Source: RBA
The above chart shows pretty much what happened to the outlook for the Austrlaian economy and why bonds were the best investment for the year.
It shows the longer terms yields (3 years and above) dropping by up to 200bps thus providing very large capital gains for bond investors who had the courage of buying long term bonds at the start of the year. This yield curve movement also indicated the declining outlook for the Australian economy thanks largely to the Euro crisis and its potential impact on the banking system across the world.
For the short term bond holders (terms of 1 to 3 years), yields dropped by up to 150bps still providing strong capital growth. Whilst the yield to maturity dropped enormously across all maturies for Australian Government bonds, the Reserve Bank took a while to start the decrease and then only decreased by 50bps by the end of December. This curve still suggests the RBA has a few rate decreases to come and the Euro crisis will probably be the main determinant of that. That is despite the weak retail sales and weak residential property sales that provide increasing evidence of our weaker than you know economy. The Reserve Bank are also forecasting lower commodity prices which doesn help our resources sector so the outlook for growth across our economy may be moving closer to a one speed economy than we think.
Anyway, the year 2011 was certainly a year where the conservative bond investor was a winner and whilst I haven’t seen the final numbers yet, it looks like the gross returns should be a comfortably in double digits.