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“Not A QE” Begins: Fed Start Buying $60BN In Bills Per Month Starting Next Week

October 11, 2019

“Not A QE” Begins: Fed Start Buying $60BN In Bills Per Month Starting Next Week

Just one day after we laid out what Goldman’s revised forecast for the Fed’s “NOT A QE” will look like, which for those who missed it predicted that the Fed would announce “monthly purchases of about $60BN for four months, split across Treasury bills and short maturity coupon Treasuries, in order to replenish the roughly $200bn reserve shortfall and support the pace of growth in non-reserve liabilities”, the Fed has done just that and moments ago – well ahead of consensus expectations which saw the Fed making this announcement some time in November – the US central bank announced it would start purchasing $60BN in Bills per month starting October 15. This will be in addition to rolling over “all principal payments from the Federal Reserve’s holdings of Treasury securities and the continued reinvestment all principal payments from the Federal Reserve’s holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities received during each calendar month.”

In short, the proposed schedule is virtually identical to the one Goldman “proposed” yesterday, one which sees the Fed purchase a grand total of $100BN or so in TSYs the near term, and one which is meant to “engineer a one-off level shift of roughly $200bn over the course of four months.“

But wait there’s more, because just as today’s surprising spike in repo use suggested, mere “NOT A QE” may not cut it, and just in case, in order to provide an “ample supply of reserves”, the Fed will continue with $75BN in overnight repos and $35 billion in term repos twice per week, “at least through January of next year.”

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

NY Fed Announces Extension Of Overnight Repos Until Nov 4, Will Offer 8 More Term Repos

October 4, 2019

NY Fed Announces Extension Of Overnight Repos Until Nov 4, Will Offer 8 More Term Repos

Anyone who expected that the easing of the quarter-end funding squeeze in the repo market would mean the Fed would gradually fade its interventions in the repo market, was disappointed on Friday afternoon when the NY Fed announced it would extend the duration of overnight repo operations (with a total size of $75BN) for at least another month, while also offer no less than eight 2-week term repo operations until November 4, 2019, which confirms that the funding unlocked via term repo is no longer merely a part of the quarter-end arsenal but an integral part of the Fed’s overall “temporary” open market operations… which are starting to look quite permanent.

This is the statement published moments ago by the NY Fed:

In accordance with the most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) directive, the Open Market Trading Desk (the Desk) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will conduct a series of overnight and term repurchase agreement (repo) operations to help maintain the federal funds rate within the target range.

Effective the week of October 7, the Desk will offer term repos through the end of October as indicated in the schedule below. The Desk will continue to offer daily overnight repos for an aggregate amount of at least $75 billion each through Monday, November 4, 2019.

Securities eligible as collateral include Treasury, agency debt, and agency mortgage-backed securities. Awarded amounts may be less than the amount offered, depending on the total quantity of eligible propositions submitted. Additional details about the operations will be released each afternoon for the following day’s operation(s) on the Repurchase Agreement Operational Details webpage. The operation schedule and parameters are subject to change if market conditions warrant or should the FOMC alter its guidance to the Desk.  

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

The Ghost of Failed Banks Returns

September 27, 2019

The Ghost of Failed Banks Returns 

Last week’s failure in the US repo market might have had something to do with Deutsche Bank’s disposal of its prime brokerage to BNP, bringing an unwelcome spotlight to the troubled bank and other foreign banks with prime brokerages in America. There are also worrying similarities between Germany’s Deutsche Bank today and Austria’s Credit-Anstalt in 1931, only the scale is far larger and additionally includes derivatives with a gross value of $50 trillion. 

If the repo problem spreads, it could also raise questions over the synthetic ETF industry, whose cash and deposits may face escalating counterparty risks in some of the large banks and their prime brokerages. Managers of synthetic ETFs should be urgently re-evaluating their contractual relationships.

Whoever the repo failure involved, it is likely to prove a watershed moment, causing US bankers to more widely consider their exposure to counterparty risk and risky loans, particularly leveraged loans and their collateralised form in CLOs. The deterioration in global trade prospects, as well as the US economic outlook and the likelihood that reducing dollar interest rates to the zero bound will prove insufficient to reverse a decline, will take on a new relevance to their decisions.

Problems under the surface

Last week, something unusual happened: instead of the more normal reverse repurchase agreements, the Fed escalated its repurchase agreements (repos). For the avoidance of doubt, a reverse repo by the Fed involves the Fed borrowing money from commercial banks, secured by collateral held on its balance sheet, typically US Treasury bills. Reverse repos withdraw liquidity from the banking system. With a repo, the opposite happens: the Fed takes in collateral from the banking system and lends money against the collateral, injecting liquidity into the system. The use of reverse repos can be regarded as the Fed’s principal liquidity management tool when the banks have substantial reserves parked with the Fed, which is the case today.

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

Dollar Liquidity Crisis Accelerates As Month-End Nears, Record $92 Billion Demand

September 25, 2019

Dollar Liquidity Crisis Accelerates As Month-End Nears, Record $92 Billion Demand

As month-end looms, demand for dollar liquidity is accelerating dramatically with today’s Fed operation oversubscribed – with around $92 billion of demand for The Fed’s $75 billion offering…

Source: NYFed

This is the heaviest demand yet for this new Fed liquidity spigot…

As we noted previously, some banks appear to have been simply waiting to get closer to the quarter end before tipping their cards: after all, just like the Discount Window, the repo operation has become the modern “stigmatizing” equivalent, and if reporters or clients get a whiff that a bank is in a dire liquidity state, the consequences could be dramatic.

Never mind though, it’s probably all transitory.

Fiat Money Cannibalization in America

September 22, 2019

Fiat Money Cannibalization in America

An Odd Combination of Serenity and Panic

The United States, with untroubled ease, continued its approach toward catastrophe this week.  The Federal Reserve cut the federal funds rate 25 basis points, thus furthering its program of mass money debasement.  Yet, on the surface, all still remained in the superlative.

S&P 500 Index, weekly: serenely perched near all time highs, in permanently high plateau nirvana. [PT]

Stocks smiled down on investors from their perch upon what Irving Fischer once called “a permanently high plateau.”  As of the market close on Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average held above 27,000, the S&P 500 above 3,000, and the NASDAQ above 8,000.  401k accounts, to the delight of working stiffs of all ages, origins, and orientations, are swollen beyond expectations.

Below the surface, however, the overnight funding market was subject to much weeping and gnashing of teeth.  Sometime between Monday night and Tuesday morning the overnight repurchase agreement (repo) rate hit 10 percent. Short-term liquidity markets essentially broke.

After several technical glitches, the Fed executed its first repo operation in a decade – $53 billion – to keep the interbank funding market flowing.  Zero Hedge documented the chaos real time.  

This was followed up with additional repo operations on Wednesday and Thursday – at $75 billion a pop, and both oversubscribed.  Perhaps Fed repo operations will be a daily occurrence, at least until the Fed launches QE4.

US overnight repo rate – as Fed chair Jerome Powell remarked: “Funding pressures in money markets are elevated this week”. Evidently, nothing escapes his eagle eyes. [PT]

At the same time, the effective federal funds rate – the upper range limit of the federal funds rate – continues to push above the rate the Federal Reserve pays on excess reserves (IOER).  In other words, the Fed’s primary tool for price fixing credit markets is not behaving according to plan.  Greater Fed intervention will be needed to keep things in line.

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

Liquidity Shortage Getting Worse: Fed’s Repo Oversubscribed As Funding Demand Soars 50% Overnight

September 18, 2019

Liquidity Shortage Getting Worse: Fed’s Repo Oversubscribed As Funding Demand Soars 50% Overnight

20 minutes after today’s repo operation began, it concluded and there was some bad news in it: as we feared, yesterday’s take up of the Fed’s repo operation which peaked at $53.2 billion has expanded substantially, and according to the Fed, today there was a whopping $80.05BN in bids submitted, an increase of $27 billion, or 50% more than yesterday.

It also meant that since the operation – which is capped at $75BN – was oversubscribed by over $5BN, that there was one or more participants who did not get up to €5 billion in the critical liquidity they needed, and that the Fed will see a chorus of demands by everyone (because like with the discount window, nobody will dare to be singled out) to either expand the size of its operations, implement a fixed operation and/or – most likely as per the ICAP note yesterday –  transition to permanent open market operations, i.e. QE

By comparison this is what yesterday’s repo operation looked like:

What is immediately notable is that except for agency paper, there was a greater use of both Treasury ($40.9BN to $51.6BN) and Mortgage-backed ($11.7BN to $27.8BN) collateral. The only silver lining: the step out rate on agency paper dropped from 3.00% to 2.1% however with virtually nobody using that, it is a largely meaningless easing in terms.

Finally, the worst news is that immediately after the operation, overnight repo remained elevated, with Reuters reporting the rate was 2.25%-2.60% after the latest repo operation, confirming that the liquidity shortage continues with the high end of repo still far above fed funds.

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

Quantitative Easing & the Nightmare It Has Created

October 23, 2015

Quantitative Easing & the Nightmare It Has Created

Germany_bonds

While so many people claimed that Quantitative Easing (QE) would produce inflation since it was the creation of money, the truth is very far from this simplistic idea. The theory used by the central banks is seriously flawed and a throwback to ancient times before 1971. There used to be a difference between debt and cash where you could not use debt as cash to borrow on. Then it was less inflationary to borrow than to print, but that changed post-1971. If you want to trade today, you post T-bills as cash. The REPO market has emerged where AAA securities can be borrowed against for the night.

Therefore, buying in bonds to inject cash into the system under the old way of running the monetary system pre-1971 made sense. Today, it is proving to be a fool’s game. Why? This is merely swapping debt for cash; the REAL money supply has not increased when the true definition of the base in money supply is debt + cash. Then you add the leverage from banking.

Draghi-Lagarde

So what does this new reality mean? Under QE, the central banks are the bidders supporting the market in the same stupid manner as attempting to peg a currency. The ECB under Draghai has lost its mind. They keep increasing the percentage of bonds they buy in hopes of creating inflation, but nothing is working. The bonds will not crash without a free market, but instead, they could become extinct. In order for a crash to materialize, there has to be a free market where the private sector bids. But what happens when the private sector has no interest? Oops! Extinction.

CBDisCntRate-USA-M 1925-1955

Little known to most analysts, during World War II, Congress ordered the Federal Reserve to do something similar to QE.

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

Short Squeeze, Liquidity, Margin Debt and Deflation

October 13, 2015

Short Squeeze, Liquidity, Margin Debt and Deflation

Some things you CAN see coming, in life and certainly in finance. Quite a few things, actually. Once you understand we’re on a long term downward path, also both in life and in finance, and you’re not exclusively looking at short term gains, it all sort of falls into place. The only remaining issue then is that so many of you DO look at short term gains only. Thing is, there’s no way out of this thing but down, way down.

Yeah, stock markets went up quite a bit last week. Did that surprise you? If so, maybe you’re not in the right kind of game. You might be better off in Vegas. Better odds and all that. From where we’re sitting, amongst the entire crowd of its peers, this was a major flashing red alarm late last week, from Investment Research Dynamics:

September Liquidity Crisis Forced Fed Into Massive Reverse Repo Operation 

Something occurred in the banking system in September that required a massive reverse repo operation in order to force the largest ever Treasury collateral injection into the repo market. Ordinarily the Fed might engage in routine reverse repos as a means of managing the Fed funds rate. However, as you can see from the graph below, there have been sudden spikes up in the amount of reverse repos that tend to correspond the some kind of crisis – the obvious one being the de facto collapse of the financial system in 2008. You can also see from this graph that the size of the “spike” occurrences in reverse repo operations has significantly increased since 2014 relative to the spike up in 2008. In fact, the latest two-week spike is by far the largest reverse repo operation on record.

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

The Lesson In China: Don’t Go Bubble In the First Place

June 21, 2015

The Lesson In China: Don’t Go Bubble In the First Place

There can be no mistaking that Chinese stocks are in a bubble. Since November 21, the Shanghai SSE Composite index has risen more than 100%. Going back to July 22, the gain is nearly 145%. Those dates are not random coincidence, as they mark specific points of PBOC activity. The stock bubble in China is certainly a monetary affair, but in ways that aren’t necessarily comparable to our own stock bubble experience (twice).

There is, of course, great similarities starting with leverage; in China at the moment there is no shortage, which is precisely the problem. It is quite precarious, though, in that the PBOC has at times shown far more open contempt for Chinese stock margin than the Federal Reserve or Bank of Japan ever did.

Stock forecasters in search of an early-warning system for the next Chinese bear market are zeroing in on the country’s record $358 billion pile of margin debt.

When that three-year build-up of leveraged positions starts to unwind, regulators will struggle to limit the selloff, according to Bocom International Holdings Co. and Rabobank International. Almost all of this year’s biggest declines in the Shanghai Composite Index, including a 6.5 percent slump on May 28, were sparked by investor concerns over margin-trading restrictions. The securities regulator announced plans Friday to limit the amount brokerages can lend for stock trading.

Unlike central banks here and elsewhere, the PBOC has a vastly different understanding and appreciation for asset bubbles, at least to the point that in 2014 and 2015 under reform it is not shirking responsibility for them. The Federal Reserve, in particular, had long been against any linkage between monetarism and asset bubbles, believing instead that they were fully contained under “market” irregularities (that has evolved, somewhat, under the relatively new Yellen Doctrine). I’m not sure the PBOC ever went so far as to completely delink its own activities from asset bubbles, but it at one point was clearly embracing of them even if reluctantly part of a greater government mandate.

 

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

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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