Category: Fed, Central Bank and Banking Macro Liquidity

Both bonds and stocks have weakened over the past 2 weeks. It’s a sign that the Fed isn’t supplying enough QE.

We’ve known for a long time that it wasn’t enough to support twin bull moves in both asset classes. Have we reached the tipping point where it’s insufficient for either to move higher while the other descends?

The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind—the wind of margin calls now blowing through dealer balance sheets as leveraged fixed income positions continue losing value.

Meanwhile the $2.9 trillion Biden stimulus proposal may boost the US economy, but it will be a disaster for the increasingly fragile stock and bond markets. Here’s why, and what you should do about it.

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Back in September I wrote to you about why I was giving up on the banking system indicators. I’ve reposted that rant in an addendum to this report. Essentially it boils down to this. Every time there’s a critical problem in the banking system due to banker malfeasance, the Fed steps in to paper it over and reward the criminals.

That’s why we focus on the Fed more than anything else.

The banking indicators were useful once upon a time. The Fed has rendered them irrelevant. But I promised to keep an eye on them, so herein is a review. It makes me sick and should make you sick too, but we’re not here to fight the Fed. We’re here to make money by understanding and playing according to the Fed’s rules. The Fed’s first order of business is always to protect its banker clients. And it does that very well indeed.

Once again trouble is brewing, and the Fed will need to come up big again to prevent it from blowing up the banking sector. If history is any guide, the Fed will be there. It may be to the detriment of those who don’t own capital, but they don’t matter. The Fed doesn’t care about them, and refuses to take responsibility for the intractable problems that has caused our society.

Consequently, being a bear for the right reasons does not pay. To make money in these markets you must play on the side of the criminals that run the show, the Fed and its client banks.

These banking indicators help us to understand just what they’re doing, and where the landmines might be that one day could blow this whole game to smithereens.

This brings us to a recurring theme. The first sign of potential systemic blowup would be an upside breakout in the 10 year Treasury yield. It would mean that the Fed had lost control, and that the system was careening toward an abyss from which there might be no Fed response big enough to escape.

We’ll take a look at that, but also some other problems in the banking system balance sheet that the banks and the Fed are pretending don’t exist. Well, they exist and they’re bubbling up just below the surface, to burst forth one of these days in the not too distant future.

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The Fed’s policy remains stable at about $170 billion per month in QE, give or take a few billion depending on the level of MBS replacements. The balance sheet is growing on trend.  The stock market is tracking with it, as usual.

This will lead to a huge problem when the economy begins to react to enlarged stimulus.

This report discusses how to position trading strategy to take advantage.

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Yesterday we looked at the overview of the CLI and the issue of new and secondary stock offerings. The CLI is still bullish. And the supply of new stock issues has not been sufficient to absorb enough of the demand to stop the advance of stock prices, although it has probably contributed to slowing the rise. Likewise, new corporate debt issuance, while massive, hasn’t been sufficient to pull enough of the demand for securities to cause a reversal of the rise in stock prices.

In this Part 2 of the report, I cover the remaining interesting and important indicators that comprise the CLI. Each has its own story to tell, but they all lead to the same conclusion. Still bullish, and, unbelievably, one key component says that the stock market is oversold.

I find it difficult to wrap my head around that. But I won’t argue with it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in 53 years of watching markets virtually every day, it’s not to argue with impartial indicators. They don’t care what I think should happen. They just show what is happening.

So here we are. The Fed is creating enormous amounts of excess liquidity, “liquidity” being a fancy word for “money.” I use the words interchangeably.

The Fed is creating that excess by pumping money directly into the markets via its POMO operations—buying bonds from Primary Dealers and paying for them by crediting the dealers’ accounts at the Fed with newly imagined money. That leads to secondary effects of increasing money in the system via credit growth, particularly increasing margin credit that results from rising securities prices.

This works, and will continue to work, for as long as the players have enough confidence in the game to keep buying. This keep pushing prices higher, increasing the value of collateral. That, in turn, allows for and promotes ever more credit creation. It’s the quintessential nature of bubble finance. Circular, and more. Always more.

There are those who say that this isn’t sustainable. There are also those who say that an expanding universe isn’t sustainable, that it will collapse in on itself.

In a few trillion years.

I’m agnostic about whether this must finally end in collapse within the foreseeable future. I assume that it will, but I sure as hell don’t know when. So I’ll just operate in the here and now, and respect the trend. We’ll always be alert for signs of change, but at the same time, never forgetting Rules Number One and Number Two.

Don’t fight the Fed.

The trend is your friend.

Meanwhile, as Yogi said, you can observe a lot by watching. I’m confident that by always being vigilant, and open to anything, we’ll be ready just in time to take advantage of, or at least protect ourselves from, whatever is to come.

Now to the indicators.

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We’ve had two working theses over the past few months. One is that the Fed is no longer pumping enough cash into dealer accounts to keep an endless bull trend going. Instead, at best, there’s only enough for rotation between stocks and bonds.

The second thesis was that because dealers are so leveraged, any fall in bond prices, reflected in an increase in bond yields, would mean big trouble for the markets. Based on technical analysis, I guessed that the Maginot Line for the bond market was 0.80 on the 10 year Treasury yield.

It’s early yet but, last week we saw evidence in the stock market that these theories are working in practice. The 10 year yield traded persistently above 0.80, and stocks sold off.

Not only wasn’t there rotation, where selling in one market translates to buying the other, but both markets were weak. The selling was contagious, leading to net portfolio liquidation, losses, and equity destruction. This increases the danger of margin calls, which can become self-feeding.

The big question is just how much pain will the Fed tolerate?

Because more pain is coming. A lot more.

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