Investors crave certainty. They want to know that there are definitive signals for them to follow as they adjust their investments to fit the current market and economy. They want to know that A leads to B leads to C. Tea leaf readers are always in high demand on Wall Street and they continue to find employment despite their almost [...]
Having past the fifteenth of the month, the first month in the new quarter, the repo “cycle” for the quarter end has completed. Repo rates have followed almost exactly the same pattern as three months earlier, pivoting on both the quarter end and the 15th each time. This is not just unusual, it shouldn’t happen. Compared with other quarter-end periods, [...]
At this point, no commentary is necessary though I will point out that repo volume in MBS (through DTCC) is very heavy of late. The 7-day average is the highest since March 4, 2013.
Repo rates made an almost perfect recapitulation, with MBS GC jumping to 28 bps and UST at 24.1 bps. Those July 15 fixes compare to MBS of 27.1 bps on April 15 and UST at 25.6 bps. The remarkable recurrence is all the more remarkable with figures now for the 15th. This might be as close to being able to [...]
With Greece settled and China moving away, for now at least, from the edge, it appears as if the “dollar” has settled back from the collateral calls of last week. That would make July 15 as seemingly as much of a dud as April 15 was, both in sharp contrast to October 15 and then January 15. That does not [...]
I feel almost obligated at this point to present UST volatility whenever referring to funding markets. Hopefully that “duty” will subside in the near term, but as I suggested yesterday this week is setting up to be much like last week. When I wrote that, however, I didn’t mean to propose a literal copy from week to week, but that [...]
I have to thank my colleague Joe Calhoun for passing alone a very topical article written by Nassim Taleb and Gregory Treverton in Foreign Affairs. Taleb is, of course, well-known for his “black swan”, but it is really far more than that as it gets to the failure of modern economics as nothing more than a study of statistics. Conventional [...]
Henry Hazlitt once wrote that, “it is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths.” I have come to wonder how far that might have penetrated, disabling so many of the tools in which any “good” economists, or even investors, may use to act. Without the free [...]
Stay In Touch