Early Warning Signals in a Fragile System
[ed note: here is Part 1; if you have missed it, best go there and start reading from the beginning]
We recently received the following charts via email with a query whether they should worry stock market investors. They show two short term interest rates, namely the 2-year t-note yield and 3 month t-bill discount rate. Evidently the moves in short term rates over the past ~18 – 24 months were quite large, even if their absolute levels remain historically low.
Sizable moves higher in short term interest rates were recorded over the past two years. 2 year note yields only started moving up in mid 2016, but the surge in t-bill discount rates has been in train since late 2015 already. The moves in short term rates come from extremely low levels, but they are nevertheless quite noteworthy – click to enlarge.
The first thing that comes to mind in connection with asset prices is that the cost of carry for leveraged positions is rising. Eventually this will have an effect on such positions, particularly in fixed-income instruments, which inter alia include structured products such as CLOs (collateralized loan obligations). Some market participants reportedly employ leverage of up to 1:10 in these in order to boost returns, which the banks are apparently happy to provide, as the risk is deemed to be low.
As we have discussed previously, CLOs are conceptually not different from the CMOs that created such heavy conniptions in 2007-2009, but CLOs ultimately turned out to be quite resilient at the time. The problem is of course that it is definitely not a given that they will be similarly resilient in the next crisis.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
