If you agreed with all the academics, billionaires and politicians who denounced Federal Reserve monetary policy since the financial crisis, you missed $1 trillion of investment returns from buying and holding U.S. Treasurys.

That’s how much the government bonds have earned for investors since the end of 2008, when the Fed dropped interest rates close to zero and embarked on the first of three rounds of debt purchases to resuscitate an economy crippled by the worst recession since the Great Depression.

The resilience of Treasurys represents a rebuke to the chorus of skeptics from Stanford University’s John Taylor to billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer and U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, who predicted the Fed’s unprecedented stimulus would lead to runaway inflation and spell doom for the bond market. It also suggests investors see few signs the five-year-old expansion will produce the kind of price pressures that would compel Fed Chair Janet Yellen to side with the central bank’s hawkish officials as they consider when to raise rates.

“The doves continue to have the upper hand,” Scott Minerd, who oversees $210 billion as the global chief investment officer at Guggenheim Partners LLC, said in a telephone interview on Sept. 4 from New York. “There is a bias in the market that interest rates need to be higher. But that just isn’t based on sound analysis. Betting against the consensus on Treasurys has been a winning strategy.”

Inflation Risk

Minerd is buying Treasurys due in 10 years or more, which typically appreciate when inflation expectations weaken.

Since the end of 2008, interest-bearing Treasurys of all maturities have returned 14.6 percent, index data compiled by Bank of America Merrill Lynch show. That’s equal to $1 trillion in price gains and interest from the securities over that span.

This year alone, longer-dated U.S. bonds have rallied 14.2 percent, beating the 10.2 percent return for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index of American stocks. They have almost tripled the gain in gold, which some investors buy to preserve wealth when they foresee rising costs eroding the dollar’s value.

While the Fed’s most-aggressive measures in its 100-year history helped to restore the world’s largest economy and reduced joblessness from a peak of 10 percent, the stimulus has yet to generate the price pressures that some have warned about since the central bank began quantitative easing in 2008.

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