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What Does the QE Experience Say About Rates in a Shrinking Fed Balance Sheet World?

September 14, 2017

What Does the QE Experience Say About Rates in a Shrinking Fed Balance Sheet World?

The Federal Reserve is likely to decide next week to begin letting assets roll of its balance sheet as bonds mature, instead of reinvesting the proceeds. This means that the balance sheet will begin to shrink in size and other market participants will be forced to absorb the supply of new issuance of treasury and mortgage backed securities. Conventional analysis of supply and demand dynamics might suggest the exiting of a large marginal buyer of these securities would cause yields to rise to some higher equilibrium level, but the QE experience suggests something else entirely. When the Fed was engaged in asset purchases and the rate of change in the Fed’s balance sheet was rising (late 2010, mid 2012 through early 2013) long-term treasury yields rose on the back of juiced growth and inflation expectations produced by the stimulus. When the rate of change in the Fed’s balance sheet would flat line or fall (most of 2010, most of 2013 through 2014) treasury yields fell on the back of subdued growth and inflation expectations. Importantly, it was both real rates (TIPS) and breakeven inflation that followed this pattern, which is indicative of the level of economic stimulus produced by QE. Chart 1 below shows 10-year nominal rates (red line, right axis) overlaid on the three month difference in the Fed’s balance sheet (blue line, left axis). Chart 2 below shows 10-year real rates (red line, right axis) overlaid on the three month difference in the Fed’s balance sheet (blue line, left axis). Chart 3 below shows 10-year implied breakeven inflation expectations (red line, right axis) overlaid on the three month difference in the Fed’s balance sheet (blue line, left axis).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

The Monetary Base, Buybacks and the Stock Market

March 17, 2016

The Monetary Base, Buybacks and the Stock Market 

A Useful Leading Indicator?

We often see charts comparing the S&P 500 to the growth in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, or more specifically, to assets held by the Fed. There is undeniably a close correlation between the two, but it has struck us as not very useful as a “timing device”, or an early warning device if you will.

Recently we have come across a video of a presentation by Bob Murphy, in which he uses a slightly different comparison that might prove more useful in this respect. Instead of merely looking at Fed assets, he uses the total monetary base. Here is a chart comparing the monetary base to the S&P 500 Index since 2009:

1-Monetary Base vs SPXThe monetary base (red line) vs. the S&P 500 (blue line) – as can be seen, sometimes one or the other series leads, but in recent years the monetary base has been a leading indicator. It probably lagged the market in 2010/11 due to the fact that traders at the time bought stocks in anticipation of more monetary pumping – whereas nowadays the market appears to be reacting with a slight lag to changes in base money – click to enlarge.

Below is a chart that shows consolidated assets held by the Federal Reserve system for comparison. Since the Fed is currently reinvesting funds from MBS and treasuries that mature, its total asset base is basically flat-lining since the end of QE3. Obviously, all that can be gleaned from this fact is that the central bank is currently not activelypumping up the money supply. Currently money supply growth is therefore largely the result of commercial bank credit growth.

2-Fed AssetsAssets held by the Federal Reserve – flat-lining since the end of QE3. Interesting, but not useful as a short term leading indicator of the stock market – click to enlarge.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is This How the Next Global Financial Meltdown Will Unfold?

November 20, 2015

Is This How the Next Global Financial Meltdown Will Unfold?

In effect, a currency crisis is simply the abrupt revaluation of the currency to reflect new realities.

I have long maintained that the structural imbalances of debt and risk that triggered the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008-2009 have effectively been transferred to the foreign exchange (FX) markets.

This creates a problem for the central banks that have orchestrated the “recovery” by goosing asset bubbles in stocks, real estate and bonds: unlike these markets, the currency-FX market is too big for even the Federal Reserve to manipulate for long.

The FX market trades roughly the entire Fed balance sheet of $4.5 trillion every day or two.

Currencies are in the midst of multi-year revaluations that will destabilize the tottering towers of debt, leverage and risk that have propped up global growth since 2009.

Though the relative value of currencies is discovered in the global FX market, there are four fundamental factors that influence the value of any currency:

1. Capital flows into and out of the currency (and the nation that issues the currency).

2. Perceived risk, specifically, will this currency preserve my global purchasing power (i.e. capital) or erode it?

3. The yield or interest rate paid on bonds denominated in this currency.

4. The scarcity or over-abundance of the currency.

If we dig even deeper, we find that currencies reflect the income streams and assets of the issuing nation. Consider the currency of an oil exporting nation that has seen both its income from selling oil and the underlying value of its oil in the ground fall by more than 50%.

Why shouldn’t that nation’s currency decline in parallel with the erosion of income and asset valuation? As a nation’s income and asset base decline, there is less national income to pay interest on sovereign bonds, less private income to tax, and a reduced asset base for additional borrowing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Gold Prices Disprove Krugman

August 7, 2015

Gold Prices Disprove Krugman

Recently Krugman wrote an op ed ridiculing Ron Paul titled, “The Old Man and the CPI.”(In case you don’t get the reference, he’s alluding to Hemingway.) Ron Paul has responded in this video, but I want to focus on Krugman’s complains about gold bugs:

Ron Paul has been making the same prediction year after year — in fact, he’s been making this prediction at least since 1981!— and has been wrong year after year. It’s hard to think of a doctrine that has been as thoroughly refuted by events as goldbug economics. For a while gold prices did go up, although not for the reasons the goldbugs thought, but now even that has gone into reverse. So why would anyone pay money for this guy’s analysis?

This has been quite the cause for celebration among progressive economists. (I won’t link to some of the lesser lights and reward them for their smugness.) And it’s true that a simple story relating the Fed’s balance sheet to the price of gold doesn’t work out very well:

Gold vs Fed

In the chart above, total Fed assets (red line, left axis) are plotted against the price of gold (blue line, right axis). People who thought the price of gold would move in lockstep with the Fed’s QE programs were sitting pretty during QE and QE2, but then things turned around with QE3. It almost looks as if the commencement of QE3 (when the red line started stairclimbing up) was the catalyst for making gold plunge about $600 an ounce.

Nonetheless, suppose someone bought into the warnings of Ron Paul (and guys like me) when Bernanke began his unprecedented monetary inflation, back in late 2008 / early 2009, and began buying gold as a hedge. Depending on when exactly you got in, gold was selling for anywhere from $700 – $900 an ounce.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

Fed Admits Economy Can’t Function Without Bubbles

August 3, 2015

Fed Admits Economy Can’t Function Without Bubbles

In short, the dot-com bust was the last chance for the Fed to pivot and liberate the American economy from the corrosive financialization it had fostered. A determined policy of higher interest rates and renunciation of the Greenspan Put would have paved the way for a return to current account balance, sharply increased domestic savings, the elevation of investment over consumption, and a restoration of financial discipline in both public and private life. Needless to say, the Fed never even considered this historic opportunity. Instead, it chose to double-down on the colossal failure it had already produced, driving interest rates into the sub-basement of historic experience. This inexorably triggered the next and most destructive bubble ever. – David Stockman, The Great Deformation

Over the course of the roughly twelve and a half years from Black Monday to the beginning of the end for the dot-com bubble, the Fed effectively engineered a mania by facilitating the explosion of bank loans, GSE debt, and the shadow banking complex, which together grew from under $5 trillion in 1987 to $17 trillion by the beginning of 2000.

For evidence that this expansion was indeed the work of monetary authorities and was not funded by an increase in America’s savings, look no further than the following chart which shows an accommodative Fed and an increasingly savings averse American public:

When the Nasdaq collapsed, the Fed was given an opportunity to restore some semblance of order and discipline to a market that had learned to rely on the Greenspan put. Instead, it chose to inflate a still larger bubble and now, courtesy of Janet Yellen’s friends at the San Francisco Fed, we know precisely why.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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