Reverse Repo

Is it time for the liquidity bulls to panic? At $180 million probably not, but while rates can't really go down (chukle, chukle Uncle Ben), this number can only go up. As a reminder, the first repo test was a 3 day term, this one is 8 days. Long way to go before the collateral is the same bankrupt stocks that the Fed accepts in its tri-party repo agreements.

$180 Million, yes, not Billion, Million, was Reverse Repoed (in a 3 day operation) by the FRBNY in its first executed Temporary Open Market Operation Test as part of the liquidity soak up process. The collateral was "Treasury", not CMBS, not stocks of bankrupt companies, but the safest of the safe securities. And even so Primary Dealers could barely part with just under $200 million. So let's do the math: excess liquidity of about $1 Trillion, and a reverse repo of $180 Million: that's just over 5000 TOMOs to go. Don't say the Federal Reserve has no sense of humor.

A few weeks ago we speculated that the Federal Reserve's attempt to conduct a reverse repo test as part of a liquidity drainage failed. In a stunning piece of news, Zero Hedge friend Jim Bianco sent us the following. Little commentary is necessary: the banks are about to unleash the massive leverage ploy all over again, this time with the pretext that they are happy to soak up liquidity, yet in the same time, their stupidity and inability to gauge risk will blow up the financial system once again when Tier One ratios for dealers are allowed to go back to 100:1. Zero Hedge will forward this information to all of our correspondents in Washington as what the Primary Dealer community is doing is extortion, pure and simple, and it is likely to be endorsed by their cronies at the Federal Reserve (which, in turn, has already received a carte blanche to do so by its purported master, Goldman Sachs).

On Monday the Federal Reserve held a major reverse repo test, as was announced by the NY Fed and by Zero Hedge. We have subsequently received several unconfirmed reports that the conducted test has been a disaster (we have calls into the Federal Reserve to confirm or deny this, we are eagerly awaiting their reply). Presumably, after conducting various repos last year, a typical transaction would be in the $1 to $5 billion range. At around the time the financial system was being pulledapart, were two separate $50 billion repo transactions on September 18, 2009, a day when as Paul Kanjorski had highlighted earlier in the year the money market system nearly collapsed as a result of Lehman and AIG's failure, and the Reserve Fund breaking the buck. Notable about Monday's reverse repo "test" was that it was quite sizable: in the $100 billion ballpark, on parallel with the biggest liquidity extraction from 2008. The outcome was the discovery that the dealer community does not have the capacity to do reverse transactions of this magnitude. As a result the Fed was forced to go directly to the money market industry, which has been speculated as a key source of excess liquidity withdrawals, another topic we discussed previously.

And the Fed finds a way to screw everyone over yet again. Contrary to expectations that the Fed will use reverse repos to remove excess liquidity (which, by definition, such an action would) it appears that Bernanke's wily scam is to push even more money out of money market funds and into capital markets. Even though banks currently have about $800 billion in excess reserves which the Fed is paying interest on, and which would be a damn good source of liquidity extraction as the Fed considers to shrink its ever expanding balance sheet, the Chairman is rumored to be considering money market funds as a liquidity source. Reuters points out that the Fed would thus have recourse to around $4-500 billion, and maybe more, of the $3.5 trillion sloshing in "money on the sidelines", roughly the same amount as MMs had just before the Lehman implosion.

With media reports of reverse repos starting to surface, are these actually honest intentions by the Fed to prevent yet another bubble for consuming the US before it is far too late, or, as we have come to expect from the Federal Reserve, merely more red herrings? Our money is on the latter.