Complete text of Greenspan testimony

All told, the economy seems to have entered 2005 expanding at a reasonably good pace, with inflation and inflation expectations well anchored. On the whole, financial markets appear to share this view. In particular, a broad array of financial indicators convey a pervasive sense of confidence among investors and an associated greater willingness to bear risk than is yet evident among business managers.

Both realized and option-implied measures of uncertainty in equity and fixed-income markets have declined markedly over recent months to quite low levels. Credit spreads, read from corporate bond yields and credit default swap premiums, have continued to narrow amid widespread signs of an improvement in corporate credit quality, including notable drops in corporate bond defaults and debt ratings downgrades. Moreover, recent surveys suggest that bank lending officers have further eased standards and terms on business loans, and anecdotal reports suggest that securities dealers and other market-makers appear quite willing to commit capital in providing market liquidity.

In this environment, long-term interest rates have trended lower in recent months even as the Federal Reserve has raised the level of the target federal funds rate by 150 basis points. This development contrasts with most experience, which suggests that, other things being equal, increasing short-term interest rates are normally accompanied by a rise in longer-term yields. The simple mathematics of the yield curve governs the relationship between short- and long-term interest rates. Ten-year yields, for example, can be thought of as an average of ten consecutive one-year forward rates. A rise in the first-year forward rate, which correlates closely with the federal funds rate, would increase the yield on ten-year U.S. Treasury notes even if the more-distant forward rates remain unchanged. Historically, though, even these distant forward rates have tended to rise in association with monetary policy tightening.

In the current episode, however, the more-distant forward rates declined at the same time that short-term rates were rising. Indeed, the tenth-year tranche, which yielded 6-1/2 percent last June, is now at about 5-1/4 percent. During the same period, comparable real forward rates derived from quotes on Treasury inflation-indexed debt fell significantly as well, suggesting that only a portion of the decline in nominal forward rates in distant tranches is attributable to a drop in long-term inflation expectations.

Some analysts have worried that the dip in forward real interest rates since last June may indicate that market participants have marked down their view of economic growth going forward, perhaps because of the rise in oil prices. But this interpretation does not mesh seamlessly with the rise in stock prices and the narrowing of credit spreads observed over the same interval. Others have emphasized the subdued overall business demand for credit in the United States and the apparent eagerness of lenders, including foreign investors, to provide financing. In particular, heavy purchases of longer-term Treasury securities by foreign central banks have often been cited as a factor boosting bond prices and pulling down longer-term yields. Thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage rates have dropped to a level only a little higher than the record lows touched in 2003 and, as a consequence, the estimated average duration of outstanding mortgage-backed securities has shortened appreciably over recent months. Attempts by mortgage investors to offset this decline in duration by purchasing longer-term securities may be yet another contributor to the recent downward pressure on longer-term yields.

But we should be careful in endeavoring to account for the decline in long-term interest rates by adverting to technical factors in the United States alone because yields and risk spreads have narrowed globally. The German ten-year Bund rate, for example, has declined from 4-1/4 percent last June to current levels of 3-1/2 percent. And spreads of yields on bonds issued by emerging-market nations over U.S. Treasury yields have declined to very low levels.

There is little doubt that, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the integration of China and India into the global trading market, more of the world's productive capacity is being tapped to satisfy global demands for goods and services. Concurrently, greater integration of financial markets has meant that a larger share of the world's pool of savings is being deployed in cross-border financing of investment. The favorable inflation performance across a broad range of countries resulting from enlarged global goods, services and financial capacity has doubtless contributed to expectations of lower inflation in the years ahead and lower inflation risk premiums. But none of this is new and hence it is difficult to attribute the long-term interest rate declines of the last nine months to glacially increasing globalization. For the moment, the broadly unanticipated behavior of world bond markets remains a conundrum. Bond price movements may be a short-term aberration, but it will be some time before we are able to better judge the forces underlying recent experience.

This is but one of many uncertainties that will confront world policymakers. Over the past two decades, the industrial world has fended off two severe stock market corrections, a major financial crisis in developing nations, corporate scandals, and, of course, the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Yet overall economic activity experienced only modest difficulties. In the United States, only five quarters in the past twenty years exhibited declines in GDP, and those declines were small. Thus, it is not altogether unexpected or irrational that participants in the world marketplace would project more of the same going forward.

Yet history cautions that people experiencing long periods of relative stability are prone to excess. We must thus remain vigilant against complacency, especially since several important economic challenges confront policymakers in the years ahead.

Prominent among these challenges in the United States is the pressing need to maintain the flexibility of our economic and financial system. This will be essential if we are to address our current account deficit without significant disruption. Besides market pressures, which appear poised to stabilize and over the longer run possibly to decrease the U.S. current account deficit and its attendant financing requirements, some forces in the domestic U.S. economy seem about to head in the same direction. Central to that adjustment must be an increase in net national saving. This serves to underscore the imperative to restore fiscal discipline.

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