One Key Market Indicator Has Gone Negative For The First Time Since 2007

The indicators that the economy is heading for a recession are piling up.

The spread between 10-year and three-month treasury yields inverted on Friday for the first time since 2007, Bloomberg reports. The yield on the long-term Treasury bonds continued its yearlong decline, reflecting a dearth of optimism in the market's long-term health against the Federal Reserve's short-term monetary policy.

The inversion of the 10 year/3 month yield curve has been the harbinger of a recession in the U.S. on a reliable basis since World War II, according to an August report from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. At the time, the bank said the risk of recession was rising, but offered the lack of a yield curve inversion as an optimistic sign.

Now, there is no longer such cause for optimism, but the report cautioned that correlation does not necessarily equal causation, as pre-recession investment sentiment that sends investors flocking toward safer bonds could cause the inversion, rather than the other way around.

After over a year of interest rate hikes in response to economic strength, the Fed indicated on Wednesday that it does not plan to raise rates any further this year. Bloomberg observed that investors have "sought refuge" in less volatile asset classes, including real estate. 

For some time now, the commercial real estate investment market has been white-hot, especially for multifamily and especially from institutional-size investors with the scale to choose between entire sectors of the global economy and influence those sectors.

"It's a great time to be a seller," Transwestern Executive Vice President Dean Sigmon told Bisnow. "There's not enough product to meet demand. It just continues to be unbelievable the responses brokers are getting and where the pricing is going. It continues to go higher."

Even as multifamily and industrial are considered to be safe holds through the impending downturn, the competition for those assets is changing the fundamentals of those deals. The eventual severity of the recession could determine at what point the price tags cease to be worth it.