A rather curious result in today's just completed 3 Year $32 billion bond auction [6], which concluded on surprisingly weak terms, despite the High Yield coming at 0.327% or precisely where the When Issued expected it would, which also happens to be the lowest yield in the history of the auction. So far so good - where things got thorny is in the internals, first the Bid to Cover which printed at a surprisingly low 3.356, the lowest since February 2012, but a bigger surprise was the Indirect Take Down, which as validated by the recent trend, just dipped to 21.9% of the issue, the lowest Indirect Takedown since 2007! It also saw the Direct allocation surpassing the Indirect for the first time in history. Just as surprising is that the Indirect tender into the auction was a meager $9 billion, leading to a very high 77.3% hit rate. Obviously America's foreign lenders have better thing to do than to lock up cash with Uncle Sam even for 3 years, despite Ben's guarantee that there will be no volatility in the throutg "mid-2015." Or perhaps due to. Finally, it also means that ever more Fed monetization will have to take place to rotate bonds from PDs back to the Fed, and also means that with the Fed already monetizing 100% of all long-dated issuance, he will have to move ever further left.
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Note however: the last time indirect take-up was this low, it marked the very top of the S&P 500
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