First and for most of course we're going to talk about the implosion in regional bank stock prices. I was saying that the regional bank panic is over and then we see their stock prices implode. Seems like it's ongoing or maybe things are not necessarily what they appear to be. We'll talk about it.
Secondly we'll talk about the update the Treasury offered us on its projected issuance over the coming years and lastly we'll talk about the big data print this week that is the non-farm payroll print.
Okay starting with the regional bank stock price implosion. So of course over the weekend first republic was bought by JP Morgan and things seem to be going well. Sure Apollo had his cut press conference and he told us that from what he sees things are broadly getting better. Jamie Diamond of course suggested the same thing and then right after his press conference we see a few stock prices of the regional banks just completely implode by 30% and the day after they continue to sink. Notably there was Pacific Western and Western Alliance which I'm showing here. You can see that things were stabilizing, stabilizing, stabilizing and then poof they kind of fell off a cliff. Now a wide range of regional banks were impacted. These smaller ones particularly so but even the bigger ones like PNC, US bank they were also sold.
Now this is kind of interesting in a sense. Now let's think back a month ago. So Silicon Valley Bank first republic were having tremendous, tremendous deposit withdrawals. Their depositors mostly tech companies were running from them. So they were under a bank run and you saw their stock price reflect that. Just basically plummet. This time though it's a little bit different because during this episode Western Alliance actually came out and issued a statement. And they said that you know I'm sitting in my office and I'm looking at my own books and it's the bank has not experienced unusual deposit flows following the sale of first republic bank and other recent industry news.
Total deposits were 48.8 billion as of Tuesday, May 2nd, up 48.2 billion as of Monday, May 1st and flat to Friday, April 28th. So they're saying that gosh guys I nothing has changed for us. There's no deposit flight. There's no bank run but then the stock price seems to tell a different story. Now if there's nothing actually going on with the bank, why is the stock price declining?
Well, there is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal called Eric Wallerstein who is a really good reporter and who actually used to work with me at the Fed. He did some digging into this and he discovered this. Now this is the options volumes for Pacific West and Western Alliance. And from this chart you can actually see that yes, there wasn't that much options volumes. Earlier in the year we had some around the collapse of Silicon Valley bank and just this past week they absolutely soared.
Put option volumes for these guys were to the moon all time highs. And as we've learned during the Memstock episode when all everyone goes and buys a lot of options say on AMC or GameStop that can make the underlying stock price go to the moon. And it seems like some people also discovered that when you buy a whole lot of put options the reverse can also happen. So when you're looking at stock prices you want to there is some connection to the actual company just like there's some connection between the stock market and the real economy but it's some connection it's not necessarily the same thing.
Stock prices like anything else is just supply and demand. Market participants buy and sell for different reasons not necessarily because they have a view on the company. Obviously when everyone went and bought call options on GameStop I don't think they were thinking that the GameStop company was just a super great business the same with AMC but they understood that if they bought a lot of those call options and the stock went up well they would make money.
And I think you have a similar occurrence here where a lot of people bought put options and dealers because they take the other side of the straight have to sell the underslaping to hedge themselves so that pushes the stock price lower in the same way that buying call options pushes the stock price higher. Okay so that seems to be the driver of these stock prices.
Now I noted earlier that there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the banks but here's the thing though now most depositors in a bank don't really pay close attention to what's actually going on in the bank all they see are the stock price. So if they see the stock of their bank tank then they're going to panic and so what was a okay bank totally normal totally stabilizing could actually end up in a bad situation a tanking stock price could precipitate a bank run.
So we're in this situation here in a sense it's kind of like you know being able to buy insurance on your neighbor's house so you buy a lot of insurance and you sit back to their house.
Perception can influence reality when it comes to banks especially in the climate where there's some degree of nervousness. So I think this has to be something that we watch closely.
If now there's also rumors right now that the SEC may institute a short sell ban on banks they did that during the great financial crisis as well but we want to watch the see if the sentiment improves because if it doesn't improve in every day even though there's nothing wrong with the bank people seeing this the stock price of the big tank they can actually get nervous and actually you know precipitate a run and that's not really what we want to happen.
We want banks to survive those banks employ people they make loans to the real economy it's it's in our interest everyone's interest actually except the certain investors for good businesses to survive.
Now I also want to address a couple topics that I've been hearing a lot. Those topics are saying that regional banks are not taking because because they have because of these options but they're taking because of poor fundamentals.
Now again we have a temptation to link fundamentals with market prices directly some relationship but not really strong but I think those objections are worthy of addressing.
The first objection is that these banks are having tremendous deposit runs because they're not willing to pay up for deposits and so they can't compete with money market funds so all the depositors are taking their deposits out of the bank and leaving for money market funds. And the banks they can't afford to pay higher deposit rates because their assets are lower yielding so that means that if they actually raise their deposit rates to compete with money market funds they'll go broke and so because the bank is in a no one situation their budget business models are broken and so their stock prices should be very low.
That objection is very obviously not true and I want to go over why in just a moment. Now the second objection that I hear about is that banks are basically insolvent because the fed rates are aggressively and so a lot of their assets who are perhaps longer dated perhaps fixed income securities they declined in market price following the aggressive rate hikes because the banks are insolvent their equities of course should be zero.
Okay now first I'll talk about now in order to talk about why these two arguments are without merit in my view I'm going to pull up the investor presentation from Western Alliance Bank or which is one of the of course one of the highlighted banks in this week's stock market price declines.
Before I go into that one more thing worth mentioning so the financial times reported that Western Alliance was exploring a sale of course if you're selling yourself you're probably going to fail and the stock price taint because of that it turns out that was a fake story so Western Alliance immediately disputed that issue depressed release and is saying that they're going to sue the financial times.
So again you have huge speculative positioning and then you have what appears to be fake news. So there could be something more to this than what it then on the one appears on the surface.
Okay now here is the interest bearing deposits of Western Alliance regional bank not like a big big not particularly important but what you want to notice is that even as the Fed hiked rates to about 5% their deposit costs their interest bearing deposit costs are about 2.75%.
So when the Fed hikes rates it never completely flows through to the depositors that that's never been the case. Usually let's say about 40% 50% flows through. The bank doesn't actually have to pass through the entire rate hike to the consumer because the consumer is able to get benefits from the banks in other ways and this has always been the case and again we all bank we all bank with someone so we we should have this in our own experience.
Let's try to retain depositors not necessarily through interest rates though some people care a lot about that but they can also do a lot of other things.
A common thing in the 80s was they would give you a free toaster but today they could also offer things like you know business loans mortgage loans good cool technology or if you're a business they could very much offer payment processing services treasury functions. So let's say you're a business with 100 employees every month you have to make payroll for 100 employees well that's a processing thing that the bank could do as a service and in exchange the bank would maybe not pay you as much interest.
And the fact is that banks don't purely compete on interest rates so that that's why even as the Fed rate hikes rates banks have to pay more interest but it's never in the sense that they they can't handle it. If there was ever an instance where they would not be able to afford deposit interest payments I mean if it was ever experienced where they had lots of deposit or flight because of interest rates they could simply raise interest rates to stop them it's a really really easy thing to fix.
One other thing that I would note here is that in this example again Western Alliance not a super important bank 35% of the deposits are non interest bearing. So you got the interest rate deposits paying 2.75% and then 35% of the deposits don't even bear an interest. So again Fed hikes rates the interest rate costs for a bank rise but just by a little because the bank is of able to compete in other areas of service as well.
Okay now the second thing related to what was mentioned is that the banks can't offer higher payments because if they do offer higher interest on their deposits their asset sides is really low they'll go broke through negative carry their interest income will be lower than their interest expense and that's really obviously not true either. So again just looking at Western Alliance not as particularly special bank now their investment portfolio so their securities things like treasuries and agency and BS and other things like that. Munis yields okay investment yields increase the 4.69% and far above what they're paying on their deposits.
Now notice that they only have 9.1 billion dollars in investments like any other bank most of their assets are in loans and here we see 46 billion in loans 46 billion dollars in loans and what are they receiving on loans 6.45% okay so again the bank is making a good interest margin all banks are making good interest margins. So when people are saying that the banks can afford to hike the deposit rates obviously obviously not true can easily afford to.
Now the second argument that I'd like to address is that the banks are insolvent. My gosh fed hike the bunch of rates all their fixed income securities fixed rate loans underwater they must be insolvent. So that is a much trickier question to answer and I'll answer it using an example. Now when you're talking about solvency it's assets minus liabilities right so we know that the assets prices have declined because interest rates went higher.
Now what about the liabilities? In case a let's say the bank borrows overnight $100 and uses it to purchase $100 worth of mortgages. Fed hikes rates mortgages decline in price from $100 to $90. Now all those overnight lenders see that the bank oh my gosh you lost $10. I want all my money back. The bank is forced to sell that mortgage realizes a $10 loss and goes broke because they only have $90 worth of assets and they have to repay $100 worth of loans. That's case A.
Now let's go to case B. The bank borrows $100 in 10 year loans and invests it in 10 year treasuries or 10 year security. So interest rates go higher yes that 10 year security that they own declines in price. Oh no. But let's say after 10 years of course because the 10 year treasury, the 10 year treasury security is money good then at the end of the day the bank receives $100 back. So it doesn't have any losses. For the course of the 10 year period the market value converges to the power value because all you're seeing is fluctuations in price due to interest rate risk. There's no credit risk.
So the bank holds the security over to maturity and it pays down a hundred cents to the dollar. And at the same time because the bank borrowed a 10 year loan to fund that investment it has $100 and it can use that $100 to pay off the 10 year loan. No loss to the bank. Bank is not bank. Bank is not insolvent. Now the key difference between these two cases between case A and case B is that in one case the bank borrowed an overnight money and the other case the bank borrowed 10 year money.
Now a deposit. Is it overnight money or is it 10 year money? Well in practice of course no one goes to the bank the next day it takes back all their deposits that doesn't happen. But it's also true that no one keeps their money in a bank forever. So it's also not 10 year money. It's somewhere in between. Now therein lies the detail. If I'm a bank and I have someone depositing money with me when is that person going to take their money out? It's that they're not going to take it all out tomorrow and they're not going to leave it in forever.
So I have to have an estimate as to when someone would take that money out. In a sense I'm borrowing term money. I'm not borrowing overnight. I'm borrowing term. I just don't know exactly what term it is.
Now banks try to estimate that based on who is making the deposit. Is it a retail mom and pop guaranteed by FDIC insurance? There's a good chance that they're going to keep their money there for a long time. Maybe it's I can estimate it to be five year money as in like a five year loan to the bank. Or it can be someone like a Silicon Valley investor who has lots of uninstalled money and is very volatile.
Well maybe that's closer to overnight money. So a bank would try to understand its clients and try to build relationships to make its money stickier. But it's an art more than a science. So the first republic's strategy was to go find lots of really rich people and ask them to keep their money with first republic.
But any exchange offer them really really sweet mortgage deals. So super low rates on their big mortgages. Silicon Valley bank strategy was to find a whole bunch of startups and offer them loans when no one else was willing to offer them loans. On the condition that they would keep their deposits with Silicon Valley bank. Again, these are banks trying to control the stickiness of the deposits.
It turns out those two strategies did not work. What was thought to be, let's say a long term loan to the bank ended up to be an overnight loan to the bank and the bank went bust. So how you run your bank, how you manage your deposit franchise, which is what they call it, really determines how stickier your money is. And thus whether or not your bank actually is insolvent when it has losses on its assets.
The vast majority of banks in the US manage their banks very conservatively. They have high degree of deposit granularity that is to say other than having a few rich people or a few big VCs, they would have about 10,000 mom and pop leaving $10,000 in the banks. Those banks are super sturdy. Now from what I see, the vast majority of banks really are like that. And I know it sounds crazy, but if you really think about what happened during the banking episode, it was really concentrated in more volatile sectors.
Let's say VC and crypto and those sectors went bust in the banks that relied on them as customers went bust with them. So we'll see going forward if there really is more trouble or really this was just a panic driven by stock prices, definitely something to watch in the coming weeks. All right, let's go on to our next topic.
Okay, now this is what I find to be the craziest thing. So every quarter the US Treasury updates us with what they're doing with their Treasury issuance. What are they projecting for the next few years?
Now here you want to see look up here, you want to look at the dots here. So these are dots based on the projections of the private sector, so the banks and also the projections of the OMB, which is a government agency and the CBOA as well. So the triangle is the OMB, I forgot the acronym, it's one of the government agencies and Congressional Budget Office is the blue dots. And the square is from the private sector.
So what you want to see here is that the net issuance of treasuries and in another way, the deficit is going to be between $1.5 to $2 trillion for the next five years. Now I want to rewind a little bit. 20 years ago we didn't really have much of a budget deficit. 30 years ago we had budget surpluses.
There was a lot of people in Congress who cared a lot about the budget deficit. Those people are all gone now and we really are in a very, very different era. We are in an era where no one cares about the budget deficit. And so that has two implications. One, if you continue to have fiscal spending, it's really hard to get inflation under control because you have basically a huge price insensitive market participant.
Now in the economy, if prices get too high, people can afford them and so prices come down. But if you have the government in there, of course the government is never going to say that prices are too high, I'm not going to afford it. They're just going to print treasuries to afford it. So if you have a government that continues to spend, well that's inelastic demand and that seems to be, that seems to continue.
Now the second thing I'll note is that now treasury yield, treasury prices, again like anything else, it's supply and demand. People look at treasuries from a wide range of angles. Some people have to buy treasuries because they're highly regulated.
Some people are macro investors, they look at things like growth and inflation. Other people are like foreign central banks who have a whole bunch of dollars they need to invest so they don't really care about inflation and things like that. Again, if you want to understand how markets work, you really have to see things through the perspective of different market participants. I really recommend my free course at centralbanking101.com about this.
Now anyway, the thing is that you have demand, demand side, totally different people, totally different participants, different perspectives. But the supply side though, the issuance of treasuries is going to be historically, historically high. If you're just doing 1.5 to 2 trillion, you can even think of the supply as infinite. The price of anything who supplies infinite is not very high. Now, I look at this and I think that we really are in an era where interest rates are going to structurally be higher. You just can't keep issuing 1.5 to 2 trillion in treasuries every year and expect interest rates to stay low. They'll be bought for sure, but at what price? 10 years or 3.5 percent? I don't think so. I know there are many who disagree with me on this, but this chart is not something that you would have seen even a few years ago.
Okay, last thing I'll talk about today is the really positive, the modestly positive, a non-farm payroll report. So in the market data world, non-farm payrolls are tier A, tier 1 data, tier A, tier 1 data. They are really important in market moving data. And it looks like payrolls, beat expectations, $250,000, $250,000 jobs created in April. Notably, of course, average hourly earnings were also pretty solid as well. So again, it's pitting a picture of the U.S. economy as basically fine, continues to create jobs at a good pace and here you go. Average hourly earnings increased by 4.4 percent.
Okay, so the U.S. economy seems to be fine. Notwithstanding everything that people are talking about or the poor sentiments, people are getting jobs and people are making more money through their wages. Now inflation has gradually come down as well. So we're at a point where the wage gains that people have are just about outplacing inflation. It really depends on what level of wage you are. Low wage workers have been outpacing inflation for some time. That seems like a good thing for the broader economy. Another really good thing to note is that labor force participation for primates workers, so workers 25 to 50, four years old, has exceeded its pre-pandemic high. So it's 83.3 percent now. So there has been a tremendous recovery in the primates, primates, employment demographic group in labor. That's not surprising to me.
Of course, wages are growing at 4 or 5 percent. A year that's going to draw more people in. Again, the peak was 83.1 pre-pandemic and now it's 83.3. What's changed, of course, is that the labor force participation for those who are 55 and above the older demographic, the boomers. Now the 55 and above labor force participation was around 40 percent pre-pandemic. And it's just plummeted to 38.4 percent and it did not rebound. It doesn't look like it's going to rebound. I think that's the big reason for labor market tightness. We just lost a lot of workers who left and didn't want to come back.
It could be that they're concerned about health. It could be that, well, if you're a boomer, honestly, you did really well in life. You bought houses when they were cheap. Now they're, you rode the wave up in house prices and asset prices and you can easily retire if you want to. But if they're not coming back, that means that the labor market, of course, will structurally stay strong.
All right, so that's all I've prepared for today. Thanks so much for tuning in. Next week, we have to focus on CPI because, of course, the Fed focuses on CPI and the Fed is the most important force in markets these days. All right, talk to you guys next week.