Conference Roundup: Negative Interest Rates and the End of the Age of Experts

Laurence Articles

At the Foundation Financial Officers Group conference in San Francisco on October 3, 2019, Vineer Bhansali, founder and CEO of LongTail Alpha, Inc., and prior to that a longtime portfolio manager and researcher at PIMCO, spoke on “Who (and Why) in the World Is Buying All These Low and Negative Yielding Bonds, and Can We Do Anything With This Knowledge?”

Just a few weeks later, on October 29, Professor Robin Greenwood of Harvard addressed the Q Group in La Jolla, California on a similar topic: “The Impact of Pensions and Insurance on Global Yield Curves.”

What follows is a summary of these two presentations. I then add my thoughts on the larger meaning of this phenomenon for the way we think about economics and, in particular, public policy regarding economic activity.

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