I’m going to go out on a limb and claim there is something seriously wrong in repo. All jokes aside, I know it sounds like a broken record but the dimension that matters is not intermittent collateral problems so much as the greater intensity to them and in a condensing timeframe. Escalation is a description you really don’t want to [...]
You do have to wonder to whom the increasingly shrill bond market declarations are being directed. It’s very likely that Bloomberg’s now daily haranguing “the yield curve can’t possibly be right” tirades aren’t meant for UST investors. Rather, it is perfectly evident that the treasury market is going to do what it does regardless, and that the media, in general, [...]
The FOMC is holding its next regular policy meeting next week. It is widely expected that on December 13 the Federal Reserve’s policy body will vote and publicize the next “rate hike” in its exit strategy. Starting in December 2015, this next one, if it happens, will be the fifth in the series. It would bring the IOER “ceiling” (or [...]
The latest update of the Treasury Department’s Treasury International Capital (TIC) estimates clarified a few things. To begin with, for the month of September the Chinese sold UST’s again for the first time in seven months. Between the end of January and the end of August, the Chinese had added $149.4 billion in UST holdings. In September, however, the balance [...]
The Chinese have been on a UST buying spree of late, having announced to the world several months into it that they were intent on keeping it going. The idea in publicly endorsing and really highlighting their official activity was as a currency policy – to stabilize CNY against its highly disruptive tendency toward devaluation (which isn’t really devaluation). How [...]
The Treasury International Capital (TIC) report produced somewhat of an anomaly in its update for August 2017. There was a lot going on during that month, mostly as UST yields fell (even though interest rates have nowhere to go but up, supposedly) while CNY continued its blistering ascent. As to the latter, it was quite clear by then Chinese actions [...]
At this point in the longer term process of unwinding the Fed’s prior emergency activities, the yield curve was supposed to flatten. That was the plan all along. If monetary policy was successful, or had even run into just dumb luck somewhere in the last ten years, here where policymakers declare the economy to be short rates would be moving [...]
The Federal Reserve Bank of NY reported on Friday that repo fails for the week of September 20 were $359 billion (combined “to receive” plus “to deliver”). That’s the second highest weekly total of this year, following $435 billion fails recorded just two weeks earlier. The week in between those two was also high, tallying $325 billion. That makes for [...]
Eleven days ago, we asked a question about Treasury bills and haircuts. Specifically, we wanted to know if the spike in the 4-week bill’s equivalent yield was enough to trigger haircut adjustments, and therefore disrupt the collateral chain downstream. Within two days of that move in bills, the GC market for UST 10s had gone insane. To be honest, it [...]
The US Treasury as a result of the government’s bloated response to the Great “Recession” has been forced in notes and bonds to reopen their auctions each and every month. Before then, reopenings were less frequent. They weren’t infrequent, but the Treasury wasn’t just auctioning 10s every month. In 2007, for example, the Department conducted four quarterly auctions and one [...]
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