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Category: 1 – Liquidity Trader- Money Trends

How Fed and Treasury policy, Primary Dealers, real time Federal tax collections, foreign central banks, US banking system, and other factors that affect market liquidity, interact to drive the financial markets. Focus on trend direction of US bonds and stocks. Resulting market strategy and tactical ideas. 4-5 in depth reports each month. Click here to subscribe. 90 day risk free trial!

The Stimulus “Magic Bullet” Is Bearish

Lee Adler

Withholding tax collections were relatively stable through November. But the 5 day average ticked a hair below November’s low here in early December. New lows would suggest that December’s jobs data will be awful, which will add to the likelihood of more stimulus, both fiscal and monetary. Whether that’s bullish or not depends on the Fed. The wrong fiscal/monetary balance could ignite a conflagration.

The Wall Street captured media constantly feeds us the BS that the vaccine is the Magic Bullet that will save us. But while we wait for that shot, the talk about more, more, more stimulus will continue to be the narrative that drives the pundit excuses for why the markets are doing what they’re doing. “Market Rises on Stimulus Hopes” will be the near daily headline.

This is mindless nonsense designed to divert us from paying attention to the financial markets’ real problems.

We have become inured to these $200 billion monthly budget deficits. But this data has catastrophic implications which I get into in this report.

And this is BEFORE any new stimulus.

As more and more Americans get the virus, and more people know someone who has gotten it, or worse, died, the economy sinks.

The eConomic establishment sees the vaccine as the magic bullet. But we now know that it won’t be available for widespread distribution until next summer, thanks to the Don Trump waving off a bigger, sooner deal with Pfizer.

That means that the US will be dependent on social consciousness to reduce the spread of the virus for at least the next 7 months. Good luck with that. 74 million people believe that the election was stolen, and the virus is a hoax. Consequently they refuse to wear masks and proudly engage in superspreader behavior. That won’t change after January 20. So we face months of worsening economic conditions and ever bigger deficits.

Until then, the only magic bullet is more stimulus. It may or may not cushion the catastrophe besetting many American households. And its consequences for the financial markets will only be guessable when we know the size of the package and the size and shape of the Fed’s response. We know what the Fed needs to do at a minimum, and we know what will happen if it doesn’t do it.

Here’s what to look for.

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Available at this link for legacy Treasury subscribers.

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The Big Dealer Leverage Brainfart

Lee Adler

Sometimes the mouth goes faster than the brain.

I chat with Lindsay Williams on his Strictly Business Podcast, once every couple of months. When I spoke with him on Thanksgiving Day I said something that I immediately realized was wrong. I said that there’s no way to know how leveraged the Primary Dealers are in their bond portfolios.

Of course, that’s wrong. The New York Fed publishes enough data every week for us to figure it out. So I set to figuring.

The question is how to put that data together in a meaningful way. There’s a lot of it, and a lot of figuring, rumination, trial, and error to be done. This is just the first installment.

What I can show so far is not earth shaking. We already knew intuitively that the dealers are leveraged to the hilt, and therefore in grave danger if bond prices fall below a certain level. We don’t know exactly what that level is, but at some point, soon I think, they’re going to face calls from their unindicted co-conspirators for more collateral.

It’s 2 PM. Do you know where your margin man is? You know. The guy with the tire iron.

So below is the first chart that I painted with the data. It shows the level of dealer net Treasury repo borrowings versus their total Treasury holdings. Surprise, surprise! They correlate!

I’ve been reporting to you their total repo borrowings before this. Those totals have been in the $1.75 trillion range, which is about 8 times their total Treasury holdings. That would be like you having a $3 million mortgage on your $400,000 home. OK. It doesn’t work.

They’re not just borrowing to support their Treasury inventories. They’re also banks. They lend. Most of that borrowing is to finance their lending activities. So I ran their reverse repo operations, where they take in securities as collateral for lending cash to degenerate gamblers like me and you, but mostly the big hedge fund wiseguys in Greenwich, Palm Beach, and the Upper East Side.

Netting that lending activity out leaves us with their net cash borrowings, which should in theory bear some relationship to their Treasury holdings.

Not that their loan sharking activities are without risk. But this is the big boy, in my opinion—the net leverage on their Treasury collateral. It’s like your margin account, except it’s not 50% margin. It’s more like 75% to 200%.

Since the Fed took over the bond market in September 2019, buying approximately 85% of all new Treasury issuance, on average, the ratio of dealer net borrowings to their Treasury holdings has stayed pretty close to 100%.

Why isn’t that a problem? Because, Praise the Load, Jaysus of the Church of the Fed is backstopping them. But despite the fact that He has been relieving them of some of that inventory since May, the dealers keep increasing their leverage.

This report includes that chart, along with what it tells us about present conditions, what to expect in the near future, and what we should do about that.

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Here’s Why More QE Won’t Be Enough for the Markets

Lee Adler

Here’s the problem. When rates are falling, there are more sales, and especially more refi. So the prepayments go up, and the Fed sees a greater reduction in its MBS holdings. Those reductions had been running at the rate of $65-70 billion per month through last month, based on the prepayment rate in the market in prior months. The Fed then bought that much from the dealers in the following months.

As always, those settlements were held in the third week of the month. The Fed would settle a total of $100-110 billion in prior forward MBS purchases that week, and the dealers would suddenly be flush with cash.

Good thing too. Because the 15th of the month is when the Treasury issues a pantload of new notes and bonds. The amount of Fed MBS purchases typically provided enough cash to the dealers for them to cover nearly all of the Treasury issuance. They could either buy it outright, or provide the repo financing to customers so that they could buy it. Then there was even some left over for them to play markup games with their equities inventories.

But mortgage rates have been rising since August. Prepayments are falling as a result. Home sales are holding up, but refis are cratering. As a result, the nearly final figure for the Fed’s MBS settlement in mid December is only $69 billion. That’s $30-40 billion less than in recent months.

At the same time, the TBAC says that the Treasury will issue $98 billion in new notes and bonds on December 15. The day before, the Fed’s MBS purchases will only total $52 billion.

That’s a problem. But there’s an even bigger problem next week. And an even bigger problem after that when the US Government passes new stimulus. Here’s why, and what to do about it.

The facts, figures, and outlook are reserved for subscribers. Click here to download the report.

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The Passion of Jaysus

Lee Adler

Jay Powell’s first order of business is to keep the bond market from breaking down. When the 10 year yield hit 0.975 last week before backing off, the market was at the edge of the abyss. Leveraged dealer bond portfolios were on the brink of disaster.

Signs of a weakening non-recovery rescued them. Traders sold stocks, which freed up enough cash at the margin to bring bonds back from the brink.

Because of that, the Fed is ok with the weaker economy narrative for the time being.

Jaysus saves the bond market first. Stocks are just the saints of this religion. They get their share of worship. But the bond market is the Cross, the Torah, and the Koran all rolled into one. It is the focus of the worshippers. It is the altar upon which the really big money acolytes pray.

So the Fed looks at signs of weakness with relief now, because it sends the big donors in the pews. And the small part of the collection plate that the Fed doesn’t fill, those donors keep filling. And Jaysus keeps saving. Or so it appears.

But this seeming miracle is an Act that won’t work for long. Because if too many worshippers reject the saints of stocks, Jaysus himself runs a similar risk. If the flock loses faith in Him, the Church of the Fed will collapse. The bulls will all die and burn in the fires of financial market hell.

As for the bears, it’s too late. They’re so dead, they’re beyond resurrection. Nobody is short the market.

In the end, only liquidity matters. The Fed can create liquidity, but an economic narrative that leads to selling of any asset class can destroy that liquidity just as fast, or faster, than the Fed creates it.

So for that purpose we keep an eye on a few real time economic indicators that few others are watching, to keep us abreast of how the Wall Street economic narrative is going to play.

We’ve known for a couple of months that the “recovery” was a non-recovery. The Wall Street mainstream is starting to catch up with that.

This report updates us on what’s happening now in Federal tax collections, and therefore what the narrative is likely to sound like in the weeks ahead. It prepares us to be ready to act ahead of the most likely scenarios in the financial markets.

Here’s the bottom line.

Subscribers, click here to download the report.

Available at this link for legacy Treasury subscribers.

KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW, before the Street does, read Lee Adler’s Liquidity Trader risk free for 90 days!

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Another Liquidity Indicator Shows Stocks Being Oversold – Wait, What?

Lee Adler

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.

The facts, figures, and outlook are reserved for subscribers. Click here to download the report.

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Composite Liquidity Indicator (CLI) – Shows Stocks As Oversold

Lee Adler

Are You Kidding Me?

Can this be right? Did the stock market become oversold in mid October versus Composite Liquidity. This chart said that it did. And even after this huge 2 week rally, it’s still much closer to oversold than overbought. The S&P 500 is still near the bottom of the liquidity band.

It’s very similar to a look it had in July 2011. That preceded 4 years of a relentless, virtually unbroken bullish string.

What should cause us to expect change?

The facts, figures, and outlook are reserved for subscribers. Click here to download the report.

This is Part 1 of a 2 part report. Part 2 will be published later today.

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TBAC Magic 8 Ball Cloudy

Lee Adler

In the second month of each calendar quarter the US Treasury gets together with a shadowy group called the TBAC, which stands for Treasury Borrowing Committee of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

The Treasury tells the TBAC how much money it will need to borrow to pay its bills for the rest of the current quarter and the subsequent quarter. The TBAC tells the Treasury how to schedule it. In other words, it sets out the type of issuance and the timing for the rest of the quarter and the next one.

In case you’re wondering, here are the current TBAC members. They change from time to time.

I just note that the Vice Chair is good old Brian Sack, who ran the NY Fed trading desk for several years. He was the guy who was in charge of executing the Fed’s trades with Primary Dealers in implementing QE. Now he’s making the big bucks on Wall Street as a “global eConomist.”

How would you like to be the firm that snagged him and his insider connections at the Fed? I wonder what that cost them.

But I digress.

The TBAC’s quarterly borrowing schedules are central to us because they tell us the schedule of expected new Treasury debt issuance (supply), months in advance. In the good old days, before pandemics and debt ceiling crises, that was extremely useful information to have because the Treasury rarely digressed from the TBAC schedule.

That has changed during the last couple years of the Trump Regime, because the mechanism for being able to reasonably forecast the Treasury’s borrowing needs broke down. First, they broke down because the Regime wanted to manipulate Congress by using the Federal Budget as a cudgel. Then things got worse when the pandemic came.

Last week the TBAC issued its revised estimates for the current quarter, and its first stab at Q1 2021.

Subscribers, click here to download the report.`

KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW, before the Street does, read Lee Adler’s Liquidity Trader risk free for 90 days!

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Real Time Tax Collection Data Supports Jobs Report

Lee Adler

Tax collections improved in October, but are still well below pre-pandemic levels. The US may look like it’s recovering, but it’s still in the hole it dug when Covid19 first hit. That means that Fed policy isn’t likely to change any time soon.

And it also means that we should expect a stimulus package of some kind, at some point. With the uncertainties surrounding a divided government regardless of whether a new Administration takes over, guessing how much stimulus there will be, and its timing, is a fool’s errand. The one thing that we do know is that whenever it comes, the bigger it is, the more bearish it will be.

And if they spend the $1.7 trillion on hand mostly to pay down debt, that would be very bullish.

Meanwhile, economic data is useful for guessing what Fed policy will be, and under normal circumstances might be useful for making an educated guess about fiscal policy. It’s not possible to translate this data directly into an expected market outcome. It always comes down to measuring the strength and persistence of the trend through technical analysis, and more direct liquidity inputs, such as the PONTs. That’s essentially the difference between the quantity of Fed QE versus the amount of new Treasury issuance.

This data gives us an outline of where the economy really stands, and what it means for the outlook for stocks and bonds.

Subscribers, click here to download the report.`

Available at this link for legacy Treasury subscribers.

KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW, before the Street does, read Lee Adler’s Liquidity Trader risk free for 90 days!

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Short Term Liquidity Relief Will Turn To Big Pain

Lee Adler

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.

The facts, figures, and outlook are reserved for subscribers. Click here to download the report.

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Disjointed Economy Points To Bad Things

Lee Adler

Last week I was surprised when the US Government’s retail sales data hit a new high. No way, I said.

Well, Way!

Yes, some retailers are seeing booming sales, particularly online, and … wait for it…

Grocery stores. Even after pulling back from the lockdown spike, they’re still up more than 7% year to year.

Now there’s a basis for a thriving, growing US economy.

Not.

And of course, there’s the surging growth in e-commerce. I’ve put it on a chart along with grocery sales going back 5 years for perspective. The average growth rate, which was already a sizzling 10-15% per year, has roughly doubled in e-commerce. The average growth rate for groceries has tripled. Apparently pandemics are good for some businesses.

Something struck me about this chart, apart from the COVID driven surge. Over the past few months, the annual growth rates in both series have been plummeting. “Growth” ain’t what it used to be. This drop implies contraction since July.

But my purpose here is not to pretend to be an eConomist. I just wanted to point out the government statistics, particularly those that the financial news headline writers feature, don’t tell the whole story.

Furthermore, we know that these sales are just coming out of the hides of other businesses. Lodging, travel, recreation, and transportation sales have collapsed. Gross tax collections show us the truth. The US economy is dead in the water, not growing at all, while remaining at a level a few percent below what it was last year at this time. It’s hard to gauge just how much in real terms, because we really have no clue how high inflation really is. But the nominal actual totals are lower and flat.

That’s what this report focuses on.

The issues then facing us are whether this will be the basis for more stimulus. That would mean more spending, more debt issuance, more pressure on the financial markets, and a need for more Fed support to prevent a market meltdown.

Here’s what the current Federal tax collections data tells us about what the real condition of the economy is, and what to expect as a result.

Subscribers, click here to download the report.`

Available at this link for legacy Treasury subscribers.

KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW, before the Street does, read Lee Adler’s Liquidity Trader risk free for 90 days!

Act on real-time reality!

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