Lee AdlerPrimary dealers are propping up record Treasury issuance with no cash cushion left. Every new purchase is repo-financed. Hedge funds are pressing shorts. Net exposures look balanced, but leverage is surging toward the danger zone. Stability here is an illusion — and when it cracks, it will happen fast.
Macro Liquidity Indicators and extreme leverage continue to suggest that the stock market is in a topping phase.
The Treasury’s funding needs, combined with the end of the Fed’s RRP market support fund, stagnant repo activity, and extreme margin leverage, create a setup that looks like a late-stage bull market. The markets are holding for now, but the pillars are stretched, and the risk of a sharp reversal is rising.
Withholding growth is steady, but nominal strength masks a weaker inflation-adjusted picture. The surge in tariff revenue is already being undermined by plunging corporate tax collections. Outlays are seeing huge increases resulting in larger deficits and more Treasury supply ahead.
This report summarizes and charts the data and tells what to expect in the months ahead.
The wall was at the top of the liquidity cliff. He dared the market to jump. Today it did. When the market is ready, a catalyst appears. The tariffs, and a weak jobs report lit the match.
Will it have a great fall, or levitate once more?
The wall was at the top of the liquidity cliff. He dared the market to jump. Today it did. When the market is ready, a catalyst appears. The tariffs, and a weak jobs report lit the match.
Will it have a great fall, or levitate once more?
The liquidity cliff is here. But nothing has changed. Stocks have been rallying. Bonds are rangebound.
We’re now at a critical fork.
The liquidity cliff has been delayed as the US Treasury has not moved with its usual speed when the debt ceiling is lifted. It must restore accounts that it has raided under “extraordinary measures” to stay under the previous debt limit. And it normally moves to rebuild the Treasury account (TGA) to its target level, announced at the quarterly refunding announcement. In this case that’s $850 billion.
The liquidity cliff has been delayed as the US Treasury has not moved with its usual speed when the debt ceiling is lifted. It must restore accounts that it has raided under “extraordinary measures” to stay under the previous debt limit. And it normally moves to rebuild the Treasury account (TGA) to its target level, announced at the quarterly refunding announcement. In this case that’s $850 billion.
The cliff came early. I had projected August under the assumption of politics as usual. That assumption was wrong. Politics no longer works the way it used to, i.e., under a system of checks and balances. The one-party state lifted the debt ceiling by $5 trillion in the context of the rump BBB bill through Congress and the President signed it into law, without the usual down-to-the-wire Kabuki theater. Instead, we now have strongman theater.
We need to get used to that. Although that does not mean that future policy enactment will be any more predictable.
So now we have to ask. Will markets rise?
Can pigs fly?
Here’s the answer.
The US is approaching a liquidity cliff when the government runs out of cash and floods the Treasury market with a tsunami of supply. Unlike previous episodes, there’s no emergency backup fund. The politics is heating up, but it won’t change the timeline estimate.
Here’s the data, the charts, and the analysis leading to the timeline estimate and guiding us through the weeks ahead.
The chart of combined foreign central bank holdings and RRPs with the Fed continues to plunge in opposition to the US market rallies. The charts show that foreigners continue run from the US.