Hello my friends, today is September 23rd. My name is Joseph and this is Markets Weekly. Now this week was a super exciting week in Global Macro, so we have a lot to talk about.
First, we have to talk about Treasury yields. The 10-year Treasury yield soared to multi-year highs and touched 4.5% this past week. This caught many people in the market off guard, but hopefully none of you. Because if you have been listening to this program, we've been telling you months and months in advance that this was going to happen. And let me tell you, I don't think that the high is in yet for Treasury yields this year.
Okay, the second thing we'll talk about is the Bank of England. So the Bank of England met this past week and although everyone was expecting them to hike, they actually paused and they also adjusted their QT program to be slightly larger. Let's talk about what's happening in the UK.
And lastly, let's talk about a very interesting piece from the latest BIS quarterly. Now many people have been wondering why the UOC economy seems to be so resilient even though rates had gone off so quickly and to such a large extent. This BIS piece may hold part of the key to that puzzle.
Okay, starting with Treasury yields. So this past week we had a Fed meeting and after the Fed meeting, the Treasury market began to sell off and that sell off became pretty significant with the 10-year yields touching 4.5% and then retreating a bit on Friday.
My best guess was that it was the dot plot that was the catalyst to this move. The dot plot contained two pieces of information this time that were pretty bearish for longer dated Treasuries. The first of course is that the Fed reaffirmed its higher for longer stance. Now in June, the Fed's dot plot penciled in 100 basis points of rate cuts next year in 2024. Now this most recent dot plot, they're only penciling in 50 basis points of cuts on account of economic strength. So that's telling the market that the Fed is going to stay higher for longer than they expected. So obviously that's going to push longer dated yields higher.
The second piece of information in the dot plot was that it seemed like the FOMC participants are coming around to the fact that perhaps our star that is the neutral rate of interest is higher today than it was in the past. And you can see that where the range of estimates that FOMC participants put for our star has been trending, the range has been kind of scattered towards upwards, towards three. The median is still 0.5% real though, but it's moving higher. So that is also I think structurally bearish for Treasuries as it suggests that rates are structurally higher going forward.
But regardless, I think the fundamentals of the treasury market as we've been discussing for months and months here are extremely bearish. In my view, rates are going to be structurally higher going forward. And for the benefit of the audience, I will review again why I think that these interest rates have to go higher and I'll also talk about why I don't think that the high is in yet for the 10 year yield.
So the way that I look at any asset class, it's not really about let's say growth or inflation or earnings and stuff like that at its essence, the fundamentals for any asset class in my view is just supply and demand.
Now, if you just look at a chart of treasury supply that is to say the fiscal deficit, it's absolutely stunning like mind boggling. So the most recent estimate from the official sector is showing treasury issuance, let's say 1.5 trillion to 2 trillion each year, basically forever. It wasn't always like that.
There was a time in the United States of history, not too long ago actually, maybe just 10 years ago where there would be a lot of people in Congress talking about having a balanced budget, trying not to spend too much money. But those guys are all gone now. It's just full speed ahead, spending more and more money.
Now, if you spend more and more money, obviously you're just printing treasuries. And if the supply of treasuries is basically infinite, then obviously the prices have to go down. So one of the catalysts for this recent shift higher over the past few months, and if you zoom out, you'll see that treasury yields have been the past few weeks. You'll see that the treasury yields have been moving up over the past few weeks has been estimates showing that the US is spending more than expected and collecting less than taxes than expected. So issuance was higher than expected and that seems to have been one of the approximate causes for this recent belt higher.
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But longer term, of course, unless you think that the US government, the US Congress will begin to spend less money, it's very difficult for me to imagine a scenario where supply will actually come down. In fact, my belief is that we're probably going to get more spending as more people want more benefits and stuff like that. So treasury issuance is likely going to be even higher than what's currently estimated. So that's supply.
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Now what is demand? Now demand, of course, over the past few years has been the Federal Reserve, quantitative easing, and the commercial banks, tremendous amounts of buying from commercial banks. Those two guys are out. They're not buying anymore. They're actually shrinking their balance sheets. I was surprised. I was thinking that this would happen earlier in the year, but it didn't because it actually was a new market participant that began to buy treasuries in size. And that was the hedge fund community who was buying cash treasuries as part of the cash futures basis trade. But my sense is that they are actually maxing out now. So I think that we're at a point where demand is going to hit an air pocket now and that could be sudden and I will write about this in my blog post this week. So that's the supply in demand dynamics.
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But there's actually two other aspects I think are very bearish with treasuries. The second one is where you get to more traditional fundamentals like inflation. So it's not that these things don't matter for bonds. It's just that when you're talking about people who invest, they all approach investing in treasuries differently. If you're the Fed, you're buying treasuries for policy. If you're a commercial bank, it's because of regulations and stuff like that. There are certain classes of investors who buy for looking at things like growth and inflation, but they're only one segment of the market, which is why when you focus on things like inflation, you are not giving the whole picture.
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Now the second point, of course, is that from my perspective, inflation is likely going to be structurally higher. I think there's two sub points for this. One, of course, and I've written about this before, is Charles Goodard's theory that an aging population is inflationary because you have more and more people who don't work, but continue to consume. When you retire, you're a boomer, you have a whole bunch of money saved up from working and maybe you get Social Security, maybe you have a huge amount of home equity because you bought your house and you appreciate it a lot, but you're not working anymore. But you continue to consume, you continue to eat, to go on trips, go to restaurants and stuff like that. So there's a shift in supply and demand in balance for goods and services. That's inflationary. We're seeing that right now, actually. Remember, boomers retired. A lot of boomers retired earlier than expected during the pandemic. That pushed wages higher and led to a lot of inflation.
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Now the second sub point to this is I think this is a really good chance that the said will actually revise its inflation target higher. Now I think right now what's happening is that well, everything is going well and everyone's letting the Fed do their job, but there will come a time where the economy may be it's not doing as well as people would like. Maybe unemployment is increasing and at the same time, maybe inflation is still not back to 2%. At that time, I think there's going to be a lot of political pressure on the Fed to move their inflation target higher to maybe 3% so that they won't have to keep raising rates to cause higher unemployment in exchange for lower inflation. I think the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment is going to tilt towards a society that is more accepting of higher inflation. Now to be clear, we don't hear a lot of that now. We had an episode that I did earlier where we talked about very prominent political comment haters making the argument for higher inflation target. It's not super mainstream yet, but I think that next time we have an economic downturn, it's going to be very loud and maybe it will happen.
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Now the last point where I think is really important to understanding why I think treasuries will go higher is just geopolitical risk. So as we all know, many, many prominent countries in the world hold treasuries and some of them are not best friends with the US. And going forward, these countries are going to be scared to have too much exposure to US treasuries because they know that if they ever are on the wrong side of a dispute, the US government is willing to confiscate their treasuries and that is a matter of national security. They're going to have to diversify a bit. It's going to be really hard to do and it's going to happen gradually, but I'm pretty sure it will happen, it has to happen. And that is of course another reduced sense of demand, a reduced source of demand. So from my perspective, treasury yields can only go up. They're not going to go up in a straight line. We'll have scares, we'll have risk off filler off so that will, I think, push people to treasuries if only for a counter trend rally. But from my perspective, I think being still trend higher. Now when treasuries were 4%, I thought it was really easy to say that it would go up to 4.5%. Or now that we're around 4.5% for this year, I still think we trend higher, but from my perspective, it's not as high conviction as it was before.
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Okay. Now let's talk about the bank of England. So this past week, the Bank of England met. Everyone was thinking that the Bank of England was high. And they should hike because. Yeah, so let's look at what's happening in the UK. So in the UK, obviously like everyone else, the UK has an inflation target of about 2%. And as you can see, they are very, very far from their inflation target. Inflation is comfortably above 6%. Now the good news is that inflation is coming down and it seems to be coming down faster than expected. But of course, it's still much higher. On the economy front, the UK economy seems to be slowing pretty rapidly. Now recent survey data suggests the UK data is cooling a lot. And there's good reason to think that monetary policy really is working very quickly. Now one thing that's different in the UK compared to the US is that in the UK, a lot of people have short-dated mortgages. So as the UK, as the Bank of England has been hiking rates, eventually homeowners refinance, let's say, for a few years, and then refinancing and interest rates that are much, much higher than when they initially took out their mortgages. And so their interest expenses are soaring. And so that is going to quickly eat into their disposable income and let monetary policy effectively cool the economy. So on the one hand, inflation is much higher than the target. On the other hand, it seems like monetary policy is working on the economy is slowing. So it seems like the Bank of England took that into account and decided to pause. The reaction to this, of course, was quite swift that the pound sold off against the dollar and potentially the Bank of England could be done.
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We call that the ECB also paused at their meeting and in part due to a slowing economy. Of course, they were careful to clearly state that inflation continued to, if inflation was higher than they expected later, they would be prepared to hack again. But of course, they have to say that my sense is that they're probably done for now. Monetary policy for them really is working unlike the US, where it's much more difficult, which we'll talk about in a moment.
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Now what I found really interesting about the Bank of England's meeting is that they actually toggled their quantitative tightening program. Now their quantitative tightening program was shooting for, say, getting rid of 80 billion pounds of securities. Now they're raising that to 100 billion, 100 billion, great British pounds worth of securities in the coming months.
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So they're increasing the pace of QT and that makes perfect sense to me because when you look across the world, when anyone borrows, they're not really borrowing at the overnight tenure. They're always borrowing, let's say, five, six, seven year tenure and that is much more affected by the QT program than it is overnight rates. And so it seems like to make monetary policy even more effective. They're shrinking their QT portfolio as a way to make term interest rates higher. Now that's a really good idea. Many people have commented that maybe the Fed should do the same. The Fed, in my view, is definitely not going to do that, but they don't have to because the deficit in the US is high and so the drill strategy is going to show a lot of securities and push lower-dated yields higher anyway.
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Now the last thing that we'll talk about is this interesting piece from the latest BIS quarterly. Now the BIS quarterly is a quarterly publication from the Bank of International Settlements, which is kind of like the central bank of central bankers that publishes a lot of interesting stuff. Now they have access to data that no one else in the world has access to. Central banks across the world give them confidential data. They look at that data and they publish their insights based on it. So I really like reading that stuff. I recommend that you read their work as well. And one of the things that stuck out to me this past quarterly is their graphs showing how resilient the US economy is to interest rates.
Now there's this really, really interesting chart here showing how across the world, non-financial corporations seem to have been borrowing longer term and with fixed rates. Now far above all these other countries is how US non-financial corporations behaved. US financial corporations bought much, much more, longer data, tenors and much, much more fixed rate than they did in the past compared to their own past and compared to all other countries. And I think this is a key reason why the US corporate sector has been so resilient. You see all these companies really haven't been paying high interest rates yet because they haven't had to renew. But all the while they've been sitting on a lot of cash that actually has gone off in interest rates. So in fact higher interest rates has been a net benefit to the non-financial corporate segment. Their liabilities, their debt has it really gone up in interest rates but their cash assets which they've been holding in money market funds has been increasing in what they pay in interest. So so far actually not only have high interest rates not really stress the cash flows of the non-financial corporate sector in the US, it's actually been a net benefit. Very surprising.
The second thing in that BIS piece is of course discussion of the majority wall. Eventually all these US corporations are going to have to renew their debt and when they renew it's going to be at much higher interest rates. So monetary policy is going to finally hit the corporate sector. But the majority wall that they show in the BIS is super interesting in that it's very very staggered. It's not just going to all hit in 2024 or 2025 but it's spaced out evenly over a number of years. And so that again suggests that corporations are going to feel the pain of higher interest rates but only gradually. So in my, from my mind that again supports interest rates staying higher for longer simply because all this work that the Fed has done isn't really going to be felt by the corporate sector for over a few years. Not to mention of course if you're looking at the households while everyone has third year mortgages at you know 3% and that's basically they're never going to feel higher interest rates.
So again it seems to me that the Fed compared to the rest of the world has an economy that is more resilient interest rates supporting their position of higher for longer and likely suggest further dollar strength.
Okay so that's all I prepare for today. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you like what I'm producing remember to like and subscribe and remember to check out my blog thinguy.com for my most recent market commentary and if you're interested in learning more about global macro check out my online courses at centralbanking101.com. I'll talk to you all next week.