Hey everyone, this is Joseph and welcome to class 1. In this class, I will go over some of the major market participant types. This is really important because each market participant type has a different perception of the world.
They have different business models, different constraints and they all have a big impact on pricing. So basically, if you're trading the market, it's very helpful to have an idea of who you might be trading against and how they think.
In this class, what I'll do is go over several major market participant types and for each market participant type, I'll briefly describe what the market participant is, how they behave and to add a little bit more color into their behavior, I'll go over a case study where we can see how they interact with the market.
The big takeaway I'd like you to have from this class is to understand that investors have different beliefs and constraints. So they buy and sell in the market for different reasons. Now this is really, really important because it's a little bit different than what we are often taught in school.
When I was studying finance, for example, we would learn many different valuation models. A very common one could be, for example, the discount cash flow model where in evaluating an investment, I would try to forecast what a company would make for the next few years and then come up with a discount rate and discount those cash flows to the present to kind of have a sense of what the net present value would be and use that to inform my investment decision. Now, that's an interesting framework, but it might not be super useful when you're investing in the markets.
The reason being that everyone approaches their investment process with either a different framework or they can even use the same framework and have different inputs. Now for example, let's say I find a company and I think it's a great company based upon my DCF model and I want to buy its stock.
Now when you are investing in the markets, the way that you make money is if that stock price goes higher. That means if other people go and they buy that stock as well. But the thing is many investors in the markets could be using other methods or other inputs, even if everyone was using the same DCF model for example, they could have different information that suggested them that maybe the company's outlook isn't so great or they could be more risk-averse and have a higher discount rate such that they don't feel the company is a very good value.
So using any valuation model itself isn't really going to tell you whether or not the price will go higher. You'd have to have some idea of how other people think about it. This also works in another way as well. If you're looking at market pricing, it's very difficult to infer based on that pricing itself what the market is saying.
That again goes to the point that everyone approaches this with a different way. For example, post-Great Financial Crisis, the central banks have become major market participants and they're out there buying treasure securities and other credit risk free assets because they're trying to implement monetary policy. They're not even trying to make money. And yet if you're looking at, say, interest rates themselves and trying to infer some kind of economic condition from it, it'd be a little bit troubling because you have such a large amount of buying in that market, stemming from people who are not trying to make money and not trying to express an economic view, but simply trying to carry out their policy goals.
In the rest of this class, what I'll do is I'll walk through a number of different market participants' types and hopefully convey to you the idea that people buy and sell in the markets for wide range of reasons. It's very helpful to understand this because sometimes prices don't mean what you think they mean.
Now the first major market participant type that I like to talk about is security zealers. Now security zealers are probably the most important market participant type that you've never heard of. If you're trying to buy or sell things that are not traded on exchange, for example government bonds or corporate bonds or foreign exchange or some kind of derivative, you actually have to trade through a dealer.
Now if I'm buying a stock, then oftentimes I'd go to my broker and my broker will route the order to an exchange. But if I were buying a government bond, I'd have to call up a dealer and then a dealer would quote me a price and I can accept or decline. Or if I had, say, $10 billion in treasuries that I wanted to sell, I'd have to also call up a dealer and the dealer would make me an offer.
Dealers are kind of like huge pawn shops for financial products. What they do is they buy financial products from some of their clients, warehouse them, so hold them in their pawn shop, so to speak, until they can find another client to offload them to. They make money by buying low and selling high. That's their business motto. So it's important to note that they're not in the market to take any directional risk.
So back to the example where I sell my dealer $10 billion worth of treasury securities. If my dealer were to buy it from me, he would take those treasury securities but hedge his exposure. So even if treasury is rallied or if they sold off, he wouldn't really be impacted by it. He makes money off the spread. So what he's trying to do is he's trying to buy it from me at one price and sell to another person at a slightly higher price. That's his business model.
Now in the chart on the bottom, what you can see is dealers are a pretty big part of the financial system. They have four and a half trillion dollars in assets. They are very much one of the main arteries of the financial system because of any big investor and any hedge fund wants to do, wants to go and buy a lot of stuff. They have to contact the dealers. But remember dealers are buying and selling to make markets, buying low and selling high. They're not expressing a view or they're not having any directional exposure.
So one interesting example that I like is what happened with the Gava squeeze in GME stock in January 2021 that really helps illustrate how dealers can impact market prices. So on the left, you see the stock price for GME, which is the ticker for GameStop. Now GME in January 2021, they was trading below $50 and it rocketed to as high as almost $350. Now if you were some kind of fundamental, more valued dream investor, you would look at this and be like, well, this is really weird. There's nothing changing in the market. The underlying business hasn't changed and yet the stock price is going higher.
The reason that the stock price is going higher obviously is because there's a lot of people buying it. And there's been a lot of studies about what went on here. One of the more well-known ones is a study done by what's called the ad hoc academic committee of equity and options market structure. So these is a group of people with industry and academia experience. They did a study and they suggested that what likely went on here is that the tremendous buying that drove GME stock from about $50 to $350 was actually hedging by dealers. So it really wasn't anyone very bullish on the future of GME. It was really just someone mechanically hedging.
And let me give you an example. Let me flesh out how that might happen. Remember, if I want to make a trade oftentimes after a call up a dealer and at that time many investors saw this stock price of GME go higher and what they wanted to do is they wanted to short it. But they wanted to short it by buying put options. So they caught up their dealer and the dealer sold them put options. Now let's say for arguments sake, the dealer sold them some put options and in order to hedge dealers own exposure, the dealer sold short 100 shares of GME.
Remember, dealers don't take any exposure, any directional risk. They're just trying to make money off the transaction. Just as a reminder, a put option is a derivative that becomes more valuable if the underlying stock price goes lower. So after selling the put option, the dealer is short of put. So if GME were to go down, the dealer would start losing money. And the dealer doesn't want to have that directional exposure. And so to protect itself, it needs to sell short GME stock. In this case, for the sake of this example, let's just say the dealers were short 100 shares of GME.
Now, what happened then was the stock continued to go higher. And when the stock continued to go higher, the dealers who were short say 100 shares of GME had to turn around and buy some of that stock back. They had pat to buy some of that back because the puts that they were short were no longer as valuable. As the price of GME stock went higher, the price, the value of the put options became less. And so the dealers did not have to short as many shares of GME to hedge that exposure.
So say if they were short 100 shares, maybe they bought 25 back. And when they were buying shares back, that obviously influences the underlying price of GameStop, such that their price rises and they have to hedge less. So they buy more stock back. So at the end of the day, this dynamic, which many describe as a gamma squeeze, became a self-fulfilling cycle where dealers who were short the stock ended up buying it back, pushing the price higher and thus having to buy back even more. They were active in the markets, buying and selling, not because any view on the markets or all the stock, but simply because their business model demands that they hedge their exposure, that was one of the major drivers of that price.
Remember, people buy and sell for different motivations. In this case, the dealers were simply participating because that was their business model to hedge their exposures. Now, the next major market participant type that I'd like to talk about are the pensions and life insurers. So just as brief as the description, pensions here, and I'm referring to the defined benefit pensions. A defined benefit pension is basically a pension program where they promise their beneficiaries upon retirement a set amount of benefits, say $10,000 a day.
So if you are a worker at a company with a defined benefit pension, throughout your career for every paycheck, you'll pay a little bit into that pension fund. And when you retire, maybe they'll say give you $10,000 a month. Now life insurance is a little bit similar, your paying periodic payments to the insurer, and when you die, the insurer will pay your beneficiaries a lump sum amount of money. These two programs are similar because they have obligations that are far into the future.
For defined pensions, that's the retirement payments they have to make, and for life insurers, that is, the lump sum payments they make when the person with the life insurance contract passes away. Now if you're one of these investors, one of these businesses, and you want to be able to make sure that you have enough money to make those payments in the future, what you do is you'll make investments that are both safe and also long dated. So for example, what you would often do is you would purchase long dated government bonds as a way to hedge your exposure to these long dated liabilities.
So if I'm a pension fund and I have to pay a bunch of money out in the future, let's say 30 years from now, what I'll often do is I'll take the money that I have now, I'll invest it and say 30 year government bonds. And that helps me be sure that in the future 30 years from now, I'll get money from the bond that I purchased just in time to pay the obligations that I promised. This is called asset liability management, and it's how these major investors interact with the markets.
They're interested in part in what the review of the market is, but ultimately their investments are guided by their liabilities. They have long dated liabilities in the future, obligations they have to make. So they're needs to buy long dated assets to match those liabilities. You can see in this chart that they're both major, major players in the financial system. So life insurance companies have no around 10 trillion in assets and the defined benefit pension plans have around 17 trillion in assets. It's a very sizable sum.
In this next example, what we'll look at is how these life insurance companies directly impact the markets through their investment strategy. A very good example of this is what happened with the UK pension inform in 2004. In 2004, the UK government was concerned that some of their pension funds may not be properly funded. That is to say, maybe in the future, some of their beneficiaries may not be receiving all the money that was promised to them. So in order to make sure that the pension funds were well funded, they passed a law that forced all the pensions to be well funded.
And if they didn't, they would have to be fined. Now the pension funds, they did not want to be fined. And so they wanted to make sure that they were properly funded. Under the pension fund reform law, that meant that the UK government would basically discount the liabilities of the pension funds and made it wanted to make sure that the assets when discounted to the present were also able to meet them, meet the liabilities. The easiest way that pension funds could do this was to buy longer-dead bonds.
And so since the passage of that reform, if you look at the chart, the UK pension funds became net sellers of equities, a sort of bunch of equities, and became large net buyers of longer term bonds. On the right, you can see the direct impact on pricing of this. Now this tremendous amount of demand from the UK pension funds pushed longer-dead bonds. Here you can see the black line being the bond maturing in 2055 pushed it down so that the curve was inverted. That means longer-dead yields trading below shorter-dead yields.
So the 2009 bond at the time was trading at yields that were higher than the longer-dead 2055 bonds, and part of that seems to be due to the enormous amount of buying from the UK pension funds, so much so that they actually asked the UK government to issue more longer-dead debt, which the UK government did. Now this is an interesting example because when you think about, let's say, the sheep of the year curve or longer-dead yields, people often look at this and try to assign it some kind of economic interpretation where, let's say, the market is trying to tell you something, but in this case, it seems clear that at least part of the reason is simply because there was a change in regulation forcing some market participants to buy more longer-dead bonds. It was not a signal of any economic weakness or anything. It was simply because there were more buyers. Remember, market prices are just supply and demand, and this regulation pension reform stirred up a lot of buyers.
The next type of investors I like to go over are the foreign investors. So foreign investors are very active in US markets. So on the chart, you can see the foreign participation in some of the major US asset classes. You have treasuries, agencies which are largely agency mortgage-backed securities, corporate debt, and equities. You can see that the foreign participation in each of these categories are significant, but you also notice another thing as well. Now, the foreign investors are broken down in this chart by foreign private investors and foreign official investors. Foreign official investors refer to foreign central banks and governments and foreign private investors refer to private sector foreigners. One big difference you'll note is that foreign official sectors tend to invest a lot in treasuries and agency debt because those are credit-risk-free and foreign official sector investors tend to be risk-reverse. Whereas the private sector tends to invest in risk-earned assets like corporate debt and equities.
So foreigners have a lot of dollars to invest in part because the US runs a chronic current account deficit. So year after year, the US is buying more goods and services abroad than in exports. This means that foreigners end up with a lot of dollars that they usually reinvest into US assets. However, that's not the only reason there's a lot of foreigners investing in the US. The US is a country that over the past few decades has had strong economic growth, has rule of law. It's relatively insulated from the rest of the world and it has very deep and liquid capital markets. So it's a good place to invest or at least have some exposure to.
In the next few slides, I'll talk a little bit more about the foreign official sector in particular. The foreign official sector, as we saw earlier, invests in very conservative dollar assets, mostly credit risk-free assets like Treasury's and agency MBS. The foreign official sector behaves differently from private sectors because they're not really trying to make money. Now globally, the US dollar is the reserve currency. And when thinking about foreign official investors, I think it's helpful to first have an idea as to why these people might be investing dollars.
Now if you are a foreign government, usually you want to keep a rainy day fund just to be able to help out your businesses or support your currency. Let's say for example that one day your currency becomes very, very weak and that's hurting your businesses. If you had a stash of dollars, what you could do is you could sell the dollars and buy back your own domestic currency that would strengthen your domestic currency and maybe help out some of your businesses. Or let's say that some of your businesses have need of emergency dollars. If you had a rainy day fund of dollars, what you could do is you could take those dollars and you could lend them to your businesses. So if you're a foreign government, what you really care about when you invest your rainy day fund isn't that it makes a lot of money, but that it's there when you need it.
So what you really care about is safety and liquidity. And in practice, that means treasury securities, so debt issued by the government or agency securities, that is to say debt indirectly guaranteed by the US government. And that's as we see what these foreign central banks, foreign governments largely invest in. On the right, you have a breakdown of foreign exchange reserves globally by the IMF. And one thing you'll note is that among the foreign exchange reserves, the US dollar plays a very big role. And that has to do with the fact that the US dollar is the world's reserve currency. This trade is in the US dollars and most ethics transactions are in US dollars as well. So if you are a foreign government, what you really need to have reserves up, what you really need to have a rainy day fund of is dollars more so than the other currency. And that's reflected there.
This is a great example of how foreign governments use their rainy day dollar funds. So on the blue line here, what you see is that's the nominal US dollar index. So when the blue line is going higher, that means the dollar is strengthening. On the red line, that's the amount of treasury securities that foreign governments hold at the New York Fed. So if you are a foreign government and you own treasury securities, what you usually do is you store them at the Federal Reserve.
Since the Federal Reserve is a credit-risk free counterparty. So you know that these two lines look somewhat in the opposite of each other. So when the blue line goes higher, that is when the dollar is strengthening, it looks like treasury holdings of foreign central banks decline. That relationship is largely because that when the dollar strengthens, that causes trouble for a lot of countries. And what they do is they try to find ways to weaken the dollar and strengthen their own currency.
So what they do then when the dollar is strong against their currency is that they sell dollars and buy their own currency. So where do they get the dollars? Well they have to go to the New York Fed, take the chargeories that they have on store the New York Fed, sell them, take the dollars, then sell the dollars for their own currency. So that is why that when the dollar is strengthening, you see that the amount of treasury is held at the New York Fed that belongs to foreign central banks declines.
That's foreign exchange intervention. And again, these are public sector actors trying to intervene and directly affect market pricing. From these examples, you can see that it does seem to have an impact on the dollar by making it weaker. And also, I have to imagine that if foreign central banks are selling their treasuries, it probably has an impact on treasury prices as well.
Now, this is just buying and selling from official sector entities implementing their policy without any reference to underlying fundamentals or economic conditions. The next example are Japanese life insurers. Now, this example ties in our foreign investor type as well as our life insurer investor type. Remember from a few slides back, life insurers look for longer dated assets to match their longer dated liabilities.
On the left here, you can see that the US 10 year treasury, which is the blue line, has been solely trending lower and then it went higher. It's been around, let's say, 2 to 3% for most of the past 20 years. Now during that time, many investors were marveling how anyone would be investing in US treasuries when they're basically yielding nothing after taking into account inflation. However, there were many investors in US treasury securities.
And on the right here, you can see that the Japanese life insurers were becoming increasingly interested in foreign bonds. And the reason for that is if you look at the red line, you can see that the Japanese tenure, the tenure JGB was yielding much less than the US tenure treasury. So what looked like a very poor investment to US based investors was actually looking like a pretty good deal for many foreign based investors.
Again, people buy and sell for different reasons. They have different constraints and different goals. The Japanese life insurers were looking for long dated assets. They found what something that were better than what they can get at home and they started to buy more of it. Now, another thing to keep in mind is that when you're a foreign investor purchasing US assets, oftentimes what you do is you hedge out the currency risk.
So if you look at the second chart on the right, you'll see that the life insurers do actually hedge out a portion of their currency risk. Not everything, but let's say most of it. That affects their returns as well. So that's something to keep in mind. For most of this period, it still made sense to them on an FX hedge basis.
However, one other thing that I note is that when you're a foreign investor, sometimes you actually do want to have a little bit of foreign exchange risk. Because if you're a Japanese investor and you're purchasing US assets and then the dollar rallies, you're basically getting a double play. You're making money on the treasury side on the interest rate and you're also making money because the dollar appreciated. So that's another thing to keep in mind too. Sometimes foreigners are in purchasing US assets because one, it's better than what they get at home, even if it looks unattractive to a US based investor. And two, maybe they're not so much associated in the asset, but they're trying to make FX currency play thinking that the dollar would appreciate.
The next market participant type I'd like to discuss are the hedge funds. Now the hedge funds are difficult groups to discuss because they're also different.
我接下来要讨论的市场参与者类型是对冲基金。对冲基金是非常不同的群体,所以讨论起来比较困难。
Now in this chart, you can look at the performances you're today in 2022 for a wide range of hedge funds strategies. Or every box here is a different strategy and you can note that there's a whole lot of them.
You have your long shorts, which is what else slash S means. You have glue and macro. You have CTAs and you have event-driven funds or quant funds and so forth. There's a lot of variation here.
I'll briefly describe some of the major strategy types that you will encounter. Of course, the most basic one is the traditional long short, fundamental based, so you have a hedge fund, perform some kind of valuation analysis on investment and goes to buy it or sell it depending on what it thinks the how good it thinks investment is.
The strategies are event-driven strategies where they're not so much focused on the underlying fundamentals but they're thinking that there might be some kind of corporate event that will be a catalyst in moving prices. It could be that they see a company and they think it's a prime takeover target and they invest in that company with the theory that this company is eventually going to be bought out from a bigger company and thus make them a lot of money.
Or they could be speculating that it would go bankrupt or sell short or they can be thinking that two companies are about to merge. They can buy one company and sell the other thinking that at the end of the day they'd be able to harvest some kind of premium. Quantitative funds are more data-driven so what they'll often do is they'll try to find out statistical relationships between two asset prices and try to assume that those statistical relationships will persist and then benefit from them.
For example, just as an example, let's say someone found out there was a statistical relationship between price of copper and the price of gold. Well, if they had some kind of quantitative model trying to estimate the relationship between the two, then when the relationship widens and their model suggests that it's going to close again, then they could put on a trade to take advantage of that convergence. CTAs are called commodity trading advisors and what they are is they are basically trend following, which is to say momentum. They mostly trade in commodities and futures.
So what they'll do is that if something is going higher, they're basically buy it and if something is going lower, they'll sell it. They'll follow the trends. And strangely, this actually works, empirically it works pretty well. And lastly, we have macro funds and there are of course, there are many other strategies. A macro fund would be investment fund that tries to make investments based upon global developments such as centrobake actions or political developments and so forth.
They trade in a wide range of asset classes and around the world. So these are just some ideas of what hedge funds invest in. It's such a large and motley group, it's difficult to generalize.
But what is important to note is that they have a pretty big impact on market prices from a day to day standpoint, simply because they are such active investors. The chart shows that hedge funds, their total financial assets are about two and a half trillion.
Now, you'll know that that's a lot smaller than let's say the pension funds and the life insurance and so forth, but this really understates their impact because hedge funds often employ a lot of leverage. So their actual impact on market pricing could be a lot higher than what you see in, let's say, cash only investors. And also because they're so opportunistic, treating in and out every day, they have a pretty big impact on day-to-day market pricing.
But it's just not clear in which way they influence prices because as we suggested earlier, they employ a whole different kinds of strategies and oftentimes they trade against each other. So it's not clear to actually have some kind of buy-assess to how they would shape prices.
In this example, I'll go over one of the more popular hedge fund trades that was actually having a big impact on prices a couple years ago. So this is called the cash futures basis trade. Now, as many of you know, the US government has a tremendous deficit and it's issuing a lot of churches all the time.
And it's often wondered just who was buying all these trades recent. In the past few slides, we pointed out some participants like Japanese life insurers. But for the couple years before 2020, the largest marginal purchaser of trades was actually the hedge fund community to the tune of a few hundred billion dollars. And that's what you see on the chart on the left.
You see that it was estimated that US-based hedge funds were increased their exposure in treasury holdings from 600 billion to 1.1 trillion. The thing is, they were not purchasing these treasuries because they had any view of inflation or economic growth or anything. They were purchasing these cash treasuries as part of a cash futures basis trade.
What that is is that the hedge fund is trying to exploit pricing differences between the cash treasuries and the treasury futures. Let's say for example, they would buy the cash treasuries and then they would sell short a futures contract of treasury futures. They would hold the two trades until they're too converged and try to harvest the difference between the pricing in the cash market and the pricing in the futures market.
And you can see that on the right as well. So on the right, you can see that the hedge funds significantly increased their short your treasury futures at the same time as they increased their long treasury cash positions. Again, they're just harvesting the pricing inefficiencies between these two products, derivatives and the cash market.
Without any view on pricing or growth. So looking at this, it's clear that when people buy treasuries, they have different motivations for doing so beyond, especially in the fundamental view. And if you were to look at, let's say, subdue treasury yields, you know, you wouldn't really know if it was because it was part of a hedge for another trade, say the cash futures basis or because they were trying to say that economic growth is going to be slow for the coming years.
So the next market Bertram type, I'll talk about are the commercial banks. So the commercial banks, they make loans and they are more involved in the real economy than the financial economy. So let's say they go when they give a homeowner a mortgage or they give a small business alone so that the small business can continue to pay their employees.
But it wasn't actually always like this. There was a time when the commercial banks were very involved in financial markets. In the graph on the bottom, you can see that the blue line are the amount of securities that the commercial banks were purchasing. Heading into the great financial crisis, the blue line was accelerating. And that was because that commercial banks were becoming more interested in participating in the booming financial economy.
And then that all stopped in 2008 during the Jake financial crisis, the series of great crisis in the commercial banking sector and thereafter regulations that were meant to make the commercial banks safer placed big limits on what the commercial banks could buy. And those limits basically did two things. They constrained the appetite for commercial banks to buy riskier financial securities. And they also encouraged them to buy financial securities that are credit risk-free like treasuries and agencies.
What you can see is the red line there, post 2008, due to the commercial reforms, there is a tremendous demand by the commercial banks for treasury securities. That wasn't because they had any underlying view of law through author inflation, just because they had all these regulations that strongly encouraged them to do so. And they complied. In this next study, we'll see a little bit more into that.
So the specific regulations that the commercial banks were under that compelled them to buy treasuries are called the Basel III liquidity coverage ratio or the LCR. So 2008 is often thought of as a banking sector crises. Banks bought a whole bunch of assets that were not very good. Those assets went bad, so the banks were basically insolvent.
People who lent money to the banks were very worried that they weren't able to get their money out and started to withdraw their money or stop lending to the bank in mass. And so you had a good old fashioned classic bank run. To make sure that this doesn't happen anymore in the future, regulators post 2008 force banks to hold more liquid assets.
If they had more liquid assets on hand, say cash on hand, that meant it much less likely for there to be a bank run. And that's what the liquidity coverage ratio does. Liquidity coverage ratio forces the banks to hold a lot of high quality liquid assets to meet potential withdrawals. In practice for bank high quality liquid assets mean treasury securities.
It could mean agency and BS or it could mean cash held at the Fed. This study shows that in order to meet those regulations, banks increased their liquid holdings of treasury securities by a few percent of their total assets. So that's the green line you see over there. Once Basel III LCR was issued, you can see that the green line on the bottom climbed from, let's say about a little bit more than 2% of the total assets of the banking system, to about 5% of the total assets of the banking system. Which we, if you recall, is the huge spike in treasury and agency and BS holdings we saw just a slide before.
这可能意味着银行代理业务和 BS(不良资产),也可能意味着存放在美联储的现金。这项研究表明,为了满足这些监管要求,银行将它们的国债证券流动性持有增加了总资产的几个百分点。因此,您可以在那里看到绿线。一旦发布了巴塞尔 III 的 LCR,您可以看到底部的绿线从银行系统总资产的略高于2%上升到银行系统总资产的约5%。您可能还记得,在上一张幻灯片中,我们看到了国债,代理业务和 BS 持股的巨大激增。
So the last market participant type that I'm going to talk about is the Fed. And the Fed is very special because the Fed is a major market participant, but it's a market participant that's really not trying to make money at all. What the Fed is really concerned about is its two mandates, full employment, and price stability.
And the way that they think that they can arrive at achieving their mandates is by adjusting interest rates to affect the real economy. And one way to adjust interest rates is to purchase lots of assets, specifically what we call quantity of easing.
Now before we talk about QE, I'd like you to look at the chart. This chart shows the total assets held by the Fed and you'll notice just the enormous, enormous influence of the Fed has since 2008. Pre-2008, the Fed had relatively small footprint in the financial markets. But from then till now, their balance sheet has grown to over $8 trillion. So now they're not a small participant in the markets. They are very large participant and they have big impacts on financial prices through their involvement.
One other thing you'll note is that the Fed also purchases other assets as well. That green line is the Fed acting as emergency lender of last resort to a wide range of market participants to try to support financial stability.
So this last example I'll talk about is quantity of easing. Now quantity of easing is how the Fed is trying to stimulate the economy by lowering longer dated interest rates. So the Fed is looking at the 10-year treasury interest rate and it thinks that if it's 10-year, we're a bit lower, maybe that it would simulate more investment, maybe with stimulant more borrowing.
So in order to lower the 10-year treasury rate, it goes out and buys a whole bunch of longer dated treasury securities. And when it looks at the mortgage market and it's trying to lower mortgage rates, it goes out it does the same. It goes out and buys a whole bunch of agency MBS. And the FAT is the Fed's attempt to stimulate the economy by lowering longer dated interest rates.
Now, whether or not it actually stimulates the real economy, that is a subject of debate and there are many papers written on it. But I think there's a lot less debate to see that it's very stimulative of financial assets.
I think many market participants note that there's a reliable relationship between when the Fed is expanding its balance sheet and when the risk assets go higher. So when the Fed is doing QB, it's not just going and buying at any price to be clear. It holds competitive auctions to try to get market-based prices.
However, if the Fed promises to buy say $100 billion a month, that it will do so. And I imagine that probably that might force it to buy prices that some of who wouldn't have to buy it, $100 billion, wouldn't take. So these quantitative easing purchases likely have an impact, not just pricing of the treasuries but the pricing of all assets, simply because they're so huge.
Now it's important to keep in mind that this is a factor that is not trying to make money at all and it has an unlimited money printer. So they're there going and shaping market pricing without regard to any fundamental view. They're just doing their job and carrying out monetary policy.
So if you were to look at rates or look at financial assets and try to infer some kind of signal about economic conditions from them, it would be very difficult because there's such a large investor in the market who is buying, not because they have a view on economy but because they're trying to shape an outcome.
In this class, I linked to a number of studies. And if you're interested in looking at additional reading a little bit more into what we discussed today, this is a list of additional reading and all the links are current. So you should be able to find them just by clicking on the link. And thank you and I'll see you in the next class.