Bond

The circus in Europe can't come to an end soon enough. As Zero Hedge posted and speculated previously, according to a draft document, it has now been confirmed that banks will only be tested for sovereign debt exposure just on trading books, not on debt held to maturity. Guess what: about a month ago, all banks almost certainly decided to quietly reclassify their hundreds of billions of sovereign exposure from "trading" to "held to maturity," thus taking advantage of the same FASB 157 accounting abortion that America has gripped tightly on to for almost two years now, as accounting fraud follows the Bernanke Put in going global. If this is supposed to inspire confidence, then the market has truly lost it. As we explained last week, "the haircut will only pertain to
trading books. In other words this is Europe's equivalent of FASB 157:
everything that banks hold "to maturity" will not see a major haircut,
and very likely not see any haircut at all. Which simply means that all
European banks that hold such debt will merely reclassify their Greek
exposure from trading to a "held to bankruptcy at par" category. The
surreality of European banking assets (which as we pointed out
previously is a $100 trillion circle jerk where one bank's assets are another bank's liabilities) has now passed well into the twilight zone." In other completely irrelevant news, the micro trading books will see the following haircuts, as presented by Bloomberg.

Earlier today Germany announced the "successful" placement of €3.195 billion in 30 Year bonds at a 3.33% Yield and a glowing 1.2 Bid To Cover.... Only if one were to take out the €805 million retained by the Bundesbank as so often happens these days, the auction was really undersubscribed. As the government sought to place €4 billion and received just €3.764 billion in total bids (of which €2.691 billion were in competitive bids and just €1.073 billion were non-competitive), there is no other way to classify the auction than a failure. And with the 'allotted at high' (or low price) coming in at 95%, there was certainly less than an enthusiastic reception for this latest auction which sported a coupon of 3.25%, the lowest coupon ever for a long-dated eurozone bond.

In an odd development, today bond traders have been fielding calls to express an interest in a $50 million bond BWIC. Two observations: traditionally any recent BWICs percolating have usually involved loans, and typically in the form of much larger baskets. This one, however, is all bonds, consists of 17 names, the largest of which are UPS, DIAG, TGT, HARVRD and PEP, and even more interesting is that this is for the most part 2030 and longer-maturing paper. It appears some fund has decided to unwind a big portion of its duration exposure. Granted, the bonds are mostly IG, with the biggest coupon at 7.9%, but nonetheless, the fact that $50 million in HY can not be placed in the traditional bond pipeline speaks volumes about the lack of liquidity in the bond market, especially for longer-dated, and thus inflation sensitive paper. As for stocks, it is very obvious that any liquidity in equities has long gone, as stocks undergo 0.5% rallies in the span of seconds, on no news, just momentum-driven HFT block order frontrunning.

Broke US states are probing new lows with each passing day, as money continues to stubbornly refuse to grow on trees (unless you have discount window access of course). The latest funding fiasco comes from Texas, which Reuters reports is planning on selling $2 billion in debt just to refill its empty unemployment trust fund. We are confident that bondholders will be ecstatic to put their money into a extremely rapidly amortizing "asset" that will begin depleting from day one and will likely have no collateral recourse in under a year. But after all, it is other people's money, so we are confident this particular Citi/BofA led bond offering will close and price and sub Treasury rates.

The US government is another $35 billion in the debt sink hole. The cost of this marginal addition to our existing debt load ($10 trillion? $100 trillion? who cares) was just 1.055%, which was gobbled up briskly at a 3.20 Bid To Cover. The bulk of the buying came from Primary Dealers who took down the highest portion of the auction, or 45.1%, since May of 2009, when PDs were responsible for 56.6% of the takedown. Indirect bidders, coming in at 40.6%, was the lowest indirect take down since January, when they were responsible for just 38%. The balance of 14.3% was left to the Direct Bidders. The Bid To Cover at 3.20 came in well above the LTM average of 3.03%.

Two more European auctions have closed at terms that show continued deterioration in sovereign demand conditions. Earlier, Italy auctioned off €7.5 billion in one year BOT (bills) at a yield of 1.399% and a 1.659 bid to cover. This compares to the precious auction that closed at 1.377% and a 2.359 BTC. Elsewhere, the German government had to retain 15%, or €807 million, of a €5 billion 6 month bubill issue to "sell" as much as had been hoped for. The issue came at a 1.9 bid to cover, excluding the government retention, compared to 2.2 previously, and had to double the yield on the issue from 0.1923% to 0.4226%. Of the €2.153 billion in non-competitive bids were obviously accepted 100%, it is the non-competitive ones that were problematic. It was the 5.765 of competitives that were an issue: just 2 billion of the competitive bids were found to be "acceptable" to the government, meaning €2.8 billion offered rates far too high to be accepted. Is the German curve starting to bear flatten as well?

The ten year Treasury bond yields we saw at a stunning 2.91% are telling us that the government can borrow nearly infinite amounts of money at the lowest interest rates in history. The expiration of the Bush tax cuts next year and recovering economy will bring a return of tax revenues, eliminating 79% of this year’s deficit, even is Obama does nothing. This is the writing on the wall the bond market is attempting to focus our blinkered eyes on.

The latest targeted leak in the European "stress" tests is that according to German bank sources, the discount on Greek debt will be in the 16-17% ballpark. This compares to an earlier rumor leak of a 10% discount on Greek debt which however did not sufficiently spike the market, leading to rumor #2 which so far has done a good job at pushing the AUDJPY (aka stocks) higher. The quid pro quo however, is to take not only German but now French bonds, will be out of the "stressed" picture. As Reuters reports: "The presumed markdown applied to French sovereign bonds will be 0.7 percent, one of the sources, both of which are based in Germany, added. "German sovereign bonds will not be stressed," both sources confirmed." Of course, with Greek bonds being stressed to market (which is where the discount actually implies they are tested), French bonds would would suffer a far greater markdown than 0.7%. But then again, the EU has already bought up a ton of Greek bonds, and little if any French. Can't have the bank pick and choose which country to bail out now, can it.

What's driving bond yields to their lowest level since April '09? Could it just be an ominous 1930s echo...

I am more convinced than ever that a Treasury bond short will have its day in the sun. The next financial crisis will be a chain reaction that has already started in small, peripheral European countries, will spread to large European countries, and then eventually hit Japan and the US. Debt service will soar from the current 11% of the federal budget to a gob smacking 28% as early as 2014. Washington is doing nothing to avert the impending crisis.

One of the less discussed topics by the propaganda machine is that with bond yields approaching record yields, and in the case of the 2Y below them, the S&P has no place trading over 1,000. There was a time when bonds and stocks would correlate, and as bond prices surged, equities would plunge and vice versa. Now that we live in HFT days where stock values are completely disconnected from fundamentals, and even the bond market, courtesy of the Fed's seemingly endless market interference,  it makes sense to extrapolate what the fair value of stocks would be implied purely based on bond yields stripping away for the Fed. Attached we present a very simple regression analysis between simple 10 year spreads and the S&P, and the 2s10s (steepness between the 2 and 10 Year) and the S&P. What both analyses indicate is that stocks are approximately 30% overvalued, at least based on historical regression patterns relying on yields to imply stock prices. Yet even though this analysis is purely statistical, here is a simple extension: with US stocks at about $13 trillion in market cap, if one assumes the suggested 30% haircut the result is $9.1 trillion in fair market value. Considering that the Fed has pumped $2.5 trillion in the form of monetary stimulus, and Obama's various fiscal stimuli now amount to just over $1 trillion, that explains the delta. Bonds are implying where stocks should be almost to the dot, absent the $3.5 trillion pumped into stocks by the administration and the Chairman. Fair value of stocks, when stripped away from the printer and Congress, is 750.

A week ago we highlighted that Hungary, in addition to liquidity problems, is now back to experiencing solvency issues, after suffering a bond auction failure. Today, Hungary had its second failed auction in a row, after it was unable to raise enough money as had been initially planned. "The state debt management agency sold 40 billion forint ($174 million) of bills, 10 billion forint less than planned, at a yield of 5.41 percent compared with 5.35 percent on June 10." The domino effect in Europe (contrary to the lies by G-Pap) is now in full force and nothing can stop it. Country by country will now need to be bailed out (for a few months - recall that Greece is supposedly solvent, yet its CDS are now wider than ever) or be forced to default. Which brings us to our second point: in a note to clients (attached), Citi's Willem Buiter goes so far as to say that Europe's current €860 billion bail out facility is insufficient by more than half, and a new rescue package will promptly need to be created to the tune of €2 trillion or more. He also slams the ongoing stress tests for the vile, malicious joke (which just so happens is squarely on Europe's middle class) they are.

Just reported on CNBC. The yield on the issue is massive and is certainly a means to encourage basis traders to cover their naked CDS positions at a profit. Look for 5 year CDS to widen to the neighborhood of the new issue spread. BP better hope this is all the liquidity it will need, as the next bond offering will have to come at 10-15%, the third even wider, etc. By then, of course, there would be no equity value left.

How much do you want to buy at a 28 year market top? Last year, a staggering $375 billion poured into bond funds, a record, while $40 billion exited equity funds, despite a Dow that rose 23%.

Title says it all