Hello my friends, today is October 12th and this is Markets Weekly. So this past week was a really good week in markets. We had the S&P 500 soar to new all-time highs. Now I think of price as a good indicator for sentiment and it's looking pretty euphoric out there. But today let's talk about three things. First, let's talk about the 10-year yield surging to above 4%. Let's talk about what could be driving that. Secondly, now over the past two years many people have pointed to the rise in autolone delinquencies as signs that the consumer is cracking and the Fed has to cut rates ASAP. Well a few Fed researchers took a deep dive into the data and they're coming away with a slightly different conclusion. Let's hear what they have to say. And lastly, this past week Vice Chair Jefferson of the Fed gave not one but two speeches on the discount window. He really likes the discount window. So let's take a listen to what he has to say about the history and potential future of the discount window.
Okay, starting with the 10-year yield. Well the 10-year yield closed Friday at around 4.1%, marking a notable surge for the past up a couple weeks actually. Now many people have been commenting how does it make sense for the 10-year yield to rise even as the Fed is cutting rates. Now there's a couple ways to think about this. Now if you are a doomer you can say that the Fed made a tremendous policy mistake, inflation is going to surge out of control and the 10-year yield is responding to that. Or you can simply say that because the Fed has been more aggressive in trying to get ahead of a potential recession there's less of a chance of a recession and so the market is pricing in, pricing in fewer rate cuts. Now the rise in the 10-year yield started in a big way last week when we had a better than expected jobs report. Again, jobs created much higher than expected and that seemed to really calm the market's fear of a potential US recession and if you have less of a chance of having a US recession then obviously the market is going to price in fewer rate cuts.
Now another interesting data point came this past week and that has to do with inflation. Now we got CPI data and looking at CPI it was across the board higher than expectations. Now if you take a step back and look at core CPI year over the past few years you should also notice that core CPI basically seems to be in a different regime. Now we were around 2% before the pandemic and now we are comfortably above 3 and more recently it looks like core CPI on a year over year level seems to be moving higher. Now let's see a year or two ago the Fed wanted to focus not so much on core CPI or headline they wanted to focus on something that they created called Supercore which is Services X Shelter. Now if you look at Supercore again Services Service Inflation Excluding Shelter Excluding Rent you'll notice that that measure of inflation also is pretty high and pretty sticky. That is largely due to elevated wage growth which has moderated but is still higher than pre-pandemic levels. So on the one hand in looking at the chain of yield you can say that you know there's less of a chance of recession on the other hand you can also think of it as inflation looks to be a bit stickier above pre-pandemic trends.
Now of course this has a direct impact on how the Fed thinks about monetary policy. Now not too long ago the market was pricing in quite a bit of red cuts throughout the end of this year. Today the market is pricing in just one 25 basis point cut in November and a 25 basis point cut in December so 50 basis points to go. Now this past week we had some pretty interesting Fed speak where one Fed president actually said he was comfortable with escaping rate cuts in November but that person was not terribly important and the more important people in the Fed seemed to be intent on their plan to continue to cut rates but at a gradual pace and so the market is no longer expecting 50 basis point cuts.
Now looking forward for the next few years when we're thinking about interest rates it's not completely not all about what the Fed does but we also have basic supply and demand dynamics as well in the treasury market. Now there's some interesting work by a nonpartisan organization about estimates of what the fiscal deficit would be under a Harris administration or under another Trump administration. Now according to this work they're thinking that both of them of course will spend a lot of money but person Trump will spend notably more. Now of course we have to keep in mind that spending is largely a decision of Congress so what really matters is who wins Congress and also there's a big difference between what a candidate says on the campaign trail and what they actually do in office but I think it's pretty clear that if you look at our political culture again president Trump the past week telling everyone that you know let's just cut taxes more this time let's cut taxes for Americans living abroad so they don't have to pay worldwide income tax which is I think great idea but in any case it's more tax cuts and Harris as we all know would like to spend more on a subsidizing housing and so forth so we are in a cultural context where everyone is trying to get elected by buying votes either by giving you money directly or by giving you money indirectly by cutting your taxes so going forward I think the future will be different from the past and 10 euro below 4 percent has always been a bizarre phenomenon to me.
Okay now the next thing that I want to talk about is auto loan delinquencies. Now looking at this chart of auto loan delinquencies you notice that they've gradually ticked up and are comfortably above where they were pre-pandemic. Now many people have been looking at this and suggesting that this is an indicator that the consumer is cracking Fed needs to cut rates ASAP this is really really bad so some Fed researchers took a deeper dive in the data and they're coming up with a slightly different conclusion. Now the first thing they did was to look at this one level lower not on an aggregate auto loan delinquency level but by vintage.
What that means is let's look at the delinquency rates according to when the loan was originated and what they found was there was a normal the higher delinquency rate for loans that originated in 2022 and as everyone recalls 2022 was kind of the height of the post-COVID boom everyone was happy spending money stock market going to the moon interest rates really really low so it seemed that that cohort seems to have more problems paying down their debt. Now then they took another look at this data in another way and looked at it according to the mount borrowed and also by interest rates. Now what they came out with was that well one thing that stood out about the 2022 cohort is that they tended to borrow a lot more principle for their auto loans than they did in the past. So from their reading that reflects the tremendous amounts of inflation we saw back then. Now from in 2022 again we were still suffering supply chains from COVID so there wasn't a very big supply of new cars and that meant there was massive competition for them so car prices rose and also used car prices rose a lot as well. So if you wanted to buy a car at that time you needed to borrow more money and so at that time the people had higher loan balances which of course implies higher monthly payments and if you have higher monthly payments that means it's more like that you default because maybe you can't pay it.
The next thing they looked at is interest rates. Now looking at this chart what's really interesting well first off it's a chart where on the x-axis you can see the interest rate you have to pay depending on your credit score very clearly lower credit score people pay higher loan rates on their auto loans and on the y-axis is a loan interest rate. Now what's really interesting about this chart is as you can see over the past few years interest rates have gone higher for for auto loans but what's really noteworthy is that among the borrowers with low credit scores so on the left hand part of the x-axis you'll notice that in any case whether loans whether interest rates were zero or whether or five and a half percent they had to pay really high interest rates. The bigger difference had to do with people with very high credit scores for them the Fed's rate hiking campaign had more of an impact on their auto loan interest rates. So basically if you have a low credit score no matter where the Fed is setting interest rates you have to pay a really high really high interest rates because you are a higher credit risk and so the researchers are looking at this and says that because most of the delinquencies are in people with low credit scores and these low credit score people have to pay high interest rates regardless of whether or not the Fed has rates at zero or five percent it's unlikely due to the Fed's interest rate campaign that's causing this rise in delinquencies. The rise in delinquencies seems to be driven by the inflation we had in the price of autos which forced them to take out bigger auto loans even if the Fed were had interest rates very low they would as this chart shows still have to pay very high interest rates. So given that fact they look at the data today and they notice that car prices have come down a lot and banks have also tightened up their credit standards and so because of these two aspects we're unlikely to see a rerun of this surging auto loan delinquencies in 2022 for auto loans originated today. So the overall amount of auto loans from my perspective that delinquency rate seems to basically maybe be along its heights and rather than worsen it's probably going to trend lower going forward so maybe this surprising loan this rise in that alone delinquencies overall seems to be due more to these idiosyncratic inflation secondary effects rather than anything to do with interest rate policy or as a clear sign of what's happening in the labor market especially in the context of the broader data where GDP growth continues to be strong and at least by official data standards jobs continue to be created.
Okay now the last thing that I want to talk about is the discount window. Now Vice Chair Jefferson at the Fed gave two speeches on the discount window the past week talking about its history and its potential future. Now the backdrop of this is that the Fed is thinking about revamping its discount window policy but first let's listen to some history. So now before there was a Fed now the the nation was under a gold standard and it was heavily agrarian. Now today most maybe one or two percent of the people are in agriculture back then a big chunk of people were in agriculture it was a big sector in the economy. Now when you have when you're under the gold standard again and you don't have a lender of last resort banks are a little bit more constrained in the amount of loans they can provide because there's a real risk that they could be set for a run.
After all you can run out of gold and there's no one to backstop you. Now in that context when you have an agrarian economy credit demand is very cyclical especially around harvests around harvests time farmers would have to take out loans hire a whole bunch of people to harvest and then they could sell the crop and get their money back and pay back their loans. So there are some cyclical demand and credit and credit was less elastic and so around say see snow times money would flow from the financial centers at that time say New York to the regional banks and there would be some tightness of credit and maybe some fragility as well because if you have a harvest that's not very good maybe you have trouble paying back your loans and so that system didn't seem to be ideal and so they wanted to have a federal reserve as a central bank lender of last resort to be able to backstop credit and make sure that they wouldn't have these so much a seasonal tightness.
Now so the federal reserve was born now at that time you know you have this fed backstopping and it seems like the banks were pretty active in barring the discount window and maybe that contributed to some of the bad loans made by the banking sector in the 1920s and maybe some of the speculation and so starting in the 1920s the Fed became a bit weary of making discount loans and wanted to discourage their active use. Again this is going to be a long-running thing throughout the Fed's history whereas the Fed wants to backstop the system but also doesn't want to create moral hazard where banks see that the Fed is there to backstop them and begin to make riskier loans or speculate.
Now starting in the 1920s the began to do something called open market operations we call them you know basically go out and buy securities. That was a potential solution to this dilemma whereas instead of making adding liquidity through emergency loans the discount window maybe they would go out and buy securities adding cash into the banking system and just let the markets work and distribute that liquidity throughout. Now over the next few decades the Fed will try to struggle to strike that balance between backstopping the system and also preventing moral hazard. Now in the 1960s the Fed actually set the discount window loan rate to below market and what they would try to do to prevent banks from abusing that was basically regulation and moral suasion. They would tell the banks heavily discourage them to not tap the discount window unless they needed to.
They would create different types of lending to make it clear that you know you only do this if you really need it and some of this is meant for short term and so forth but in the end it wasn't very successful. Now Jefferson has this chart where looking at discount window loans as a percentage of Fed balance sheet you can notice that 70s and 80s a lot of banks were borrowing in the discount window pretty regularly. Oh and I forgot this really quote chart from the 1920s that shows that again back then many banks were borrowing from the Fed's discount window all the time and so some of them were basically were having using the Fed regularly a huge number of banks and so that's part of the reason why the Fed became worried about moral hazard.
Anyway back to the 1970s and 80s so the Fed realized that their moral suasion was not super useful in discouraging banks because again discount window loan rates below market banks were just leveraging up and borrowing but then we will come into the 90s and we realize back then there was a kind of a big banking crisis many banks went bust and as they were getting into trouble they would borrow heavily from the discount window and so the market began to associate discount window borrowing with the bank doing very poorly. It became a very strong stigma attached to borrowing of the discount window and so you can see from this chart again that say in the late 80s and 90s not much borrowing in the discount window because all the banks were aware that if they borrowed from that given all the bank failures at the time they would be they would be tarred and so the bank held big discount windows basically not used.
Now the Fed looked at this and began to realize well if we have a discount window and no one's using it then it's not very useful and so they revamped it again in the early 2000s and the way that they're doing this since then is that rather than have below market rates and then just dissuade you they would have the discount window set at above market rates and let you borrow whenever you want no question asked provided of course you know you're in good standing and not let's see there aren't any solvency concerns. Now that did seem to be helpful we saw that during the great financial crisis tremendous surge in discount window borrowing and more recently in the Silicon Valley crisis Silicon Valley bank crisis as well but one other thing that happened in after the 2008 financial crisis that we had new legislation called the Dodd-Frank Act which actually mandated the Fed to disclose in detail after two years who borrowed from the discount window and so it seemed like there's a return of discount windows stigma given that if you borrow from the discount window people are going to find out eventually.
So recently when we had that Silicon Valley bank panic the Fed realized that something really strange was that Silicon Valley bank they had a liquidity problem but they didn't really borrow from the discount window because they weren't even set up to borrow from the discount window they were borrowing from the home loan banks and they didn't really have the documents in place to borrow from the Fed and that set up alarm bells because that tells the Fed that we have this to sound window no one's using it not just that but no one a lot of people are not even already even set up to use it and so what they're trying to do now is one make sure that everyone is at the very least set up to use it and two they're finding ways to try to reduce the Sigma so that you know make the discount window useful again.
Now during Covid they did lower the discount window borrowing rate so that it's not really far above market but right now they're working on the stigma one making sure that all the banks are able to borrow it from it and two there seems to be some news suggesting that the Fed is going to make it mandatory for at least some of the bigger banks to make periodic test drawings from the discount window and recall I think during their most recent panics in Covid for example they were strong arming big banks to borrow from the discount window just to remove that stigma and so that seems to be the current campaign for the Fed trying to create make the discount window into something that's a bit more useful and maybe throwing in some regulatory sweeteners as well recently Bar of the Fed was suggesting that you can if you have treasuries you can borrow against treasuries with a discount window and that can count against your liquidity regulations in a good way but that could really just be to encourage greater treasury holdings as well by making them more fungible with reserves.
在新冠疫情期间,美国联邦储备系统下调了贴现窗口的借款利率,使其不再远高于市场利率。但目前,他们正在努力解决两大问题:一是确保所有银行能够从贴现窗口借款,二是有消息称美联储可能会要求至少一些大银行定期从贴现窗口进行测试性提款。在最近的疫情恐慌中,比如新冠疫情,美联储强制大银行从贴现窗口借款,以消除相关污名。这似乎是美联储当前的行动,目的是使贴现窗口更加实用,可能还会加入一些监管奖励措施。最近,美联储官员 Bar 建议,如果你拥有国债,可以用国债作为抵押通过贴现窗口借款,这可以对你的流动性规则产生积极影响。但这也可能只是为了鼓励更多储备国债,使其与储备金更加互通。
In any case that seems to be the Fed's new project more discount window usage and we'll see if that's successful at the next banking crisis. All right so that's all I prepared for today thanks so much for tuning in again if you're interested in hearing more about all my thoughts check out my blog FedGuy.com and if you're interested in learning more about markets check out centralbanking101.com where I have online courses and if you don't like the courses you get a full refund no questions asked talk to you all next week.