fixed

Following the release of its quarterly equity market update, Global Tactical Asset Allocation has released the must read Q3 debt update, which covers virtually every aspect of the fixed income space with more granularity than can be found in the best sellside research report. Since the imminent global insolvency is not about equities, and all about coupon and variable rate instruments, this could we be the most important update piece from Damien Cleusix this quarter. Your all in one compendium on fundamentals, technicals, and everything inbetween can be found inside.

What the smart money is saying ...

To all who have been following the recent rout in both the 10 year and the mortgage market, today's most recent jump in the 30 Year Freddie Fixed-rate mortgage, which at 4.86%just hit a 7 month high, will not come as a surprise. To Ben Bernanke, however, this is a flashing red sign, that QE2 is only working for Wall Street: its primary function of creating imaginary wealth in the form of additional home equity is not only failing, but the recent jump in mortgage rates by 1%, has had the indirect impact of forcing home prices to drop by another 10%. Look for this to hit Case Shiller data in March-April when today's near-5% mortgage rates diffuse through the marketplace. Robert Shiller describes it best: "Optimism is fading from the housing market." QE3 should promptly abort any last traces of anything even remotely resembling a housing recovery.

There is more to Deutsche Bank than just that douchey joke of an economist who appears on CNBC every other day to repeat that the November NFP number was irrelevant (incidentally we agree, simply because everything out of the BLS now has the same trustworthiness as Chinese data, and the November number was politically motivated to pass the UI extension) and who changes his story diametrically and on a daily basis, with every incremental piece of economic data that does not fit his amateur theories. Deutsche Bank has always had a very decent fixed income platform, and we are happy to announce that in reading the firm's 2011 FI forecast we encounter not only views that diametrically oppose those of the aforementioned hack (for which alone the report is worth reading), but also has some very detailed and insightful observations (which we are confident David Rosenberg would agree with wholeheartedly). The report's summary: bonds may drop a little more, then surge once it becomes clear the economy is as scroomed as always. And another interesting observation, which has to the do with ending the 10s30s flattener trade. We tend to agree with that as well. Having almost penetrated 100 bps today, the second retest proved unsuccessful, and the time for a steeper long-end is coming (primarily due to a renormalization of the curve), and a flattening of the 2s10s.

Understanding that credit default swaps are a way to step up the capital structure absorbs them into fixed income trading in a natural way. At the same time they opened up some terrific opening lines. One can basis trade based on the whether a CDS is priced rich (or no) against an underlying bond. One can trade dispersion, by selecting name(s) that outperform an index basket, or by selecting a CDS that outperforms another CDS. There is curve trading of same-name CDS at different maturities. I’m not going to go further, but the cap arb strategies can extend beyond the strictly fixed income space. That “sell VIX- buy CDS” arb is an example.

What ails Japan, the United States, and many other countries is financial deleveraging. Much talk about “Japanification” over the past year or so because the Federal Reserve response to deleveraging has been to compress BOJ policies into a shorter overlapping timeframe… giving the scenario a look and feel of the Japanese experience. Aside from this policy compression, there’s nothing new in the policy brew. The monetary policy compression and fiscal insanity has arguably made the next step—a tax increase—even more imminent than when Japan instituted their consumption tax.
Central banks can salve financial system wounds, but they must heal on their own. The problems of the financial sector reflect adjustments going on at the household level. This implies that these problems will be resolved organically by debt reduction, capital losses, and rescaling of capacity.

Social Security is a demographic and financial time-bomb. With something like 60 million Baby Boomers about to begin retiring, the so-called “Social Security lock-box” is going to take quite the beating—especially considering that that famed “lock-box” is stuffed not with money but with nothing but Treasury IOU’s. Politicians of both parties are making rumbling noises, essentially in two directions: Cutting benefits, and finding an “alternative system". One of those alternative systems some American pundits and politicians have been looking at is the Chilean system of AFP’s—Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones, literally “Managers of Pension Funds”. This system is a workable free market solution to the problem of funding worker pensions, and has worked like a charm for the past 30 years. Unfortunately for this good idea, the system was imposed by decree by the Right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet. - Gonzalo Lira

It is time for the weekly refi: the 30 Year Freddie cash mortgage just hit another fresh all time low. And with the 10 Year plunging and soon to drop below 2.5% as the bond bubble is becoming ever more primed, we expect the 30 Year to eventually drop as low as 4% if not further. Will this force more incremental homebuying activity? Absolutely not.

The 30 year Freddie Fixed Rate Mortgage has just printed on the south side of 4.50%, at 4.49%: a fresh new all time record. The spread to the 10 year Bond (which, yes, is tighter once again, flirting as usual with the 2.9% barrier), is about 158 bps. Of course, should the Fed recommence QE, which is now just a matter of politically self-destructive time, the spread will collapse, the 10 Year will plunge, and the administration will bankrupt all mortgage lenders (who are idiotic enough not to have been subsumed by the bankrupt GSE Borg) who will soon be forced to lend a 30 year mortgage at something around 3%. Alas, by the time the administration realizes that it does not matter what rate the mortgage is, and that the security of having a 1) cash flow and 2) job is far more important, and still as missing as always, it will be too late.

For the few, the proud, the stuck in the 19th century, with an "originate to hold" business model (such an anachronism when originate to distribute by hedge funds, pardon, banks is all the rage), the latest data by Freddie Mac, in which the 30 Year Fixed just dropped to a new fresh all time low of 4.56%, down 1 bp from the last two weeks, is about the worst news possible. While the short end is still cheap (and in the case of 2 Year, near record), the ongoing flattening is a death knell for anyone who still relies on funding curves to a some profit. As the Bloomberg article pointed out earlier today, the 60 bp tightening in the 2s10s is a huge impact to P&Ls, which is now actively reverting profits afforded to financial companies in 2009 and early 2010. Soon enough, the Fed's active management of the yield curve will force banks to come up with new and improved ways to pinch pennies from US consumers now that the profitability margin on the curve has been cut by 25% in a couple of months. Alas, that would mean the risk of inflation would have to be taken seriously. In its absence, look for flattening to continue as all on the wrong side of the trade continue capitulating, and making the future for JPM, Wells and BofA uglier by the day.

For a vivid example of how pointless QE1 was (and QE2 will be), look no further than the 30 Year FRM fixed: the mortgage rate is now at the lowest it has ever been, at 4.57%, for the second week in a row, and housing is unanimously double dipping. The problem is that the Fed has no more incremental mortgages to buy, so QE 2 will likely be all about other assets. Yet with USTs also at or near all time tights, there is little point for the Fed to bid up Treasuries. Which is why QE2 will be all about risky assets: the Fed will find a way to go all out and bid up stocks. Although, as today indicates, and as we first posted earlier, all the idiotic market needs is some totally groundless rumor of a reserve interest cut to go from down 1.5% to up in the span of an hour. All the Fed needs to do is pull a Radioshack, and keep leaking day after day that it will bid up $5 trillion in AAPL stock and watch the Dow hit 36,000 tomorrow as all the HFT go nuts with frontrunning each other, all the while Goldman keeps on betting against all of its major clients (and praying it will be correct this time).

Interest in the ECB's weekly 3-'On (Monetization Sterilization Operation) assault on free markets, also known as the Fixed Term Deposit Liquidity Absorption Tender was high, and came at precisely the same level as last week's. €97.2 billion worth of bids were chasing after €60 billion of ECB-regurgitated sovereign bonds, resulting in a 1.6 Bid To Cover, exactly the same as last week, when €98.3 billion of bids were after the same amount of ECB-sterilized worthless Spanish bonds. Of course, in other countries the Ponzi occurs by the ECB accepting collateral from banks which purchase their own sovereign debt. As Reuters reported earlier, 90% of the most recent 26 Week Greek Bill operation was purchased by Greek banks which subsequently received 100 cents on the dollar for each bond from the ECB- if there is a more accurate definition of a pyramid scheme we have yet to hear it. The marginal rate on the Tender came at 0.64% with a 1.00% max rate. The weighted average allotted rate was 0.56%. 88 banks participated in the auction, a slight increased from last week's 85. Elsewhere, demonstrating that real liquidity in Europe is bad and getting worse, 3M EUR Libor rates rose yet again, now well over 0.8% at 0.81125%, the highest since August 26, 2009. The ECB's deposit facility saw a plunge in usage, dropping to just €52.5 billion yesterday, as banks now have to look under the cushions for any and all free euros to allocate. Good luck European Small and Medium Businesses in trying to get a loan.

Today, Freddie Mac announced that the 30 Year FRM declined to a new all time record low, dropping by 1 bp to 4.57% from the week before. Yet even as mortgage rates hit fresh weekly records courtesy of the Fed's undisputed control of the mortgage market, the only thing increasingly more certain is that even at 0.00% there is precious little marginal demand in the primary market for housing. Here are the latest observations from Rosie on precisely this phenomenon, and much more.

After last week the world saw a failed auction in the ECB's Fixed Term Operations which further spooked investors to pull away from an increasingly unstable Europe, the ECB seems to have come down with an iron fist on participating banks. With just 45 participating banks submitting bids for under €32 billion of the €55 billion on auction last week, or a 0.6 Bid To Cover, this week the bidding banks surged to 88, bidding a massive €87.4 billion for this week's €59 billion of Fixed Term Deposits intended to sterilize running Eurozone government bonds. The result was a bid to cover of 1.5x: at the current rate of €4 billion acquired each week, the ECB will be hard pressed to find marginal buyers in as little as 5 weeks when the running sterilization total passes €80 billion, and the average of all auctions is just over €82.5. This includes the outlier first auction. Yet not everything was good news: the weighted average allotment rate was 0.56% compared to last week's 0.54%. The marginal rate was 0.75% and the minimum rate was 0.29%, compared to last week's 1% and 0.25%. The ECB continues to pay up more and more to stimulate interest in having to do outright QE as opposed to this sterilization charade. And as confirmation that the liquidity is once again strained on average, the use of the ECB's deposit facility jumped from €232 billion to €246 billion overnight, even post the July 1 reset from €309 billion to €213 billion.

Last week, the ECB had a failed QE "sterilization" operation, when it was unable to cover the full €55 billion in previously purchased government debt via a Fixed Term Deposit operation, better known as a liquidity reacharound. That particular auction, which occurs every Tuesday, generated only €31.9 billion in bid side interest, or 0.6x BTC. The failure was largely attributed to the massive LTRO maturity the next day. Which is why everyone will be closely following tomorrow's most recent FTD operation. Even more so, since as the ECB just announced, in the prior weak the central bank bought an additional €4 billion in sovereign bonds as part of the Securities Markets Programme which is now at €59 billion. As the chart below shows, this indicates a steady buying interest of €4 billion per week for each of the past 4 weeks. On the other hand, as we have been expecting for a long time, with total bidding interest declining, while the total FTD amount rising each weak, the likelihood of ongoing failed auctions, and continued loss in European liquidity conference keeps going higher.