If the bond vigilantes are ready to ride again, there should be little doubt who will be leading the charge.
Bond guru Bill Gross at Pimco in Newport Beach this week has ramped up his warnings to the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve about the perils of unfettered government borrowing.
In an interview in Time magazine on Tuesday, Gross suggested that Pimco, which manages nearly $1 trillion in mostly fixed-income assets, now feels more comfortable owning German government debt than U.S. Treasury debt:
“There are a number of reasons to have doubts about Treasuries, not just because of America’s sovereign risk but also from the standpoint of an over-owned currency [the dollar]. . . . At Pimco we would probably try and substitute for our Treasuries with sovereign bonds of potentially higher quality. Germany looks interesting to us. Germany has problems, but it’s in a much better budget situation than the U.S. because of a constitutional amendment three months ago that forces a balanced budget in four years.”