that they've been you know it's everyone can talk about these cuts if they're not making them and it's making and then when you come into office i think it felt like inheritance act is one of those levers that the tories have pulled in opposition before i mean classically back when brown was about to call the election in 2008 2009 it was it was a lever they went from and that and that kind of scared brown off and yeah i think you know it felt like something from them was was coming but the way that this is as you say the way this is worked out does feel like an interesting way of approaching it it's not necessarily one that is going to like you know they're kind of tax wonks on twitter who come out and give you a kind of rating it's not really it's going to appeal to them whereas yes i think that some of the labor policies you saw from burnham around social care and the triple lock were more perhaps designed to appeal to them than the this is a very much a kind of you know a kind of heart thing isn't it it's it's a heart rather than head approach Yeah, I mean, that's interesting you mentioned the Gordon Brown kind of wobble.

24:38Because obviously one of the things that people think might happen is that Andy Burnham might call a snap election for early next year or possibly even earlier. How much do you think, it's just now that you've raised that, I mean, how much do you think the IHC thing might have been aimed at stopping them from putting them off doing that? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's... Yeah, I think, especially coming after Berlin's speech where he's given very long-term views. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously, he's been quite explicit about not having an election and there's various reasons why he may or may not.

25:16And I think this, to me, just felt like more of a kind of statement of the offer that the Tories were given to the country. obviously they're in the situation now where they've got the left and the right and they need to they're kind of trying to differentiate themselves because there's a risk they do get squeezed on on the other side i suppose so yeah i think that's that may maybe more but again i have no idea like oh no it's always interesting to think about these things because that's part of the problem isn't it because i think your point about the head versus the heart thing is a really good one because a lot of if not all of the policies that are aimed at the heart are actually not that great headwise a lot of the time um which is why we're in the situation we're in with the triple lock for example um but yeah i think that's a really good point but anyways getting back to markets um obviously the other big trend that is still ongoing is ai and one thing i kind of noticed this week was well, A, there's a fairly well-known locally strategist called Joaquin Clement who put it up.

26:30He's over at Panmure Liberum and he said he reckons the AI bubble's going to burst in the next two years and he's got a kind of tentative S &P 500 target for the end of next year of 5 ,000, which is a lot. It's a big drop from where we are now. And I also noticed that Ray Dalio and Michael Burry of the big short frame and I realise he's kind of a perma bear but at the same time still someone interesting to listen to we're both coming out and talking about how it feels more imminent than it did and also this morning we had Samsung reporting record breaking profits and actually it still ended the day down 2.4 % and I was just wondering have you got any sense how AI is rippling through the wider market this week because it does feel as if the I guess maybe it's because the Anthropic IPO is coming up there's a sort of sense of nerves ahead but it feels as if we must be getting to some kind of point where all of this stuff comes to a head in some way I think the Samsung earnings are interesting to look at because you said they weren't bad by any means and it just shows you how sky high the expectations are in this sector now so like the the bar to to be and to keep this going is getting higher all the all the time i think one thing is that my colleagues on markets live in in the us have been writing about a lot is how concentrated the the rally in the smp has been and that all this risk is piling into very kind of particular things and the breadth of breadth of this is is really quite concerning they produce all these charts that show yes this is looking like the top boom and then burst or all sorts of things but i think there are you know i think that would be the risk that so much of the rally is kind of predicated on this idea that this can carry on kind of building and building and building both like metaphorically and also literally data centers and compute and maybe it can but there's also obviously the further down this road you get the more those kind of risks are and we haven't really had the kind of liberation day sell-off that yeah you look at that now that was like kind of barely a bump in the road we took us a while to get back to the housing smp but we're there again now yeah i think there is i suppose it's you know coming from a journalistic background there's always a sense of when things are going up everyone's immediately looking at the reason why it might yeah why it might come down and you know you if you've kind of believed in this rally from the start then you i imagine you've done pretty well for that because people have been i think similar ones have been coming for it for quite a long time yeah absolutely people have been talking about a bubble for years one thing that i thought was quite interesting was that we did see that wobble kind of early september when the kind of ai safety concerns kicked off and we saw more talk from the ai companies themselves about pausing or or pasting or however they want to cause it but again that feels like that's yes that was a kind of one-off thing that that took place over a weekend and we kind of shrugged off well 10 % extinction risk i guess we'll just have to put up with it and the company's saying we're going to slow down and now you know we've since then i'm sure we've had new models from both of them that are doing all these kind of yeah talking earlier about the the math uh the math stump that happened earlier where hundreds and hundreds of puzzles came out and i think puzzles might be understated to be honest problems i think yeah i think it's probably a better way of putting it but there is obviously that ends night undeniable progress and that you know i suppose when it's doing stuff like that that kind of explains why people still do believe in it and yeah you know we have got the anthropic ipo probably coming this year there's the open ii one i think that i think the last that we heard that would be that's kind of pushed back to next year but there is you know those two feel like very big events that and and also incredibly clean ai plays yeah yeah after that so yeah i wondered yeah i guess yeah it's the question of whether they suck all the oxygen out of the market or if they just end up being like spacex because obviously spacex was a big deal but it doesn't seem to have had a lasting impact And now it's back pretty much at its IPO price as well.

30:55Everyone was tracking that on the way down and it's kind of back to basically where it was when it got issued. I suppose this is the problem. We don't have a crystal ball, so I guess the only thing you can do is stay diversified and just be aware that there is a lot of concentration in the markets. Your S &P 500 tracker used to be 20 % in tech and now it's nearly 50%. but um but beyond that you trying to kind of call these things is about a mug's game but then it's also linking back to what we were talking about at the start in terms of the bond yields and that like because all these companies are wishing death at a kind of scary rate as well then that is part of the reason i think it's feeding into these high high yields and if you know traditionally bonds are this kind of safe dull investment that you just buy you forget about and they they kind of form part i guess like you know if you're happy to buy us 30 to 6 that isn't that isn't a terrible deal but only if you can hold to maturity exactly that's the no you can probably do that i'm pushing it now right well look thanks very much for your time david um really appreciate you taking the time we come on hopefully see you again in the future

32:12Thanks for listening to this week's Merrin Talks Money at Markets Wrap. If you like our show, rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And also be sure to follow me on X at John underscore Stepek. This episode was produced by Summer Saadi, Moses Andem and Jennifer Seeley. Questions and comments on this show and all our shows are always welcome. Our show email is merrinmoneyatbloomberg.net. Special thanks to David Goodman.

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