Hello my friends, today is May 13th, my name is Joseph and this is Markets Weekly. This week we're going to talk about three things. The first thing we'll talk about is the most recent senior loan officer survey. Many market participants have been focusing on this because it gives us insight as to how badly if any the panic in March impacted the banking sector's willingness to make loans. Secondly, we'll talk about the Fed's most recent financial stability report. In it there's an interesting tidbit that suggests that the impact from commercial real estate to the banking sector may not be what we expected it to be. And lastly we'll talk about the Fed's fight against inflation. The Fed is slowly getting inflation under control but maybe too slowly and that might impact how it behaves in the coming months.
Now let's start first with the senior loan officer survey. So for those of you who don't know, the Fed's survey is about 60 commercial banks periodically to try to figure out whether or not they're tightening their lending standards. Now this indicator has been pretty useful over the past few decades in determining whether or not the economy will fall into every session. Now this chart here I show the lending standards to commercial and industrial middle market and large firms and commercial and industrial small firms. You'll notice that there are two lines but they basically go the same way. Over the past few decades you can see that this line goes up and down. It oscillates like a sine wave. It usually goes up that is to say banks are tightening their lending standards heading into a recession and as the economy comes out of recession this indicator shows that banks tend to loosen lending standards.
Now there's a couple ways to think about this. One is that banks have a pretty good grasp as to what's happening in the economy. They have lending relationships to a vast amounts of businesses. They also see the chicken counts of a lot of people so they can get a sense whether or not the economy is doing well or poorly and perhaps when they sense that the economy is slowing down they become more conservative in who they make loans to. After all they don't want to make loans to someone who is unable to repay them. So you can think of it as perhaps a banks were willing to make a loan to someone with a 650 credit score. Now as they tighten conditions maybe they're only willing to lend someone with a 770 credit score. Another way to think about this is that as banks reduce their lending borrowers have less money to spend. So there's less money to buy stuff, miss money to make investments and that naturally slows the economy down. So there could also be a causal relationship where less bank loans means that economic growth slows down.
So I'm sure there's some truth to both these angles. Many people were particularly interested in the most recent loan officer survey because it's the one that was conducted after the regional bank panic in March. Now just for some context as you can see in the chart here the banks have been tightening their lending conditions for almost a year. So for the past several months they've already been steadily tightening. Now the question was whether or not what happened in March significantly impacted their lending standards. Did they significantly retrench because you're afraid of further big runs and so forth? And the survey was actually pretty clear that it didn't that they did not significantly retrench.
Now here is the lending standards for to large and middle market firms. And you can we can look at the middle of the lending standards for small firms later as well and it's about the same. And in this survey it showed that overall 54% of banks reported that their lending standards were unchanged and 43% they had tightened quote unquote somewhat. So banks continue to tighten their lending standards but it doesn't seem like they reacted very strongly to what happened in March. What was particularly interesting to me though is when they break the survey down between large banks which includes some large regional banks and other banks which are the thousands of small banks most of us have never heard of and many were most concerned of that they would face deposit runs.
Now the large banks 52% of them reported that their lending standards to large and middle market firms were unchanged. For the small banks 57% reported that their lending standards were unchanged. So it was actually the larger banks that tightened their lending standards slightly more than the smaller banks which is pretty interesting. So this measure seems to me to suggest that banks continue to tighten their lending standards but it doesn't seem like the panic with Silicon Valley bank had a big impact on their on them tightening. They were already doing so and continue to steadily do so.
Now the next thing we want to talk about is the financial stability report which is the Fed's report that it releases twice a year that goes over what the Fed thinks of as potential vulnerabilities in the economy. This report is really interesting because the Fed has access to a lot of confidential data so they're able to see things that most market participants are not able to see.
As I went over the report it struck me as pretty mild there wasn't anything that really stood out except this box here on commercial real estate. Now many of us have read in the press that commercial real estate is a source of major concern. But before we become too alarmed though I think it's important to note that commercial real estate isn't really really broad segment.
Commercial real estate includes things like hospitals, so medical, so it includes warehouses, it includes multi-family. And also of course includes office space and retail and things like that. Now obviously the fundamentals that drive say industrial space are going to be very different from the fundamentals that drive office space in downtown San Francisco.
So if one segment of commercial real estate is doing poorly that doesn't necessarily mean that everything else is doing very poorly as well.
因此,如果商业房地产的某个细分市场表现不佳,并不意味着其他方面的表现也非常糟糕。
Now we've all heard that commercial office space in downtown areas of big cities have been doing very poorly. Many companies went to work from home but they're not fully back yet. That means lots of vacant office space. That potentially might always be vacant because perhaps some people are moving to permanent work from home. And in connection to that retail space that was dependent upon all these downtown workers is also suffering.
So if you don't have workers going down to work in downtown offices that means a restaurant in downtown is not getting as many customers as it used to. So those segments of commercial real estate are segments that are doing very poorly and are people are rightly concerned about it. So the Fed took a look at that segment of commercial real estate and wanted to figure out just the potential of contagion from that segment of sense of commercial real estate to the broader banking sector.
Many media reports report that commercial banks, particularly smaller banks are big lenders to commercial real estate investors. And so that would suggest that if the commercial real estate segment is not doing well then maybe these banks will not do well as well. Again, as we noted commercial real estate is broad. So let's just focus on the sense of aspects of commercial real estate.
That of holdings of office in downtown retail commercial real estate. Now according to this Fed study it comes with a very surprising result. Now the reports breaks down exposures of commercial banks to the second segment by the size of the commercial banks.
So they said that the category one banks, the biggest, biggest banks, the JPMs, the US G-Subs had pretty small exposure to this segment. Only collectively 100 billion, which sounds like a big number but is actually a pretty small part of the assets of these banks. Next the Fed broke it down to exposure by category two to four banks. Now these banks are the large regionals. So you can think Huntington or M&T banks like that. And another pretty surprising result.
These regional banks only have about 110 billion in exposure to office in downtown retail commercial real estate. So that's also a pretty small exposure. However, when you go beyond the regional banks to the legitimately small banks, remember in the US we have over 4,000 banks and most of them are very small and you've never heard of those really small banks, like community banks have collectively 510 billion in exposure to this sensitive sector of commercial real estate.
Now I think that was pretty surprising to me because reading from the news, you'd expect the regional banks to be big investors in the space but it turns out they aren't. It's really just these small banks. And you know that that that's pretty concerning to me because small banks collectively are not that big and $500 billion would be a meaningful part of their total assets.
But before we panic though, we have to, of course, keep in mind that we don't really know how well underwritten they are. Perhaps the commercial perhaps the small commercial banks were very conservative and they were lending to very low, low into value. We don't know. But the good news is of course small banks by definition are not systemically important. So it's probably not going to have a big impact on the financial system as a whole. Again, this study was not very granular. They don't have a lot of detailed data but it's something to keep in mind whenever you read about panic in the commercial real estate sector impacting the banking sector.
Now the last thing I want to talk about is the most recent CPI print which was actually pretty promising. So as we know inflation has been very high for the past couple of years and the Fed has been trying hard to get it under control.
CPI this month is showing some moderation in some pretty important segments, specifically shelter. So shelter, so let's say rentals and housing, stuff like that, that is about 30% of CPI and over the past few months it's been steadily decelerating. So a few months ago it was at 0.7 and then 0.6 and then 0.8 and now most recently it's at 0.4% month over month. So there's a very clear deceleration in shelter.
Now we always knew that this would happen though. One way to think about this is that when rents go up it doesn't impact everyone at the same time. If rents went up today then the people who had to renew their lease today would report higher rental expenses. But the other people though they would continue to pay their current rent until their lease was up for renewal, let's say next month or a few months later. So in a sense this shelter inflation was something that was slowly feeding in to CPI and we always knew that over time it would gradually slow down because the most leading indicators of rent, so rents being rent increases right now have been decelerating for some time. It seems that that deceleration is finally here. So that's good news.
But the bad news though is that when you think about the Fed's fight against inflation it's not just eventually getting inflation down to 2%. There's also a time component to this which is a framework that I learned from Bob Elliott which is a really smart guy on Twitter. In the sense that if you take a long time to get inflation under control you potentially could lose control of inflation expectations.
Now the Fed being largely run by economists like to think about inflation through the lens of inflation expectations. The theory is that a big driver of actual inflation is the expectations of future inflation. So from a consumer standpoint if consumers expect prices to be 10% higher next year then obviously they're going to go out and buy stuff today. And if they all go out and buy stuff today that pushes up inflation because everyone is going to buy stuff. Another way you can think about this is that if you are a big business and you expect prices to go up 10% next year well then obviously you have to raise your prices 10% too. So that's why the Fed pays close attention to inflation expectations.
Now this is a graph of the University of Michigan's fiber and the survey of consumers fiber inflation expectations and you can see that it's spiking higher. It looks like it's reaching highs not seen for quite a few years. Now we have had high inflation for a couple years. The Fed is getting it under control but very slowly. And it might be so slow that inflation expectations are steadily rising and that's going to scare the Fed a lot because from their framework if you lose control of inflation expectations you can lose control of actual inflation.
And this week though we also had some interesting Fed speak from Governor Bowman who is a voting member. Now the market has largely expected that the last rate hike to be the last and it was looking forward to future rate cuts. Now Governor Bowman came out with this speech and actually suggested that she might want to hike rates again in June. Here I read a couple of lines from this speech to give you a sense of how she's thinking about this. She says, should inflation remain high and the labor market remain tight, additional monetary policy tightening will likely be appropriate to attain a sufficiently restrictive stance in monetary policy. So again she's saying that if themes continue as they were have been I want to hike again. And later on in the speech she says in the same paragraph, in my view the most recent CPI and employment reports have not provided consistent evidence that inflation is on a downward path.
So here's a voting member up there for them to see telling everyone that she wants to hike rates again in June. So again when I think about the markets as I've been telling you for some time is that so far it's like this it's been this one big bet that the Fed is going to cut rates later so the dollar weekends and you got to buy a tech stocks. Now I don't think that's actually going to happen and the Fed is again pushing back in that narrative. When the market finally realizes that maybe the Fed is actually serious that they may might actually hold rates higher for longer throughout the year that's when you can get some volatility and probably a bit of a correction in the equity markets.
Okay and my best guess is we're close to that part. Okay so that's all I have for today. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll talk to you all next week.