Mortgage rates have enjoyed a modest rally, the 10-year T-note’s decline from 4.88 percent to 4.77 percent leading mortgages from 6.375 percent to 6.25 percent. Do not expect more improvement, not with an economy as strong as this, and zero chance of a rate cut from the Fed. On the other hand, don’t expect the blow-up in rates that would normally follow dashed bond-market hopes for a recession, long yields soaring above the Fed’s 5.25 percent cost of money.

This unnaturally “inverted yield curve” is just one of several effects of the recycling of the American trade deficit, now in the previously inconceivable range of $750 billion per year, some 6 percent of GDP. For exporters to us to continue to export, they must keep the dollar strong enough to buy their junk (and oil), and the only way to do that is to re-invest their dollar winnings here. There has never been anything like this before, neither magnitude nor duration, but the effects are coming clear: there is a constant bid in every financial market (commercial real estate, too), which has caused prices to rise, limited downside damage, suppressed volatility in general, compressed spreads for risk in time and credit, held long-term interest rates artificially low, and stimulated the economy.

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