A potential sudden increase in bond yields have been on my mind for a long time, and if you’ve been reading Bill Gross’s monthly commentary’s for the past few years it’s been the only topic on his mind as well. I can quite easily picture a scenario where yields in the US go up higher than expected for a multitude of reasons, followed by the US dollar skyrocketing, followed by every major equity market falling substantially and commodities all dropping as well leading to a mass Armageddon. Then again, a lot of other people are thinking the same and yet every dip we’ve seen has just led to more buyers coming into the markets, FOMO at its best.

Here’s a snippet and a link to the rest of the article.

Perhaps. But the reliance on historical models in an era of extraordinary monetary policy should suggest caution. Logically, (a concept seemingly foreign to central bank staffs) in a domestic and global economy that is increasingly higher and higher levered, the cost of short term finance should not have to rise to the level of a 10-year Treasury note to produce recession. Most destructive leverage – as witnessed with the pre-Lehman subprime mortgages – occurs at the short end of the yield curve as the cost of monthly interest payments increase significantly to debt holders. While governments and the U.S. Treasury can afford the additional expense, levered corporations and individuals in many cases cannot. Such was the case during each of the three recessions shown in Chart 1. But since the Great Recession, more highly levered corporations, and in many cases, indebted individuals with floating rate student loans now exceeding $1 trillion, cannot cover the increased expense, resulting in reduced investment, consumption and ultimate default. Commonsensically, a more highly levered economy is more growth sensitive to using short term interest rates and a flat yield curve, which historically has coincided with the onset of a recession.

Source: Janus Henderson