Bond

Today, we get the March trade balance and JOLTS reports. Also, the Treasury continues its exercises in debt ceiling breach by issuing another $24 billion in 10 Year notes, while the Fed explains its monetization intentions for the next month as it releases the latest POMO schedule at 2 pm EDT.

Today's $32 billion bond priced at the memorable 1.000%, with auction strength confirmed by no surprises to the WI, and also the highest Bid To Cover since August, and the third highest ever. Naturally, none of this due to actual demand, but merely due to Primary Dealer expectations of a prompt and profitable flip back to Brian Sack: PDs accounted for 51.9%, with Directs taking down a notable 15.3%, leaving Indirects with the lowest allocation of the three past auctions or 32.7%, the the third lowest since January 2009. But nobody cares about the declining foreign interest: after all the ponzi game is all internal. And since this auction is potentially debt limit busting (as it is more than the total capacity under the debt ceiling), we can't wait to see what machinations Tim Geithner's henchmen will concoct to prevent an unconstitutional breach of what is now known as the "debt target." Look for Cusip QM5 to be briskly monetized as soon as the next 3 Year POMO is announced, when the next POMO schedule is revealed tomorrow at 2 pm.

It is no secret that David Stockman, former budget director in the Reagan administration, has long been a vocal opponent of the crash course America has found itself on courtesy of record debt. In this Bloomberg interview, he presents his latest take on U.S. fiscal policy and the outlook for agreement between Congress and the Obama administration on a deficit and spending reduction plan. Suffice to say, he is not a fan of either the republican or democrat plan, and is convinced both sides are playing nothing less than class warfare to promote their flawed programs. "I think the people would respond if they knew the fact, and if they'd been were told the truth, but they haven't been, they've been lied to for the last 10-20 years by both sides saying that we can live beyond our means, new entitlements, new tax cuts constantly, tax stimulus for everything that we could imagine, and as a result of that the country doesn't know that sacrifice is going to be required, and that everyone is going to have to give up something." On the recent "spending cut" much touted by Washington: "even this noisy $39 billion package cutback, that was all flimflam and swindle: there wasn't $39 billion in that, maybe there was $5 billion at best, and had anybody in the business community reported that they had $39 billion in a package that was this fraudulent they would have every prosecutor in the country and the SEC on their tail right now." And on the much endorsed by Zero Hedge Tobin tax: "We out to put a major tax on transactions on Wall Street, because Wall Street is turning into a high speed casino. We need to start thinking about new revenue sources and that is one of them." So what will finally awake America? "I think it's going to take a major dislocation in the bond market, a real conflaguration on the part of the people who have to buy this debt, before the country wakes up." Of course, if the Fed is able to sell virtually unlimited Long-Term Treasury puts, the synthetic push on sellers will never abate and the Fed can manipulate the curve virtually in perpetuity, or until such time as those buying Treasury vol protection, ironically, decide it makes no more sense to hedge against a curve yield surge.

As many recall, Morgan Stanley's always cheerful, and unfortunately always wrong on the first try, Jim Caron had a target of 4.5% on the 10 Year for 2010 only to see the bond trade at half the yield at year end (a call for which he later apologized). Today, following another comparable bullish call on yields (and thus inflation, and the economy) Caron has done it all over again. "We see the key risk to the market as a downgrade in growth expectations for the quarters ahead. This could happen as early as this month if the data does not materially improve after a big miss in 1Q growth and keep us on track for reaching 3.4% consensus 4Q/4Q growth in 2011. And despite today’s stronger headline release of NFP, the Household Survey, which we saw as a leading indicator of jobs, fell 190K and the unemployment rate rose 0.2% to 9%. This keeps us wary of growth prospects in the months ahead. As a result, we recently turned neutral from bearish bonds. We also see risk for curves to flatten as yield forecasts may also get downgraded along with growth." Gee, and it was only on April 7, that this strategist wrote: "Overall there is little doubt that policy in the US continues to be very easy, which presents a risk that markets may tighten those conditions well ahead of the Fed, especially if Q2 growth is back on track. This is why we think that the risks are skewed toward higher rates." What a difference month makes. But that's ok, just like when Caron turned bearish on bonds in 2010, promptly followed by Goldman going all out in its QE2 demands, so this time the very same action, now that 2011 is a carbon copy of 2010, we fully expect Wall Street demands for QE3 to hit a fever pitch within 3 months tops.

It seems like yesterday that the LCH reduced Irish bond margins from 45% to 35% (it was actually 4 weeks ago). Since then, as the CME has demonstrated so well, when in need of some temporary price hike, best to just purge the "speculators." And to wit: after hiking margins back to 45%, LCH.Clearnet has for the first time raised Irish bond margins to over half, or 55%. Whether this will work as effectively in "normalizing" Irish bond prices, as it has so far "worked" with silver, remains unclear.

While it is unclear if the 7 Year bond auctioned off last week (our commentary on that partcularly weak auction rescued by Primary Dealers is here) Cusip: 912828QG8 has even settled yet (it certainly is not on the Daily Treasury Statement as of Friday), what is clear is that as part of today's POMO which closed 30 minutes earlier, that very issue accounted for a whopping 78.5%, or $6 billion, of the entire operation. As a reminder, Primary Dealers bought $15.4 billion of the auction on Thursday, and just as we predicted, couldn't wait to flip it back to the Fed. Indeed, 39% of the entire allocation has now been flipped right back to Brian Sack. And people wonder why Bill Gross is paranoid that in the absence of the Fed this thoroughly fake bid will no longer be there. And with PDs actually forced to hold the bonds they quote-unquote bid for, one wonders: what clearing price will be appropriate, once the flip game ends?

Today's final auction of the week just closed in the form of a $29 billion 7 year bond issue (Cusip: QG8). While we will find out whether or not this is the auction that broke the debt ceiling camel's back when everything settles on Tuesday of next week, the internals were downright ugly: the WI of the bond was trading at 2.68% when the auction priced at 2.712%, a surprisingly wide tail into what everyone claims is a risk free asset. As a result the entire curve has been dragged wider on the news. Among the internals, the Bid To Cover came at 2.63, far weaker than both the previous (2.80) and the average (2.79). But the most notable metric as usual was the Indirect Bid, which traditionally strong at the belly of the curve, saw only 39.1% of the auction going to foreign bidders. This compares to 49.31% in the last auction and 51.45% on average. This meant that Primary Dealers, better known as Brian Sack, were forced to preemptively monetize 53% of the auction, and 7.8% going to Directs. Overall a very poor auction, considering that conventional wisdom was that when the Fed launches QE3 it will focus on bonds at the belly and to the right, in order to moderate inflation. Hopefully (for some) this is not a harbinger that the Bill Gross thesis is finally starting to materialize.

In the world of bonds, few things have perplexed investors as much as the ridiculously low (and going lower) rates of Japanese Government Bonds (JGBs), at last check yielding 1.22%. Granted "deflation" in Japan has long been quoated as the key driver for the ongoing decline in real and nominal rates, but in practical market terms it was always the fact that there was a buyer of first and last resort, usually this being either Japanese citizens directly or their proxy, the Japanese Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) that kept yields in check and sliding. No one has been following the story of the perpetually collapsing JGB yield better than SocGen's Dylan Grice (for the best overview of this issue we suggest: "Upcoming Government Funding Crises: Japan Edition"). And while as Dylan has pointed out before, the direct purchase of bonds by the population has slowed if not reversed entirely (and in the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake we are confident many have entered run off mode - we will attempt to confirm as soon as official fund flow data is released), the GPIF has always been a buyer of last resort. Until now. Reuters reports that the Kyle Bass pain trade, which has for so long gone counterintuitively, may be about to pay off in spade.

For a stunning reminder of just how much of a haircut the market is expecting on Greek debt in actual cash terms, look no further than the country's 30 Year bonds. These are now trading just above 50 cents on the euro. That's a "50% off" blue light special and roughly comparable to the recovery the market is expecting on the paper. Alternatively any "liability management exercise" price on these notably above 50 will result in a Greek revolution.

As if insane FX vol (has anyone looked at the EURUSD chart recently) and failed LCH.Clearnet margin hikes to prevent surging vol in Irish and Portuguese bond was not enough, the CME is doing its best to make sure developed world sovereign bonds, which had for the time being been recently stable, follow in the footsteps of all other assets that actually trade (read: not stocks) and see volatility surge (perhaps so the Fed can sell more of it). The CME has just announced it is launching cash-settled Sovereign Yield Spread futures beginning May 22 for a trade date of May 23. What this means simply said, is that after discussions with Dealers, the CME has realized that its biggest clients are all too willing to hedge sovereign risk (pocketing wide bid/ask spreads in the process). It also means that the market for sovereign bonds is about to be opened up to all Mrs Watanabes in the world who are willing to express a direction bias in the 10 Year bonds of France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, UK and, of course, the US. Now on the surface there is nothing wrong with that, however it does open the Treasury market to two traditional risk factors always seen when an otherwise ration market is opened up to everyone: 1) the herd, which tends to be always wrong, steps in and exacerbates prices moves in either direction and 2) here comes HFT: very soon the spread arbs will be trading the living daylights out of Treasury bonds, which courtesy of market reflexivity, where the derivative actually sets the price of the underlying, means that a bunch of computers will soon be the reason for why 10 Years trade at 0 or 10%. Coming next: circuit breakers in the Treasury market. At least this means that CDS traders will no longer be scapegoated for sovereign insolvency.

Following the S&P news, oddly enough, one is not seeing a flight to safety away from US paper and into Greek. In fact, observing the absolutely record 20% yield print on the 2 Year Greek bond, one may be excused to speculate that the inverse is happening. Also, with the cash price of the 2 Year now at 20% and the prices of longer duration bonds in the 60s, there is now no reason to actually restructure the country: bonds have it pretty much fully priced in. After all, the Santorini liquidation value should be worth at least 20-30 cents on the bond dollar, er, euro.

Now that the global financial system is down to living literally auction to auction, with negligible available cash and deficits as far as the eye can see, not to mention a European continent living day to day on the whims of either political extreme, issuance of government paper, and particularly its proper uptake, takes takes on a especially significant role. Below we present not only Goldman's summary of the key events in the past week as well as those in the next 5 days, but a bond auction schedule, together with a POMO summary, for the next two weeks.With everyone selling as much paper as they can wet away it, not even the global central banking cartel selling unlimited long term puts on the worldwide treasury curve will do much to prevent the upcoming global yield tsunami.

Busy day with quite a bit on the economic front: if Gallup is right March retail sales will be weaker than expected. Other key events include the JOLTS survey, business inventories, a Treasury auction and the inverse - POMO; and last Obama is presenting at noon his deficit reduction plan.

While the last time there was a major market swing minutes before POMO completion force the Fed to delay the end of that particular POMO after Primary Dealers had to make sure they are going to be guaranteed their hundreds of millions in taxpayer funded capital gains, this time around there was no such issue. Today's monetization of 5 Year Notes closed with $6.580 billion of debt bought by Brian Sack in this week's last POMO (none tomorrow). And in what should not be a surprising development to anyone, the one issue which represented over half of the total operation was the just issued 5 Year QA1 which was placed literally a week ago (highlighted on the table). And so the grand scam continues: the Fed pretends not to be monetizing, the Primary Dealers pretend not to be making millions in preferential Bid terms, and taxpayers pretend to care.

Grotesque, meet tragicomic. In today's POMO the biggest CUSIP monetized was QB9, of which the Fed purchased $5.99 billion (of a total $8.03 billion). And here's the kicker: when we commented on last week's 7 Year auction we once again were rather prophetic: "Altogether a weak auction but it's not like the PDs would let it fail
especially not with QB9 becoming the next "flip back to the Fed" bond
for the PD community." And tadaa: today, the Fed bought back 50% (!) of the Primary Dealer take down ($12.115 billion) of last Wednesday's (yes that would be the QB9) auction. This is probably the fastest episode Flip That Bond on record. Anything else and the Fed would be monetizing bonds that had not yet settled.