In the coming months a record amount of coupon Treasuries will flood the market even as demand for those securities appears to be faltering. Recent remarks from Chair Powell suggest quantitative tightening will proceed at a pace of $1t a year, double the annual pace of the prior QT. That could imply a process that quickly ramps up to around $700b in Treasuries and $300b in Agency MBS in annual run-off. At the same time, Treasury net issuance is expected …
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The banking system is built on trust that the money one places in the care of others will be there when needed. This is as true for the retail investor with deposits at the local commercial bank, as it is for the sovereign with FX deposits at a foreign central bank. Hard earned trust is part of the magic that enables developed market sovereigns to massively deficit spend with limited consequence. The world happily holds their liabilities, be it in …
The Fed’s control over interest rates can also be viewed as control over the quantity of a certain type of money. The mere prospect of rate hikes mechanically reduces the market value of Treasuries, which are widely held as money like safe assets. The declines in value are net losses to the financial system that are also unevenly distributed and cannot be hedged system wide. The losses are further transmitted across asset classes as diversified investors rebalance their portfolios by …
An aggressive quantitative tightening (“QT”) pace would set the stage for another spike in rates, but this time further out the curve. During QT, the U.S. Treasury increases its borrowing from the private sector to repay Treasuries held by the Fed. While the Fed can be repaid with cash held in either the RRP or banks, the current issuance structure suggests repayment will largely come out of the banking system. The lesson of the prior QT was that reducing the …
This post describes the mechanics behind quantitative tightening (“QT”) and reviews the prior QT experience. In our two-tiered monetary system, it is helpful to view QT through a framework that takes into account the perspectives of Banks (those who have a Fed account) and Non-Banks (those who don’t have a Fed account). Mechanically, QT reduces the level of cash held by Banks (reserves) and changes the composition of money held by Non-Banks (more Treasuries and fewer bank deposits). The Fed …
There is still $1 trillion in Fed liquidity that will gradually flow into the private sector after QE stops. A large chunk of liquidity created by QE over the past two years never entered the banking system, but instead sat first in the Treasury’s Fed account and later in the RRP Facility. In the coming months Treasury will restart bill issuance and draw those funds out of the RRP into the TGA, and then spend those funds into the banking …
There are around $2 trillion in pandemic savings held by American households that have yet to be spent. Despite a brief recession, fiscal stimulus supercharged American incomes the past year by maintaining wages through the PPP program, topping off incomes with stimulus checks, and boosting unemployment benefits. At the same time, Americans consumed less than usual as lockdowns limited spending opportunities. As noted by Clarida in two recent speeches (here and here), Americans have accumulated over $2t in pandemic savings …
A structural change in the plumbing of the banking system is dampening the impact of monetary policy and may even make rate hikes inflationary. Rates hikes now directly increase the asset returns of banks while leaving their funding costs unchanged – effectively encouraging credit creation. This is because banks have shifted their funding structure away from rate sensitive money market funding to rate insensitive retail deposit funding. The shift is due both to Basel III raising the regulatory costs of …
The inflationary process is in its early stages, and it will be particularly strong because it arises in part from a devaluation of the world’s reserve currency. Governments throughout the world printed and spent trillions in their pandemic related efforts, but none of their actions came close to the American response. American households literally received trillions in newly printed money that they are just beginning to spend. Inflation will become more obvious as that money moves through constrained supply chains …
The Fed and Treasury have seen enough debt ceilings to develop a playbook that can be pieced together from past FOMC transcripts and Congressional subpoenas. The Fed does not want to interfere in debt ceiling negotiations, which are part of the political process. But a default by Treasury may trigger enough market turmoil to affect financial stability and ultimately prompt Fed action. At the moment, Treasury debt maturing around late October is already exhibiting some signs of distortion. Treasury will …