E44 - Financial Markets and the MacroeconomyReturn

Nowadays, the examination of bond markets is becoming more prominent as there have been significant changes in the financial market and economic policy processes due to the diverse economic shocks. The room for manoeuvre available for monetary policy is no longer a function of base rates, but rather of the growth of central bank balance sheets – which can also have side-effects on bond yield progresses. Also, QE is only the privilege of large central banks, if smaller central banks use these programs the yield premium will be elevated. Six European small open economies (Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland, Sweden) outside the Eurozone were investigated on quarterly basis between 2007 and 2020 with Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration technique.  The aim of our research was to identify the effects of the recent economic shocks - the economic crisis of 2008, the subsequent European sovereign debt crisis and the current corona virus epidemic - on the evolution of international bond yield premia time series in the light of monetary policy, macro variables and financial markets. The results were typically in line with expectations, except that no significant bond market impact of portfolio capital flow could be measured on the sample. The main outcome proved that the unconventional monetary policy increased yield premiums in these analysed countries, meaning that QE is not for small and open economies.

The yield curve - specifically the spread between long term and short term interest rates is a valuable forecasting tool. It is simple to use and significantly outperform other financial and macroeconomic indicators in predicting recessions two to six quarters ahead. The steepness of the yield curve should be an excellent indicator of a possible future economic activity. A rise in the short rate tends to flatten the yield curve as well as to slow down real growth the near term. This paper aims to analyze the dependence between slope of the yield curve and an economic activity of selected EU countries and the USA between the years 2000 and 2014. The slope of the yield curve can be measured as the yield spread between sovereign 10-year bonds and sovereign 3-month bonds. The natural and probably the most popular measure of economic growth is GDP growth, taken quarterly. The results showed that the best predictive lags are lag of four and five quarters. The results presented also confirm that 10-year and 3-month yield spread has significant predictive power to real GDP growth after financial crisis. These findings can be beneficial for investors and provide further evidence of the potential usefulness of the yield curve spreads as indicators of the future economic activity.