On one hand, the recent surge in 10Y yields is precisely what one - and certainly we - would expect: after all, the official arrival of helicopter money in the form of $1,000 checks to most Americans means that people's expectations for government generosity repriced overnight, and now the political debate shifts to how much more free cash Americans should expect and for how long (with Bernie Sanders firing the first shot with a proposal to hand out $2,000 instead of $1,000). On this point, Jeff Gundlach predicted during his DoubleLine call yesterday that "the U.S. national debt likely to grow to $30 trillion in two or three years as spending explodes in response to the crisis", which means about $3-4 trillion in net issuance per year, and that upcoming supply tsunami is certainly sending bond prices lower, potentially dealing a deathly blow to the risk-parity/balanced "60/40" portfolio model.
Yet on the other hand, Treasury inflation breakevens have plunged to record lows as if the market is saying that despite this flood of new money, there will be no actual inflation as much as a decade in the future. To put it mildly, this is bizarre, and as BMO's Ian Lyngen writes this morning, "there are aspects of the overnight price action which resonate and others that confound. Mnuchin’s dire warning that the unemployment rate could spike to 20% in the absence of government intervention to address the coronacrisis had the foreseeable impact on the equity market; limit down. The shape of the yield curve has also performed in line with prior easing episodes with 2s/10s reaching 72.6 bp overnight and offering solace to those anticipating a cyclical resteepening."...