Real Estate and Mortgages – Page 3

Meeting the “Bond King”

Posted on 17 October 201417 October 2014 by David Merkel

Photo Credit: ~Sage~ || King of the Beasts, eh?

It was winter in early 1995, and I was wondering if I still had a business selling Guaranteed Investment Contracts [GICs]. ?Confederation Life had gone insolvent the August prior, and I noticed that fewer and fewer stable value funds wanted to purchase my GICs, because our?firm was small, and as such, did not get a good credit rating, despite excellent credit metrics. ?The lack of a good rating kept buyers away.

Still, I felt I needed to try my best for one more year or so, despite my feelings that the business was?dying soon. ?With that attitude, I headed off in January to sunny Southern California, to attend GICs ’95, something my opposite number at AIG referred to as a Schmoozathon.

Schmoozathon? ?Well, you took your opportunities to ingratiate yourself with current and potential clients, across four days and three nights of meetings, with a variety of parties going on. ?I was not the best salesman, so I just tried to play it as straight as I could.

In the middle of the whole affair was a special lunch where Bill Gross was to be the Keynote Speaker. ?Because I was talking with a client, I got to the lunch a little late, and ended up at a table near the back of the room.

Things were running a little behind, but Bill Gross got up and gave a talk that borrowed heavily from a recent Pimco Investment Outlook that he had written, comparing the current market opportunities to Butler Creek?(see paragraph 6), a creek that he grew up near as a kid, which gently meandered, went kinda straight, kinda not, but didn’t vary all that much when you looked at it as a whole, rather than from a nearby point on the ground.

The point? Sell volatility. ?Buy mortgage bonds. ?Take convexity risk. ?Clip yield. ?Take a few chances, the environment should be gentle, and you can’t go too wrong.

After the horrible investment environment for bonds of 1994, this was a notable shift. ?So he came to the end of his talk, and it was time for Q&A. ?Suddenly, the moderator stormed up to the front of the room and said, “I’m really sorry, but we’re out of time. ?We’ve got a panel waiting in the main meeting?room to talk about the Confederation insolvency. ?Please head over there now.”

Everyone got up, and dutifully headed over to the Confederation panel. ?I was disappointed that I wouldn’t get a chance to ask Bill Gross a question, so as I started to leave, I looked to the front of the room, and I saw Bill Gross standing there alone. ?It struck me. “Wait. ?What don’t I know about Confederation? The best bond manager in the US is standing up front.”

So I walked up to the front, introduced myself, told him that I was an investment actuary, and asked if I could talk with him about mortgage bonds. ?He told me that he could until his driver showed up. ?As?a result, for the next 15 minutes, I had Bill Gross to myself, asking him how they analyzed the risks and returns of complex mortgage securities. ?His driver then showed up; I thanked him, and he left.

Feeling pretty good, I wandered over to the Confederation panel. ?As I listened, I realized that I hadn’t missed anything significant. ?Then I realized that the rest of the audience had missed a significant opportunity. ?Oh, well.

As it turned out, I made many efforts in 1995 to resuscitate my GIC business. ?It survived for one more year, and collapsed in 1996, with little help from senior management. ?It was for the best, anyway. ?It was a low margin, capital intensive business, and closing it enabled me to focus on bigger things that improved corporate profitability. ?I never went to another?Schmoozathon as a result, but the last one had a highlight that I would not forget: meeting Bill Gross.

The Future Will Be Like The Past, Only More So

Posted on 9 October 2014 by David Merkel

Photo Credit -- Javier || Buffett believes in America — Photo Credit — Javier || Buffett believes in America

Yesterday there was an article where Buffett was quoted on getting mortgages to buy houses. Let me quote the most relevant portion:

?You would think that people would be lining up now to get mortgages to buy a home,? Buffett said today at a conference hosted by Fortune magazine in Laguna Niguel,California. ?It?s a good way to go short the dollar, short interest rates. It is a no-brainer. But so far home construction pickup has been slower than I had anticipated.?

Now, when I read the comment stream on the article, I was not surprised at the level of disagreement, but the vitriolic nature of the the disagreement. ?Buffett is certainly not made of Teflon anymore, and fame has led to its share of detractors.

Now, I don’t think that Buffett is giving the right advice to everyone here, but I also don’t think that he is talking his book because has has investments in?firms that sell:

Real estate
Manufactured housing
Building materials
Mortgages
Etc.

Indeed, Buffett has enough investments that almost anything he says could be talking his book. ?I think his character is such that he does not talk his book — his firm is one that is built on “low hype” attitudes, at least, low hype for a company of its size and complexity.

Should everyone run out and get a mortgage because it is a cheap time to be borrowing money? ?That is an individual question, hinging on how secure and high your income is versus the likely payment on the mortgage, and other housing-related expenses.

The interest rate may indeed be low relative to history, but how well will the economy do in the future? ?Maybe residential?housing is too expensive in some areas to get a lot of people excited about buying.

Buffett also said:

?Household formation falls off dramatically in a recession, at least initially,? he said. ?But that doesn?t last long. Hormones kick in and in-laws get tiresome, too.?

Unless something changes in US culture, there have been changes to the demand for homes, driven by the following factors:

People are marrying later and less frequently
They are having fewer kids
Urban areas are more attractive for many people to live in, reducing commute time and costs. ?Even car-buying is affected.
There are fewer move-up buyers because of the financial crisis.
The ability of lower middle class people to afford homes has been reduced, particularly in high cost of living areas.
The financial crisis has ruined the illusion that residential real estate is an investment that can’t lose money.

There may be more reasons, but even though the 30-year mortgage is the cheapest long-term financing that an average person can get, there are more people than before who are not interested in buying a home. ?Renting suits their goals fine.

As such, I think Buffett is wrong here, and that borrowing to buy residential housing will not be as prominent as it was in the past. ?But I don’t think he has any bad intentions in what he said — he believes in America, and thinks that we will return to the consumption patterns of the past, which relied on too much debt in my opinion.

Final note: I’m getting tired of reading comment streams. ?The people there are often too cynical, and too loose with the truth. ?Their expectations for what they deserve in this life are also inflated beyond what is reasonable. ?Some turn to conspiracy theories to keep themselves from blaming their bad fortune on their own actions.

Buffett is generally a good guy, and a good example as far as businessmen go — he does not deserve the abuse. ?I don’t agree with Buffett’s politics, but I don’t think that he is not sincere.

Full disclosure: long BRK/B and WFC

Inevitable Ineffective Banking Regulation

Posted on 1 October 20141 October 2014 by David Merkel

I am mystified at why people might be outraged or surprised that the Federal Reserve does a poor job of overseeing banks. ?The Fed is an overstaffed bureaucracy. ?Overstaffed bureaucracies always tend toward consensus and non-confrontation.

I know this from my days of working as an actuary inside an overstaffed life insurance company, and applying for work in other such companies. ?I did not fit the paradigm, because I had strong views of right and wrong, and strong views on how to run a business well, which was more aggressive than the company that I worked for was generally willing to do. ?Note that only one such company was willing to hire me, and I nearly got fired a couple of times for proposing ideas that were non-consensus.

This shouldn’t be too surprising, given the past behavior of the Fed. ?In 2006, the Fed made a few theoretical noises about residential real estate loan quality, but took no action that would make the lesser regulators do anything. ?It’s not as if they didn’t have the power to do it. ?One of the great canards of financial reform is that regulators did not have enough power to stop the bad lending. ?They most certainly did have enough power; they just didn’t use it because it is political suicide to oppose a boom. ?(Slide deck here.)

As a result, I would not have enacted Dodd-Frank, because I like my laws simple. ?Instead, I would have fired enough?of the regulators to make a point that they did not do their jobs. ?How many financial regulators were fired in 2008-2009? ?Do you hear the crickets? ?This is the #1 reason why you should assume that it is business as usual in banking regulation.

You won’t get assiduous regulation unless regulators are dismissed for undue leniency. ?I have heard many say in this recent episode with Goldman Sachs, the New York Fed, and?Carmen Segarra that those working for the Fed are bright and hard-working. ?I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt; my own dealings with those that work for the Fed is that most of them, aside from bosses,?are quiet, so you can’t tell.

Being quiet, and favoring the powerful, whether it is bosses, politicians, or big companies that you regulate is the optimal strategy for advancement at the Fed over the last 30 years. ?It doesn’t matter much how bright you are, or how hard you work, if it doesn’t have much impact on the organization’s actions.

I try to be an optimistic kind of guy, but I don’t see how this situation can be changed without firing a lot of people, including most of the most powerful people at the Fed, lesser banking regulators, and US Treasury.

And if we did change things, would we like it? ?Credit would be less available. ?I think that would be an exceptionally good thing, but most of our politicians are wedded to the idea that increasing the availability of credit is an unmitigated good. ?They think that because they don’t get tagged for the errors. ?They take credit for the bull market in credit, and blame everyone except themselves and voters for the inevitable bear market.

Also, if we did fire so many people, where would we find our next crop of regulators? ?Personally, I would hand banking regulation back to the states, and end interstate branching, breaking up the banks in the process.

Remember, the insurance industry, regulated by the states, is much better regulated than the banking industry. ?State regulators are much less willing to be innovative, and far more willing to say no. ?State regulation is simple/dumb regulation, which is typically good regulation.

But whether you agree with my policy prescription or not, you should be aware that things are unlikely to change in banking regulation, because it is not a failure of laws and regulations, but a failure of will, and we have the same sorts of people in place as were there prior to the financial crisis.

Postscript

I would commend the articles cited by Matt Levine of Bloomberg regarding this whole brouhaha:

A bit more on Carmen Segarra.

Apparently the place to discuss regulatory capture is on Medium. Here is Dan Davies:

Regulated institutions generally have better contacts and relationships with the top central bankers than their supervisors do. And for whatever reason, top central bankers never developed the necessary knee-jerk aggressive response to any attempts to make use of these relationships to affect the behaviour of supervisors.
So banks never need to listen to their line-level regulators because they can always get those regulators’ bosses’ bosses’ bosses to overrule them. Here is Felix Salmon, mostly agreeing. And here is Alexis Goldstein with a litany of Fed enabling of banks. Elsewhere, Martien Lubberink explains the transaction that got so much attention in the Fed tapes, in which Goldman agreed to hang on to some Santander Brasil stock for a year before delivering it to Qatar. He thinks it was pretty vanilla. And Adam Ozimek has a good point:

This American Life ep should lower avg est corruption belief. Goldman and NY Fed secretly taped & all u get is in non-confrontational nerds?

AIG Was Broke

Posted on 30 September 201430 September 2014 by David Merkel

138524447_df928490da_o — Photo Credit: Ron

There’s a significant problem when you are a supremely?big and connected financial institution: your failure will have an impact on the financial system as a whole. ?Further, there is no one big enough to rescue you unless we drag out the public credit via the US Treasury, or its dedicated commercial paper financing facility, the Federal Reserve. ?You are Too Big To Fail [TBTF].

Thus, even if you don’t fit into ordinary categories of systematic risk, like a bank, the government is not going to sit around and let you “gum up” the financial system while everyone else waits for you to disburse funds that others need to pay their liabilities. ?They will take action; they may not take the best action of letting the holding company fail while bailing out only the connected and/or regulated subsidiaries, but they will take action and do a bailout.

In such a time, it does no good to say, “Just give us time. ?This is a liquidity problem; this is not a solvency problem.” ?Sorry, when you are big during a systemic crisis, liquidity problems are solvency problems, because there is no one willing to take on a large “grab bag” of illiquid asset and liquid liabilities without the Federal Government being willing to backstop the deal, at least implicitly. ?The cost of capital in a financial crisis is exceptionally high as a result — if the taxpayers are seeing their credit be used for semi-private purposes, they had better receive a very high penalty rate for the financing.

That’s why I don’t have much sympathy for M. R. Greenberg’s lawsuit regarding the bailout of AIG. ?If anything, the terms of the bailout were too soft, getting revised down once, and allowing tax breaks that other companies were not allowed. ?Without the tax breaks and with the unamended bailout terms, the bailout was not profitable, given the high cost of capital during the crisis. ?Further, though AIG Financial products was the main reason for the bailout, AIG’s domestic life subsidiaries were all insolvent, as were their mortgage insurers, and perhaps a few other smaller subsidiaries as well. ?This was no small mess, and Greenberg is dreaming if he thought he could put together financing adequate to keep AIG afloat in the midst of the crisis.

Buffett was asked to bail out AIG, and he wouldn’t touch it. ?Running a large insurer, he knew the complexity of AIG. ?Having run off much of the book of Gen Re Financial Products, he knew what a mess could be lurking in AIG Financial Products. ?He also likely knew that AIG’s P&C reserves were understated.

For more on this, look at my book review of?The AIG Story, the?book that tells Greenberg’s side of the story.

To close: it’s easy to discount the crisis after it has passed, and look at the now-solvent AIG as if it were a simple thing for them to be solvent through the crisis. ?It was no simple thing, because only the government could have provided the credit, amid a cascade of failures. ?(That the failures were in turn partially caused by bad government policies was another issue, but worthy to remember as well.)

Time to Chase Bill Gross?

Posted on 28 September 2014 by David Merkel

Jason Zweig at the Wall Street Journal had a very good piece on whether to follow Bill Gross as he goes from Pimco to Janus. ?Let me quote one paragraph:

Morningstar estimates that over the past five years, the average investor fell behind Pimco Total Return?s 5.6% annual gain by 1.6 points a year?largely as a result of buying high and selling low. That gap is among the widest of any large bond fund; at the Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund, for example, investors have earned returns only 0.4 point lower than those of the portfolio itself.

In the short run, this offers a reason to follow Bill Gross to Janus. ?He is starting with a clean slate, and will be able to implement positions that seem attractive to him that would not have been attractive at Pimco because they would have been too small. ?Managing less money lets Bill Gross be more choosy.

Second, in the short run, growth in bond assets at Janus will temporarily push up the prices of bonds held by Janus. ?Those that get in early would benefit from that if bond assets grow under the management of Bill Gross. ?Just keep your eye on when assets stop growing if you are buying for that speculative reason.

A third potential reason to follow Gross depends on how much Pimco continues to use his quantitative strategies. ?If Pimco abandons them (unlikely, but not impossible), Janus would get the chance to use them on much less money, which would make the excess returns greater. ?If I were considering this as a reason, I would watch the turnover in Pimco’s main funds, and see if certain classes of assets disappear.

My last point here is that the abilities of Bill Gross will do better managing less money, but the effect won’t be so great if he is competing with Pimco to implement the same strategies. ?At minimum, he’s not likely to do worse than at Pimco, and in the short-run, there are some reasons why he will likely do better.

PS — please remember that Bill Gross has two hats: the showman and the quant. ?The quant makes money for clients while the showman entertains them. ?The showman opines about the Fed, politics, etc. ?That can get investors interested because it sounds clever, but that is not how Bill Gross makes money.

This brings up one more point. ?If you do decide to invest with him at Janus, review the prospectus to see what degree of flexibility with derivatives Gross will have. ?If it similar to what he had at Pimco, he is likely following the same strategy.

Volatility Can Be Risk, At Rare Times

Posted on 19 September 201419 September 2014 by David Merkel

There is a saying in the markets that volatility is not risk. In general this is true, and helps to explain why measures like beta and standard deviation of returns do not measure risk, and are not priced by the market. After all, risk is the probability of losing money, and the severity thereof.

It’s not all that different from the way that insurance underwriters think of risk, or any rational businessman for that matter. But just to keep things interesting, I’d like to give you one place where volatility is risk.

When overall economic conditions are serene, many people draw the conclusion that it will stay that way for a long time. That’s a mistake, but that’s human nature. As a result, those concluding that economic conditions will remain serene for a long time decide to take advantage of the situation and borrow money.

When volatility is low, typically credit spreads are low. Why not take advantage of cheap capital? Well, I would simply argue that interest rates are for a time, and if you don’t overdo it, paying interest can be managed. But what happens if you have to refinance the principal of the loan at an inopportune time?

When volatility and interest spreads are low for you, they are low for a lot of other people also. Debt builds up not just for you, but for society as a whole. This can have the impact of pushing up prices of the assets purchased using debt. In some cases, the rising asset prices can attract momentum buyers who also borrow money in order to own the rising assets.

This game can continue until the economic yield of the assets is less than the yield on the debt used to finance the assets. Asset bubbles reach their breaking point when people have to feed cash to the asset beyond the ordinary financing cost in order to hold onto it.

In a situation like this, volatility becomes risk. Too many people have entered into too many fixed commitments and paid too much for a group of assets. This is one reason why debt crises seem to appear out of the blue. The group of assets with too much debt looks like they are in good shape if one views it through the rearview mirror. The loan-to-value ratios on recent loans based on current asset values look healthy.

But with little volatility in some subsegment of the overly levered assets, all of a sudden a small group of the assets gets their solvency called into question. Because of the increasing level of cash flows necessary to service the debt relative to the economic yield on the assets, it doesn’t take much fluctuation to make the most marginal borrowers question whether they can hold onto the assets.

Using an example from the recent financial crisis, you might recall how many economists, Fed governors, etc. commented on how subprime lending was a trivial part of the market, was well-contained, and did not need to be worried about. Indeed, if subprime mortgages were the only weak financing in the market, it would’ve been self-contained. But many people borrowed too much chasing inflated values of residential housing. ?As asset values fell, more and more people?lost willingness to pay for the depreciating assets.

We’ve had other situations like this in our markets. Here are some examples:

Commercial mortgage loans went through a similar set of issues in the late 80s.
Lending to lesser developed countries went through similar set of issues in the early 80s.
The collateralized debt obligation markets seem to have their little panics every now and then. (late 90s, early 2000s, mid 2000s, late 2000s)
During the dot-com bubble, too much trade finance was extended to marginal companies that were burning cash rapidly.
The roaring 20s were that way in part due to increased debt finance for corporations and individuals.

At the peak some say, “Nobody rings a bell.” This is true. But think of the market peak as being like the place where the avalanche happened 10 minutes before it happened. What set off the avalanche? Was it the little kid at the bottom of the valley who decided to yodel? Maybe, but the result was disproportionate to the final cause. The far more amazing thing was the development of the snow into the configuration that could allow for the avalanche.

This is the way things are in a heavily indebted financial system. At its end, it is unstable, and at its initial unwinding the proximate cause of trouble seems incapable of doing much harm. But to give you another analogy ask yourself this: what is more amazing, the kid who knocks over the first domino, or the team of people spending all day lining up the huge field of dominoes? It is the latter, and so it is amazing to watch large groups of people engaging in synchronized speculation not realizing that they are heading for a significant disaster.

As for today, I don’t see the same debt buildup has we had growing from 2003 to 2007. The exceptions maybe student loans, parts of the energy sector, parts of the financial sector, and governments. That doesn’t mean that there is a debt crisis forming, but it does mean we should keep our eyes open.

Redacted Version of the September 2014 FOMC Statement

Posted on 17 September 2014 by David Merkel

Comments

Pretty much a nothing-burger. Few significant changes, if any.
Despite lower unemployment levels, labor market conditions are still pretty punk. Much of the unemployment rate improvement comes more from discouraged workers, and part-time workers.? Wage growth is weak also.
Small $10 B/month taper. Equities rise and long bonds fall.? Commodity prices are flat.? The FOMC says that any future change to policy is contingent on almost everything.
Don?t know they keep an optimistic view of GDP growth, especially amid falling monetary velocity.
The FOMC needs to chop the ?dead wood? out of its statement. Brief communication is clear communication.? If a sentence doesn?t change often, remove it.
In the past I have said, ?When [holding down longer-term rates on the highest-quality debt] doesn?t work, what will they do? I have to imagine that they are wondering whether QE works at all, given the recent rise and fall in long rates.? The Fed is playing with forces bigger than themselves, and it isn?t dawning on them yet.
The key variables on Fed Policy are capacity utilization, labor market indicators, inflation trends, and inflation expectations. As a result, the FOMC ain?t moving rates up, absent improvement in labor market indicators, much higher inflation, or a US Dollar crisis.

The Shadows of the Bond Market?s Past, Part II

Posted on 13 August 2014 by David Merkel

This is the continuation of?The Shadows of the Bond Market?s Past, Part I. ?If you haven’t read part I, you will need to read it. ?Before I start, there is one more thing I want to add regarding 1994-5:?the FOMC used signals from the bond markets to give themselves estimates of expected inflation. ?Because of that, the FOMC overdid policy, because the dominant seller of Treasuries was not focusing on the economy, but on hedging mortgage bonds. ?Had the FOMC paid more attention to what the real economy was doing, they would not have tightened so much or so fast. ?Financial markets are only weakly?representative of what the real economy is doing; there’s too much noise.

All that said, in 1991 the Fed also overshot policy on the other side in order to let bank balance sheets heal, so let it not be said that the Fed only responds to signals in the real economy. ?(No one should wonder who went through the financial crisis that the Fed has an expansive view of its mandate in practice.)

October 2001

2001 changed America. ?September 11th led to a greater loosening of credit by the FOMC in order to counteract spreading unease in the credit markets. ?Credit spreads were widening quickly as many lenders were unwilling to take risk at a time where times were so unsettled. ?The group that I led?took more risk, and the story is told here. ?The stock market?had been falling most of 2001 when 9/11 came. ?When the markets reopened, it fell hard, and rallied into early 2002, before falling harder amid all of the scandals and weak economy, finally bottoming in October 2002.

The rapid move down in the Fed funds rate was not accompanied by a move down in long bond yields, creating a very steep curve. ?There were conversations among analysts that the banks were healthy, though many industrial firms, like automobiles were not. ?Perhaps the Fed was trying to use housing to pull the economy out of the ditch. ?Industries that were already over-levered could not absorb more credit from the Fed. ?Unemployment was rising, and inflation was falling.

There was no bad result to this time of loosening — another surprise would lurk until mid-2004, when finally the loosening would go away. ?By that time, the stock market would be much higher, about as high as it was in October 2001, and credit spreads tighter.

July 2004

At the end of June 2004, the FOMC did its first hike of what would be 17 1/4% rises in the Fed funds rate which would be monotony interspersed with hyper-interpretation of FOMC statement language adjustments, mixed with the wonder of a little kid in the back seat, saying, “Daddy, when will we get there?” ?The FOMC had good reason to act. ?Inflation was rising, unemployment was falling, and they had just left the policy rate down at 1% for 12 straight months. ?In the midst of that in June-August 2003, there was a another small panic in the mortgage bond market, but this time, the FOMC stuck to its guns and did not?raise rates, as they did for something larger in 1994.

With the rise in the Fed funds rate to 1 1/4%, the rate was as high as it was when the recession bottomed in November 2002. ?That’s quite a long period of low rates. ?During that period, the stock market rallied vigorously, credit spreads tightened, and housing prices rallied. ?Long bonds stayed largely flat across the whole period, but still volatile.

There were several surprises in store for the FOMC and investors as ?the tightening cycle went on:

The stock market continued to rally.
So did housing.
So did long bonds, at least for a time.
Every now and then there were little panics, like the credit convexity panic in May 2005, from a funky long-short CDO bet.
Credit complexity multiplied. ?All manner of arbitrage schemes flourished. ?Novel structures for making money off of credit, like CPDOs emerge. ?(The wisdom of finance bloggers as skeptics grows.)
By the end, the yield curve invests the hard way, with long bonds falling a touch through the cycle.
Private leverage continued to build, and aggressively, particularly in financials.
Lending standards deteriorated.

We know how this one ended, but at the end of the tightening cycle, it seemed like another success. ?Only a few nut jobs were dissatisfied, thinking that the banks and homeowners were over-levered. ?In hindsight, FOMC policy should have moved faster and stopped at a lower level, maybe then we would have had less leverage to work through.

June 2010

15 months after the bottom of the crisis, the stock market has rallied dramatically, with a recent small fall, but housing continues to fall in value. ?There’s more leverage behind houses, so when the prices do finally fall, it gains momentum as people throw in the towel, knowing they have lost it all, and in some cases, more. ?For the past year, long bond yields have gone up and down, making a round-trip, but a lot higher than during late 2008. ?Credit spreads are still high, but not as high as during late 2008.

Inflation is low and volatile, unemployment is off the peak of a few months earlier, but is still high. ?Real GDP is growing at a decent clip, but fitfully, and it is still not up to pre-crisis levels. ?Aside from the PPACA [Obamacare], congress hasn’t done much of anything, and the Fed tries to fill the void by expanding its balance sheet through QE1, which ended in June 2010. Things feel pretty punk altogether.

The FOMC can’t cut the Fed funds?rate anymore, so it relies on language in its FOMC Statement to tell economic actors that Fed funds will be “exceptionally low” for an “extended period.” ?Four months from then, the QE2 would sail, making the balance sheet of the Fed bigger, but probably doing little good for the economy.

The results of this period aren’t fully known yet because we still living in the same essential macro environment, with a few exceptions, which I will take up in the final section.

August 2014

Inflation remains low, but may finally be rising. ?Unemployment has fallen, much of it due to discouraged workers, but there is much underemployment. ?Housing has finally gotten traction in the last two years, but there are many cross-currents. ?The financial crisis eliminated move-up buyers by destroying their equity. ?Stocks have continued on a tear, and corporate credit spreads are very tight, tighter than any of the other periods where the yield curve was shaped as it is now. ?The long bond has had a few scares, but has confounded market participants by hanging around in a range of 2.5%- 4.0% over the last two years.

There are rumblings from the FOMC that the Fed funds rate may rise sometime in 2015, after 72+ months hanging out at 0%. ?QE may end in?a few more months, leaving the balance sheet of the Fed at 5 times its pre-crisis size. ?Change may be upon us.

This yield curve shape tends to happen over my survey period at a time when change is about to happen (4 of 7 times — 1971, 1977, 1993 and 2004), and one where the?FOMC will raise rates aggressively (3 of 7 times — 1977, 1993 and 2004) after fed funds have been left too low for too long. ?2 out of 7 times, this yield curve shape appears near the end of a loosening cycle (1991 and 2001). ?1 out of 7 times it appears before a deep recession, as in 1971. 1 out of 7 times it appears in the midst of an uncertain recovery — 2010. 3?out 7 times, inflation will rise significantly, such as in 1971, 1977 and 2004.

My tentative conclusion is this… the fed funds rate has been too low for too long, and we will see a rapid rise in rates, unless the weak economy chokes it off because it can’t tolerate any significant rate increases. ?One final note before I close: when the tightening starts, watch the long end of the yield curve. ?I did this 2004-7, and it helped me understand what would happen better than most observers. ?If the yield of the long bond moves down, or even stays even, the FOMC probably won’t persist in raising rates much, as the economy is too weak. ?If the long bond runs higher, it might be a doozy of a tightening cycle.

And , for those that speculate, look for places that can’t tolerate or would ?love higher short rates. ?Same for moves in the long bond either way, or wider credit spreads — they can’t get that much tighter.

This is an unusual environment, and as I like to say, “Unusual typically begets unusual, it does not beget normal.” ?What I don’t know is how unusual and where. ?Those getting those answers right will do better than most. ?But if you can’t figure it out, don’t take much risk.

The Shadows of the Bond Market’s Past, Part I

Posted on 12 August 2014 by David Merkel

Source: FRED

Above is the chart, and here is the data for tonight’s piece:

Date	T1	T3	T5	T7	T10	T20	T30	AAA	BAA	Spd	Note
3/1/71	3.69	4.50	5.00	5.42	5.70	5.94	6.01*	7.21	8.46	1.25	High
4/1/77	5.44	6.31	6.79	7.11	7.37	7.67	7.73	8.04	9.07	1.03	Med
12/1/91	4.38	5.39	6.19	6.69	7.09	7.66	7.70	8.31	9.26	0.95	Med
8/1/93	3.44	4.36	5.03	5.35	5.68	6.27	6.32	6.85	7.60	0.75	Med
10/1/01	2.33	3.14	3.91	4.31	4.57	5.34	5.32	7.03	7.91	0.88	Med
7/1/04	2.10	3.05	3.69	4.11	4.50	5.24	5.23	5.82	6.62	0.80	Med
6/1/10	0.32	1.17	2.00	2.66	3.20	3.95	4.13	4.88	6.23	1.35	High
8/1/14	0.13	0.94	1.67	2.16	2.52	3.03	3.29	4.18	4.75	0.57	Low

Source: FRED ? ||| ? ? * = Simulated data value ?||| ?Note: T1 means the yield on a one-year Treasury Note, T30, 30-year Treasury Bond, etc.

Above you see the seven yield curves most like the current yield curve, since 1953. ?The table also shows yields for Aaa and Baa bonds (25-30 years in length), and the spread between them.

Tonight’s exercise is to describe the historical environments for these time periods, throw in some color from other markets,?describe what happened afterward, and see if there might be any lessons for us today. ?Let’s go!

March 1971

Fed funds hits a local low point as the FOMC loosens policy under Burns to boost the economy, to fight rising unemployment, so that Richard Nixon could be reassured re-election. ?The S&P 500 was near an all-time high. ?Corporate yield spreads ?were high; maybe the corporate bond market was skeptical.

1971?was a tough year, with the Vietnam War being unpopular.?Inflation was rising, Nixon severed the final link that the US Dollar had to Gold, an Imposed wage and price controls. ?There were two moon landings in 1971 — the US Government was in some ways trying to do too much with too little.

Monetary policy remained loose for most of 1972, tightening late in the years, with the result coming in 1973-4: a severe recession accompanied by high inflation, and a severe bear market. ?I remember the economic news of that era, even though I was a teenager watching Louis Rukeyser on Friday nights with my Mom.

April 1977

Once again, Fed funds is very near its local low point for that cycle, and inflation is rising. ?After the 1975-6 recovery, the stock market is muddling along. ?The post-election period is the only period of time in the Carter presidency where the economy feels decent. ?The corporate bond market is getting close to finishing its spread narrowing after the 1973-4?recession.

The “energy crisis” and the Cold War were in full swing in April 1977. ?Economically, there was no malaise at the time, but in 3 short years, the Fed funds rate would rise from 4.73% to 17.61% in April 1980, as Paul Volcker slammed on the brakes in an effort to contain rising inflation. ?A lotta things weren’t secured and flew through the metaphorical windshield, including the bond market, real GDP,?unemployment, and Carter’s re-election chances. ?Oddly, the stock market did not fall but muddled, with a lot of short-term volatility.

December 1991

This yield curve is the second most like today’s yield curve. ?It comes very near the end of the loosening that the FOMC was doing in order to rescue the banks from all of the bad commercial real estate lending they had done in the late 1980s. ?A wide yield curve would give surviving banks the ability to make profits and heal themselves (sound familiar?). ?Supposedly at the beginning of that process in late 1990, Alan Greenspan said something to the effect of “We’re going to give the banks a lay-up!” ?Thus Fed funds went from 7.3% to 4.4%?in the 12 months prior to December 1991, before settling out at 3% 12 months later. ?Inflation and unemployment were relatively flat.

1991 was a triumphant year in the US, with the Soviet Union falling, Gulf War I ending in a victory (though with an uncertain future), 30-year bond yields hitting new lows, and the stock market hitting new all time highs. ?Corporate bonds were doing well also, with tightening spreads.

What would the future bring? ?The next section will tell you.

August 1993

This yield curve is the most like today’s yield curve. ?Fed funds are in the 13th month out of 19 where they have been held there amid a strengthening economy. ?The housing market is?doing well, and mortgage refinancing has been high for the last three years, creating a situation where those investing in mortgages securities have a limited set of coupon rates that they can buy if they want to put money to work in size.

An aside before I go on — 1989 through 1993 was the era of clever mortgage bond managers, as CMOs sliced and diced bundles of mortgage payments so that managers could make exotic bets on moves in interest and prepayment rates. ?Prior to 1994, it seemed the more risk you took, the better returns were. ?The models that most used were crude, but they thought they had sophisticated models. ?The 1990s were an era where prepayment occurred at lower and lower thresholds of interest rate savings.

As short rates stayed low, long bonds rallied for two reasons: mortgage bond managers would hedge their portfolios by buying Treasuries as prepayments occurred. ?They did that to try to maintain a constant degree of interest rate sensitivity to overall moves in interest rates. ?Second, when you hold down short rates long enough, and you give the impression that they will stay there (extended period language was used — though no FOMC Statements were made prior to 1994), bond managers start to speculate by buying longer securities in an effort to clip extra income. ?(This is the era that this story (number 2 in this article) took place in, which is part of how the era affected me.)

At the time, nothing felt too unusual. ?The economy was growing, inflation was tame, unemployment was flat. ?But six months later came the comeuppance in the bond market, which had some knock-on effects to the economy, but primarily was just a bond market issue. ? The FOMC hiked the Fed funds rate in February 1994 by one?quarter percent, together with a novel statement issued by Chairman Greenspan. ?The bond market was caught by surprise, and as rates rose, prepayments fell. ?To maintain a neutral market posture, mortgage bond managers sold long Treasury and mortgage bonds, forcing long rates still higher. ?In the midst of this the FOMC began raising the fed funds rate higher and higher as they feared economic growth would lead to inflation, with rising long rates a possible sign of higher expected inflation. ?The FOMC raises Fed fund by 1/2%.

In April, thinking they see continued rises in inflation expectation, they do an inter-meeting surprise 1/4% raise of Fed funds, followed by another 1/2% in May. ?It is at this pint that Vice Chairman McDonough tentatively realizes?[page 27] that the mortgage market has?now tightly coupled the response of the long end of the bond market to the short end the bond market, and thus, Fed policy. ?This was never mentioned again in the FOMC Transcripts, though it was the dominant factor moving the bond markets. ?The Fed was so focused on the real economy, that they did not realize their actions were mostly affecting the financial economy.

FOMC policy continued: Nothing in July, 1/2% rise in August, nothing in September, 3/4% rise in November, nothing in December, and 1/2% rise in February 1995, ending the tightening. In late December 1994 and January of 1995, the US Treasury and the Fed participated in a rescue of the Mexican peso, which was mostly caused by bad Mexican economic policy, but higher rates in the US diminished demand for the cetes, short-term US Dollar-denominated Mexican government?notes.

The stock market muddled during this period, and the real economy kept growing, inflation in check, and unemployment unaffected. ?Corporate spreads tightened; I remember that it was difficult to get good yields for my Guaranteed Investment Contract [GIC] business back then.

But the bond markets left their own impacts: many seemingly clever mortgage bond managers blew up, as did the finances of Orange County, whose Treasurer was a mortgage bond speculator. ?Certain interest rate derivatives blew up, such as the ones at Procter & Gamble. ?Several life insurers lost a bundle in the floating rate GIC market; the company I served was not one of them. ?We even made extra money that year.

The main point of August 1993 is this: holding short rates low for an extended period builds up imbalances in some part of the financial sector — in this case, it was residential mortgages. ?There are costs to providing too much liquidity, but the FOMC is not an institution with foresight, and I don’t think they learn, either.

This has already gotten too long, so I will close up here, and do part II tomorrow. ?Thanks for reading.

Redacted Version of the July 2014 FOMC Statement

Posted on 30 July 2014 by David Merkel

Comments

The two main points of this FOMC statement are: 1) ?The Fed recognizes that inflation has risen, and is likely to persist. 2) ? Despite lower unemployment levels, labor market conditions are still pretty punk.? Much of the unemployment rate improvement comes more from discouraged workers, and part-time workers.? Wage growth is weak also.
Markets don’t move much on the news. ?Really, not a lot here.
Small $10 B/month taper.? Equities and long bonds both rise.? Commodity prices rise.? The FOMC says that any future change to policy is contingent on almost everything.
Don?t know they keep an optimistic view of GDP growth, especially amid falling monetary velocity.
The FOMC needs to chop the ?dead wood? out of its statement.? Brief communication is clear communication.? If a sentence doesn?t change often, remove it.
In the past I have said, ?When [holding down longer-term rates on the highest-quality debt] doesn?t work, what will they do?? I have to imagine that they are wondering whether QE works at all, given the recent rise and fall in long rates.? The Fed is playing with forces bigger than themselves, and it isn?t dawning on them yet.
The key variables on Fed Policy are capacity utilization, labor market indicators, inflation trends, and inflation expectations.? As a result, the FOMC ain?t moving rates up, absent improvement in labor market indicators, much higher inflation, or a US Dollar crisis.