Tag Archive: U.S. Treasuries

Good Time To Go Fish(er)ing Around The Yield Curve

2022-01-21

by

2022-01-21

It should be as simple as it sounds. Lower LT UST yields, less growth and inflation. Thus, higher LT UST yields, more growth and inflation. Right? If nominal levels are all there is to it, then simplicity rules the interpretation. Visiting with George Gammon last week, he confessed to committing this sin of omission.

Read More »

Conflict Of Interest (rates): 10-year Treasury Yield Highest in Almost Two Years

2022-01-12

by

2022-01-12

The dollar was high and going higher. Emerging markets had been seriously complaining. In one, the top central banker for India outright warned, “dollar funding has evaporated.” The TIC data supported his view, with full-blown negative months, net selling from afar that’s historically akin to what was coming out of India and the rest of the world.

Read More »

Start Long With The (long ago) End of Inflation

2021-12-24

by

2021-12-24

With the eurodollar futures curve slightly inverted, the implications of it are somewhat specific to the features of that particular market. And there’s more than enough reason to reasonably suspect this development is more specifically deflationary money than more general economic concerns.

Read More »

One Shock Case For ‘Irrational Exuberance’ Reaching A Quarter-Century

2021-12-22

by

2021-12-22

Have oil producers shot themselves in the foot, while at the same time stabbing the global economy in the back? It’d be quite a feat if it turns out to be the case, one of those historical oddities that when anyone might honestly look back on it from the future still hung in disbelief. Let’s start by reviewing just the facts.

Read More »

Playing Dominoes

2021-12-19

by

2021-12-19

That was fast. Just yesterday I said watch out for when the oil curve flips from backwardation to contango. When it does, that’s not a good sign. Generally speaking, it means something has changed with regard to future expectations, at least one of demand, supply, or also money/liquidity.

Read More »

This Is A Big One (no, it’s not clickbait)

2021-12-02

by

2021-12-02

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: dollar up for reasons no one can explain; yield curve flattening dramatically resisting the BOND ROUT!!! everyone has said is inevitable; a very hawkish Fed increasingly certain about inflation risks; then, the eurodollar curve inverts which blasts Jay Powell’s dreamland in favor of the proper interpretation, deflation, of those first two.

Read More »

The ‘Growth Scare’ Keeps Growing Out Of The Macro (Money) Illusion

2021-11-26

by

2021-11-26

When Japan’s Ministry of Trade, Economy, and Industry (METI) reported earlier in November that Japanese Industrial Production (IP) had plunged again during the month of September 2021, it was so easy to just dismiss the decline as a product of delta COVID.

Read More »

What Does Taper Look Like From The Inside? Not At All What You’d Think

2021-11-05

by

2021-11-05

Why always round numbers? Monetary policy targets in the post-Volcker era are changed on even terms. Alan Greenspan had his quarter-point fed funds moves. Ben Bernanke faced with crisis would auction $25 billion via TAF. QE’s are done in even numbers, either total purchases or their monthly pace.

Read More »

Bill Issuance Has Absolutely Surged, So Why *Haven’t* Yields, Reflation, And Other Good Things?

2021-11-02

by

2021-11-02

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen hasn’t just been busy hawking cash management bills, her department has also been filling back up with the usual stuff, too. Regular T-bills. Going back to October 14, at the same time the CMB’s have been revived, so, too, have the 4-week and 13-week (3-month). Not the 8-week, though.

Read More »

The Enormously Important Reasons To Revisit The Revisions Already Several Times Revisited

2021-10-29

by

2021-10-29

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary commitment. I never set out nor imagined that a quarter century after embarking on what I thought would be a career managing portfolios, researching markets, and picking investments, I’d instead have to spend a good amount of my time in the future taking apart how raw economic data is collected, tabulated, and then disseminated.

Read More »

Short Run TIPS, LT Flat, Basically Awful Real(ity)

2021-10-28

by

2021-10-28

Over the past week and a half, Treasury has rolled out the CMB’s (cash management bills; like Treasury bills, special issues not otherwise part of the regular debt rotation) one after another: $60 billion 40-day on the 19th; $60 billion 27-day on the 20th; and $40 billion 48-day just yesterday.

Read More »

An Anti-Inflation Trio From Three Years Ago

2021-10-26

by

2021-10-26

Do the similarities outweigh the differences? We better hope not. There is a lot about 2021 that is shaping up in the same way as 2018 had (with a splash of 2013 thrown in for disgust). Guaranteed inflation, interest rates have nowhere to go but up, and a certified rocking recovery restoring worldwide potential.

Read More »

The Curve Is Missing Something Big

2021-10-21

by

2021-10-21

What would it look like if the Treasury market was forced into a cross between 2013 and 2018? I think it might be something like late 2021. Before getting to that, however, we have to get through the business of decoding the yield curve since Economics and the financial media have done such a thorough job of getting it entirely wrong (see: Greenspan below).

Read More »

Taper *Without* Tantrum

2021-08-17

by

2021-08-17

Whomever actually coined the term “taper”, using it in the context of Federal Reserve QE for the first time, it wasn’t actually Ben Bernanke. On May 22, 2013, the central bank’s Chairman sat in front of Congressman Kevin Brady and used the phrase “step down in our pace of purchases.” No good, at least from the perspective of a media-driven need for a snappy one-word summary.

Read More »

CPI’s At Fives Yet Treasury Auctions

2021-08-12

by

2021-08-12

A momentous day, for sure, but one lost in what would turn out to be a seemingly endless sea of them. October 8, 2008, right in the thick of the world’s first global financial crisis (how could it have been global, surely not subprime mortgages?) the Federal Reserve took center stage; or tried to.

Read More »

Golden Collateral Checking

2021-07-27

by

2021-07-27

Dollar Correlations, 2018-2021
Searching for clues or even small collateral indications, you can’t leave out the gold market. We’ve been on the lookout for scarcity primarily via the T-bill market, and that’s a good place to start, yet looking back to last March the relationship between bills and bullion was uniquely strong. It’s therefore a persuasive pattern if or when it turns up again.

Read More »

Lower Yields And (fewer) Bills

2021-07-21

by

2021-07-21

Back on February 23, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell stopped by (in a virtual, Zoom sense) the Senate Banking Committee to testify as required by law. In the Q&A portion, he was asked the following by Montana’s Senator Steve Daines.

Read More »

Inching Closer To Another Warning, This One From Japan

2021-07-20

by

2021-07-20

UST Yield Curve, 2017-2019
Central bankers nearly everywhere have succumbed to recovery fever. This has been a common occurrence among their cohort ever since the earliest days of the crisis; the first one. Many of them, or their predecessors, since this standard of fantasyland has gone on for so long, had caught the malady as early as 2007 and 2008 when the world was only falling apart.

Read More »

And Now Three Huge PPIs Which Still Don’t Matter One Bit In Bond Market

2021-07-15

by

2021-07-15

U.S. PPI Commodities Finished Goods Core YoY, Jan 2001 - Jan 2021
And just like that, snap of the fingers, it’s gone. Without a “bad” Treasury auction, there was no stopping the bond market today from retracing all of yesterday’s (modest) selloff and then some. This despite the huge CPI estimates released before the prior session’s trading, and now PPI figures that are equally if not more obscene.

Read More »

Third CPI In A Row, Yet All Eyes On That 30s Auction

2021-07-14

by

2021-07-14

U.S. Core CPI, Jan 1990 - Jan 2021
Three in a row, huge CPI gains. According to the BLS, headline consumer price inflation surged 5.39% (unadjusted) year-over-year during June 2021. This was another month at the highest since July 2008 (the last transitory inflationary episode). The core CPI rate gained 4.47% last month over June last year, the biggest since November 1991.

Read More »