Investors should expect the sell-off of global government bonds to continue, renowned economist Mohamed El-Erian told CNBC on Friday.
“I don’t see any appetite in the U.S. for immediate fiscal consolidation. So I suspect we will continue to see upward pressures on yields,” he told CNBC’s Carolin Roth at the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Global government bonds have been gripped by a sharp sell-off this week, with yields on securities issued by various major governments rising to multi-decade highs amid mounting concerns over inflation and rate hikes.
Bond yields and prices move inversely to one another.
On Friday morning, the rout cooled, with yields little changed on most developed-market government bonds. U.S. Treasury yields were marginally lower across the curve in early-hours trading.
El-Erian, the Rene M. Kern Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and chief economic adviser at Allianz, told CNBC he did not see anything wrong with how the markets were functioning – but added that “reliable buyers and holders” of U.S. Treasurys were coming under pressure.
“China, for geopolitical purposes, is no longer as willing,” he said. “Japan and the Gulf countries have domestic issues.”
He also pointed to the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund rethinking its allocation to U.S. government bonds.
“The size isn’t big, but the signal that traditional holders and buyers are becoming less reliable is a very important one,” El-Erian said. “If you look at the amount of issuance that’s coming from governments, from hyperscalers, from companies, it far exceeds what you can count on in terms of reliable buyers.
“And that’s why there’s been pressure on interest rates. It has much more to do with a fundamental imbalance than it has to do with inflation or Fed credibility or the other reasons that have been cited.”
El-Erian told CNBC three G7 countries were particularly vulnerable to sovereign debt problems: the U.K., Japan and France.
“Those by numbers, by everything else, and the U.K. in particular is what I call a high-beta country,” he said. “That every time rates move by a bit in the U.S., they move by a lot more in the U.K.”
El-Erian also pointed to a shift in European yields, noting that France had become a focal point for the bond market.
“In the old days you would worry about Italy. Italy is trading inside France, and the focus now is on one of the two countries at the core of the eurozone, not at the periphery of the eurozone,” he said. “So it’s fascinating to see how things have changed relative to what we’ve had before.”
