Tag: Liquidity

The Biggest Trade in the World

Photo by Vance Osterhout on Unsplash

The largest position in the history of the financial markets is about to get squeezed.

Written April 27th, 2020

Successful traders are always asking themselves two questions in the course of analyzing markets: 1) given a set of known inputs, are markets behaving as expected? and 2) if not, why not?

Since the COVID-19 pandemic crashed the world’s financial markets last month, central banks have responded with extraordinary measures to stabilize markets and prop up their respective economies.

For its part, the Fed has undertaken policies on a scale unprecedented in the history of finance, radically expanding their balance sheet and going so far as lending directly to municipalities and buying junk bond ETFs in the open market. Essentially printing money, but on steroids.

The equity markets have responded favorably, much as one would expect given the deluge of liquidity. It’s a reflexive response conditioned by a decade of the Fed propping up asset prices every time the markets stumbled. Will it last? Nobody knows.

However, the part of this scenario that is not going according to plan is potentially the most consequential for the financial markets. The US dollar needs to weaken. Big time. For a global economy staring at a tsunami of deflation, it is the most critical element to achieving a durable reflation of commodities and equity prices and restoring confidence in many regions of the world, especially the emerging markets.

This is not lost on central bank officials. In fact, if you were asked to come up with a policy to destroy your own currency, moves by the Fed and the Treasury over the past month to explode the federal deficit would be it.

The speculative trading community initially took the cue. According to CFTC data, the specs began shorting the dollar in the middle of March as rates went to zero and the money printing presses began working overtime.

But since then, not only hasn’t the dollar gone down, it is higher instead.

The latest study by the Bank for International Settlements estimates the world’s short position in the dollar at about $13 trillion, much of it based on dollar debt held by offshore banks and corporations, representing the largest aggregate position in the financial markets by far.

Currency swap facilities instituted and expanded by the Federal Reserve with the intention of ensuring these entities access to dollar funding helped settle the markets late last month, but the currency’s appreciation since then is a sure sign that it won’t be enough. For many of these foreign corporations, swap lines are of little value if their respective central banks don’t have sufficient reserves to swap or US Treasury securities to pledge as collateral.

Also, printing trillions won’t do much good if there is no turnover, or velocity, of that money due to the collapse in business activity. It just ends up in the vaults of institutions that don’t need it, crowding out the weaker borrowers.

Against all expectations, the steady grind higher in the dollar in recent weeks is a red flag that this massive short trade is about to get squeezed.

The implications will be felt everywhere. The risk to the broader economy is that a stronger dollar triggers a doom loop of debt deflation, where slower global growth causes the dollar to rise and a stronger dollar, in turn, depresses prices and causes growth to slow.

As we’ve been recommending for more than a year, stick with long positions in the dollar and front-end treasuries. In our last piece “The L-Shaped Recovery“, we suggested adding physical gold and taking advantage of near-term strength in equities to reduce exposure. If the dollar starts to accelerate, things could get ugly. Quickly. And despite the Fed’s insistence on not taking interest rates negative, it’s not impossible that this will end up being their next move.

US Dollar Index (DXY)

Liquidity Trumps Fundamentals

Inadequate funding a potential problem for markets

Photo by Robin Spielmann on Unsplash

Written September 26, 2019

Just like the equity market’s general complacency over the uncertainty created by a potential presidential impeachment, it is exhibiting a similar lack of interest in the ongoing liquidity squeeze in short-term funding markets.

A sharp spike in overnight financing rates last week due to a scarcity of bank reserves was initially dismissed as an unexpected confluence of technical factors.  Everything from quarterly tax bills, treasury auction settlements, and principal and interest payments were blamed for draining an unusual amount of money from the system and causing an acute shortage of free reserves.  Overnight rates were said to have traded as high as 10% before the Fed was forced to step in with emergency funds.  The panic passed but the underlying problem hasn’t gone away.  Lots of confusion still hangs over the money markets.  Financing remains tight, enough so that the Fed has had to supplement the system with cash every day since.  This is not normal and the longer it goes on the explanation that it is merely a temporary quirk becomes less credible.

As of now, the consensus opinion is that this problem will fix itself simply by a turn of the calendar past quarter-end (September 30).  That seems to be a big leap of faith.  In a Bloomberg piece today former Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota says that regulatory changes after the 2008 crisis, like more stringent capital and leverage requirements, have restricted the amount of free reserves in the financial system and banks’ willingness to lend those reserves among themselves. See https://bloom.bg/2mGcO3B. None of this was a problem while the Fed was expanding its balance sheet and providing almost limitless liquidity.  Only when the Fed began to shrink its balance sheet a year ago did this unintended consequence emerge. 

The explosion in the issuance of US dollar-based debt, both domestic and foreign, during the previous decade of easy money policies created a massive need to finance that debt.  What has now become obvious is that without additional liquidity provided by the Fed, there just aren’t enough dollars in the system to go around. Kocherlakota notes that “the financial system is acting like it has $1.3 billion in excess reserves rather than the actual $1.3 trillion.”

This means the Fed can forget about any plans they might have had for normalizing interest rates and reducing their balance sheet.  Quite the opposite, it slants the probabilities in the direction of even lower rates. The problem in the money markets is structural and has disrupted one of the financial markets’ most essential functions.  Until they figure out how to fix it, simple liquidity will become an ever-important consideration for investors.  Fundamental investment strategies don’t matter much if they can’t be financed.

The fourth quarter of 2019 will see two issues elevated that were not big considerations in the current quarter: domestic political uncertainty and liquidity uncertainty.  These factors should lead to a general increase in market volatility as well as heightened concern over funding availability. This will almost certainly force banks and asset managers to begin paring back positions for year-end earlier than ever. Additionally, rate cuts at Fed meetings in October (Oct 29-30) and December (Dec 10-11) will be in play as the Fed seeks to offset the slowing economy and keep funding pressures contained. 

The two simplest trade opportunities are 1) long equity volatility such as the VIX (see VIX Cheap as Impeachment Threat Grows) and 2) long Eurodollar interest rate futures, such as the Dec 2021 contract.  Policy rates in the U.S. are on their way to zero and there’s a lot left in this trade.

December 2021 Eurodollar Future
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