Hello, my friends. Today is June 17th. My name is Joseph and this is Markets Weekly. This week, we're going to talk about three things. First, we're going to talk about whether or not the rally is finally over. Secondly, we will give an update on how the TGA is being refilled. And lastly, we'll review some of the central bank speak that happened this past week and there was a lot of it.
OK, starting with the rally. Now, over the past few weeks, as we've seen, the stock market only goes up. And from my perspective, that's been a very, very dangerous development. You never want the stock market to go straight up because that suggests that there's some sort of mania, some sort of instability. And usually, you know, just like Mount Everest, if it looks like it's going to straight up on one side, on the other side, it's oftentimes a lot of downward volatility.
Now, some of the really smart people that I respect are thinking that we should be really cautious and they're looking at this from the perspective of options. So as we've all learned through the, for example, GameStop, GammaScreens and so forth, options play a big role in driving stock prices. On Friday, we saw the indexes down a bit and that coincided with a major options expiry. So in the options world, you have weekly options, you had monthly expiring options, but the really big options expiry dates are quarterly.
So that's those are the expiration dates that are that have a lot of open interest. Now, what I've learned from studying really smart people like Jim Carzone, Spark Gamma, Squeeze Metrics, is that the mechanism through which the options affect the underlying stock market is through market maker hedging. So structurally speaking, the real money investors, they are long puts and short calls. So let's say that you manage a billion dollar portfolio, well, you got to hedge some of that downside, right?
So you go and you buy puts and maybe to offset some of the costs of the puts and maybe to earn a little bit of income, you sell calls, but your calls are covered because you actually own the underlying stocks. Now, with, when the real money community does this in a structural way, obviously they have to trade with someone and that someone is usually a market maker. So market makers take the other side of this trade. They are short puts and long calls, but market makers are not like speculators. They're not trying to get make money through directional exposure.
What they're trying to do is to make money off of the transaction fees. And so when they are either long options or short options, they go and they hedge that by buying or selling the underlying. For example, let's say the real money investors of course bought a whole bunch of puts from the market makers. So the market makers are short puts. Now, that means that if the stock market goes down, well, the puts become more valuable. That is to say the short puts become more of a loss towards for the market makers.
Now, the market makers, they don't want to speculate on direction. They're only there to make their fees. So when they are short puts, they have to hedge themselves by shorting stocks. Okay, so that means that when the market declines from the market makers perspective, they are losing money on their short puts, but they're making money on their short stock. So they are so they are hedged. Now, now the question is of course, how much stock do they have to sell given their options exposure?
Now that is actually going to vary a lot. It's going to vary depending upon where implied volatility is. And of course, how many days they are left towards X-chery. Because the more days there are towards X-chery, the more probability it is that eventually the options will end up in the money. And so the market maker who is short puts might end up with a loss. So when there's a lot of time towards X-chery, the all things equal, the market maker who was short puts in my example is going to have to short more stock.
But as we approach options expiry, there's less and less time for that put position to become in the money. So as we approach these big options expiry days, the marketing making community who is structurally short puts has to gradually buy back the stock they sold to hedge that position. And those flows are very supportive for the market heading into these option expiry.
Now to be clear, the market can move a lot and the dealers can be positioned differently. But now as we go into this options expiry, though, the stock bracket has gone straight up. And so those puts are becoming less and less valuable. And as time declines, also less and less likely to be in the money. And so the options makers are buying back their short stock position that they had initially initiated. And that's been supportive for the market over the past time.
So now though, after June options expiry, the open interest is more or less cleaned and reset. And so there's more of a so those flows go away for a while. And so there's more of a possibility for us to have some downside moves.
Now the second thing that's happening in the options market and I'll play this interview from from Jim with TD now. Lastly, vol, vol supply is becoming unpinned. All the call short interests people wrote calls against all their stock, all the selling of vol that's been happening. It is now being squeezed out by stock replacement. You know how cheap these calls are.
There's a fundamental basis for vol bid out there. And guess what you're seeing it we're seeing big block orders coming in buying vol and all kinds of different parts of the distribution. Vol and dealer's hands is no longer pinned. It is quickly moving away from that place. And that is a dangerous recipe. You have a lot of people in the real money investment community that that are selling calls. And so they are a structural supply of volatility in the markets.
Now look at this from a market maker's perspective again. So a lot of real money people are selling calls. So that means the market making community is long calls. So that means the market maker is basically long gamma. So let's say that that's the position right now. Let's say that the stock market rises a bit. Well if the stock market rises a bit that means that the market makers well they're making a little bit of money off their long call position.
But of course they're not in the business of speculating on direction. They're there simply for their fees. So as the market rises a bit and their long call position increases in value they sell the underlying to offset that. So that provides stability in the market. So when vol is well supplied or that is to say what implied vol is really low it's more difficult for the major indexes to move a lot simply because as it moves the market makers push against that move to stabilize it.
But what Jim is saying now is that because we have all these people who are doing you know Yolo call bets or maybe just speculating by buying more and more calls it's overwhelming the supply of of volatility the structural call sellers in the markets and that's making well implied volatility go higher and that permits larger moves in the index and that's another potential reason to be cautious going forward. It doesn't mean we're going to crash but it does mean that some of the things that have been supporting the market don't seem to be there anymore.
Okay the second thing we're going to talk about is refilling the Treasury General accounts. Now earlier we talked about that the Treasury General account was around $20 billion and the US Treasury had a goal to raise that to about $550 billion by the end of this month and many people were worried that that money would come out of the baking system that is to say it would be a liquidity drain and that would have a negative impact on the market.
Well as of Friday the Treasury General account has risen significantly. It's gone from the low of about $20 billion to $250 billion so there's been a meaningful rebuild in the Treasury General account and at the same time it looks like the reverse repo facility has declined a lot so it actually broke below $2 trillion for the first time in a long time this past week.
Now that together suggests that so far a big chunk of the rebuild in the Treasury General account has not come out of the banking sector but it's come out of money in the reverse repo facility which is of course neutral for markets so that feared liquidity drain doesn't seem to have happened.
Now I think there's a couple reasons for this and we also have to be cautious when we interpret what's happening with the reverse repo facility. First off you know there was a lot of concern in the markets of this liquidity withdrawal. We had big investment banks writing scary pieces as to what could potentially happen and the Fed and the Treasury they are actually in tune with what happened in the markets and they respond to it and after the debt ceiling was resolved the US Treasury came out with a statement modifying their plans for refilling the TGA.
Initially they had planned sold in $550 billion by the end of June they revised that down to about $4.25 so they lowered their target to become more less ambitious and secondly they adjusted their bill issuance to focus more on the very short dated bills. Now I look at this and I'm thinking that they're probably doing this because they want to attract more money market funds to purchase the bills.
Now money market funds have expressed some hesitation in purchasing longer dated bills because they don't know the path of interest rates. They don't want to buy let's say a six-month bill and then see that the Fed is actually much more aggressive than their rate hikes and expected. Then they would they would be sitting on some losses and they don't like that. So one of the ways that the Treasury could overcome that concern is to issue a whole bunch of bills that are very short data let's say six weeks. So they've done that and that's I that could help money market funds participate more in bill auctions.
Now I don't actually think that all of this is coming out of the RAP and I still think that part of it will come out of the banking system and part of it will come out of the RAP. Now the drop in the RAP you have to be very cautious interpreting it because it's not necessarily money funds going to buy bills. It's very likely first that on June 15th we had a quarterly corporate tax payment date and money market funds are basically just big wads of cash for corporate treasuries. So with a corporate treasurer wants to make tax payments they go and they take money out of their money market fund and then go and pay the US government. So the money market fund then takes money out of the RAP gives it to the corporate treasurer and the corporate treasurer then pays taxes. That's part of it.
The second part of it is that on June 15th we had a major coupon settlement. So that means that a whole lot of long data treasuries were paid for by the dealer community. The way that the dealer community pays for these coupon purchases is by borrowing in the repo market and the biggest lender in the repo market is of course the money market funds and we see this in publicly available data as well. Repo volumes spiked high on June 15th and that likely suggests that money market funds were taking money out of the reverse repo facility and lending it to dealers who then took the money to settle their payments to the US Treasury. So in a sense it is draining the RAP but these drains tend to be temporary whereas the drains coming from bills tend to be longer dated since the repo loans tend to be overnight and once dealers who bought the Treasury securities sell them to their clients they no longer need to borrow money from the money market funds anymore. So I would expect the reverse repo facility to bounce back above two trillion dollars this week but over time though there's going to be more money coming out of the reverse repo facility than expected because the Treasury is adjusting their issuance to encourage that.
Now the last thing we'll talk about is all the central bank speak we had that happened this past week so we had the ECB meeting and we also had some good information from the Bing of England and Fed Governor Waller. So the ECB hiked 25 basis points and during the press conference Madame Lagarde strongly strongly signaled that they're going to hike again the next meeting. Now why are they hiking? Well honestly it's the same thing we see throughout the world. Inflation has been stubbornly high and their tools don't seem to be working as well as they thought they would.
The ECB in particular is very concerned about wage growth so wage growth in the Eurozone has been very strong about 5% and not just that productivity has been declining. So this is the same thing that's happening in Australia which we talked about earlier. So if you're paying a worker more money and the workers producing less then your labor costs are rising and that means that you know that that means that basically you have a situation where your wages are inflating more than a system suggested by wage growth and that could feed into other parts of the economy like services inflation which seems to be what they're doing right now and so they're trying to get ahead of this.
A lot of inflation so far has been in things like energy and food that's coming down but the wages side that seems resilient just like it is in the US and many other countries as well. Bank of England for example recently is suggesting that they're going to have to hike rates higher than expected as well. Why? Same problem. Wage growth continues to be very strong and even seem to accelerate this last quarter. We have a global labor shortage driven in part by demographics and so try as they try as they are these central banks are having trouble getting wages lower because even as they're trying to slow down economic activity you know we just don't have as many people joining the labor force as we use to so that's going to be a persistent problem.
And lastly coming back to the Fed we had Fed Governor Waller give a speech that was very hawkish as you guys may have found out Waller is a great hawk.
最后回到美联储这一话题,我们有美联储理事沃勒发表了一次鹰派言论,你们可能已经知道沃勒是位强硬派。
Now Waller is talking about the trade-off more recently between financial stability and monetary policy. There is a line of thinking that if you hike rates too aggressively well you could get inflation under control but then you risk breaking something in the financial system and that would be bad too so you have to balance this pursuit of fighting inflation with financial stability.
Now Waller is nodding to this but then he's also noting that you know earlier in the year we moderated our rate hike path because we're worried about instability in the banking sector and perhaps that the banks might retrench a lot in their lending and so in a sense we won't need as many rate hikes as we thought earlier.
Then he says that well we it's not really clear that we've seen banks tightening their lending due to what happened in March. Now they have already been tightening their lending for several months in response to a slowing economy and higher interest rates but it doesn't seem likely March episode is having that big of an impact on it. So maybe that caution we had earlier in the year isn't warranted.
He then goes on to say that we really can't conduct monetary policy simply because we really shouldn't change the conduct of monetary policy simply because we have a few people who did a really bad job in managing their bank. You know we have to conduct monetary policy with in light of our inflation mandate and not just change it because change how we conduct policy simply because some people screwed up.
And I would also note though that the most recent dot plot had basically everyone on the FOMC signing up for more rate hikes this year and that tells me that they are looking at the data and they're in their bank system and they're not actually not seeing significant deterioration either so that's why they're comfortable pricing in more hikes. And this is also what I wrote about in April. So it looks like it's coming to fruition.
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