Hello, my friends. Today is August 5th. My name is Joseph and this is Markets Weekly. This week was an exciting week in Global Macro, so we have a lot to talk about.
First, we've got to talk about Treasury yields. Treasury yields soared higher this week. They gave back a bit on Friday, but it was still a pretty big move over the week. We're going to talk about the drivers of that move and what it means for asset prices more broadly.
Secondly, we'll dig into the latest bank credit standards data, both in the US and in the Eurozone, and show that monetary policy, at least in this aspect, has been working in slowing down the economy. But this also has implications for the policy differential between the ECB and the Fed and the potential implications for the year-old dollar exchange rate.
Lastly, we'll go over the most recent non-farm payroll on Friday, which printed a comfortable, let's say, 180,000 in jobs created last month, but slower than the trend has been over the past several months. This could indicate that the U.S. economy is slowing or alternatively, which is what I think. It actually means that the U.S. economy is running out of people and how that suggests that wages might re-accelerate later in the year and inflation with it.
Starting with treasury yields. If you're looking at longer-dated treasury yields, the 10-year and 30-year, over the past week, they surged higher. They gave back a chunk on Friday, but over the week, it's still a pretty big move. What drove this sudden increase? There's a few potential drivers. I'll go over them.
First, of course, we have the ratings downgrade by Fitch. Fitch, which is one of the major rating agencies in the world, Fitch, Moody, and S&P, downgraded the U.S. from its highest rating to one notch below. This is not the first time this has happened with the U.S. In 2011, S&P, which is also a major ratings agency, downgraded the U.S. one notch below from their highest rating. At that time, the downgrade caused a lot of volatility in markets. Equities sold off and treasury yields went lower as people basically fled into safety.
Now, this time around, I don't actually think Fitch's ratings downgrade played much of a role, if any, in what happened in the treasury market. I think it's helpful to think about why credit ratings might actually impact asset prices. I think the closest analogy to this is what you would see in the corporate bond market.
The corporate bond market investors, big money managers, really don't have time to go through the balance sheets of every single corporate issuer, so they rely heavily on ratings to decide what they can buy and what they should pay for it. So you'll see a very close relationship between ratings and credit spreads in the corporate bond markets.
A big division in the corporate ratings is between investment grade, which are those rated triple B and above, and junk, which are those that are rated below triple B minus. Now, there's a lot of investors in the world who can only buy investment grade debt. So once a company is downgraded from investment grade to junk, there could potentially be a lot of investment managers who can no longer hold that debt and thus have to sell it.
And that kind of foreselling, it's always feared, would create this allocation to the markets since you suddenly have a whole bunch of debt being sold into the market, which is not very liquid. This is called a fallen angel problem. And so I think the analogy in the sovereign space would be that, well, now that two ratings agencies have downgraded the US to less than their top ratings, maybe there would be people who are no longer able to buy US Treasury securities and thus they're selling may create disallocations such that when they sell yields go higher.
Now, I'm pretty sure that's not happening at all. Now, one of the things that happened after the 2011 downgrade of S&P was that everyone basically changed the rules so that people who in the past had said they have to only buy stuff that is top rated basically change the rule so that they can buy stuff that is not just top rated but government issued liabilities. So by changing the air mandates from top rated to top rated and government issued liabilities, they basically sidestepped a problem of what would happen if a government like the United States was ever downgraded so they can definitely continue to hold US Treasuries.
And to be clear, if anyone didn't do this, there's no way they would just suddenly start selling their Treasuries. I mean, what are they going to do with the money if they were holding Treasuries and now had to rotate out of it? There's simply no other asset that has as much liquidity as the US Treasury markets. And so they would really just get either an exception from their board or just rewrite the rule so that they can continue to hold US Treasuries.
This fish, I actually have no idea why anyone would have credit ratings on sovereign issuers. I mean, for the US, for example, they print their own currency. So credit is never really a problem. Now, the rationale that fish and S&P gave in the past was political dysfunction. That is to say that although the US could potentially print as much money as they want so that they never have to default, politically they might have restrictions that such as they are a self-imposed, self-chosen default like a debt ceiling issue. And that's fair for sure. And so I definitely don't think that the US merits a top credit rating because we have these periodic threats. But the thing is, I think if you are a big investor, nobody cares about credit ratings when it comes to US Treasuries. There's just no alternative. And really, it's just ridiculously silly to think that you'd have to sell US Treasuries and say go to Microsoft, which is triple A rated instead. It's just you get fired really if you did that.
Okay, so if the fish ratings agencies downgrade was not meaningfully impacting treasure yields, what caused yields to surge higher? In my perspective, what really caused yields to surge higher was the treasure's refunding statement where they gave their forecasts for future issuance of treasuries. Now, their forecasts for the coming future was basically about in line with what it was in the past. And that is to say that treasure issuance is going to be trillions in truants a year, a year forever. But what they also showed is that they're going to slightly increase their coupon sizes going forward each quarter. So I think of treasury yields as determined by supply and demand. And when the US Treasury comes out with a new report that tells you they're going to be issuing more coupons that is to say more longer data treasuries this quarter, next quarter and the quarter afterwards for the foreseeable future, then yeah, that that's going to have an impact on prices simply because there's more supply.
Now, another concerning thing that I would focus on is that if you look at the reason why the treasure issuance is surging this quarter, it has to do with tremendous physical mismanagement. Now, this year, a year today compared to last year, the treasury actually received 10% less in tax revenue. And it's also spending 10% more compared to the same period last year. So you're spending 10% more and you're receiving 10% less, thus you're issuing more debt. And it doesn't seem like this trajectory is changing. So if you listen to me, if you've been following me, then you know that my view has always been treasure use structurally higher simply because the supply is basically infinite. You're issuing trillions and trillions of treasuries every year and you have no political motivation, no political will to actually bring that in. It's simply too easy for a politician to go and just you know, promise to give a lot of money to their constituents or some of their special interest groups and get elected. So politicians basically buy support by deficit spending. And that that motto of politics is not going to go away. And as long as it's not going to go away, treasury is going to be structurally higher. And so yields, in my view, will continue to march higher. And even though I think we were as high as I'd say 4.2 something in a 10 year, I still think the highs are not in for this year. I still expect treasury yields to approach 4.5% by the end of the year in the 10 year segment. And this has tremendous implications on all asset classes.
Higher yields, as we saw in the equity markets today, is usually frowned upon by risky assets like US equities. So I think this actually caps the upside potential for US equities, which of course I have not been very warm to the these past months. So when equity markets top, it's really not it's really more of a process. So I think there will be still more people trying to buy the dip. But if you have yields structurally marching higher, it's really, really hard in my view for for equities to make new highs this year. And I think the balance of risk would favor more of a downwards trend. And a bit of a correction here.
An interesting note that I would also add is that the dollar did not seem to strengthen as yields go higher as it sometimes does. So I think the dollar is trying to decide how to interpret this on the one side, massive just because it's spending obviously not good for the dollar. On the other side, higher yields would be especially as the interest rate differential pulls wider with vis-a-vis the rest of the world. So I think that market is still making up its mind.
Okay, the next thing we'll talk about is the Fed's latest senior loan officer survey. So periodically, the Fed surveys a whole bunch of banks and asks them what their lending standards are. What the Fed is trying to figure out is that is the supply of bank loans increasing or decreasing because when credit standards rise, there's less of a supply of bank lending. And if there's less of a supply of bank lending, that means people with companies and individuals have less money to spend. And that means slower growth and slower inflation.
The Fed, the ECB, basically all the global central banks have been raising interest rates trying to slow down the economy. What really obvious way that they do this, of course, is through the bank lending channel, when you raise interest rates, well, if you're a borrower, you don't want to borrow as much because interest rates are higher. And if you're a bank, you also don't want to lend as much because you see that interest rates are going up, maybe the economy is slowing, there's more default risk.
And that's kind of what the senior loan officer survey is showing. It's showing that bank lending standards are tightening. Now, I want to be careful here. Now, this graph here, it shows that they are tightening. It doesn't show how tight they are. So it's kind of, it could be going from, let's say, 10 miles an hour to 15 miles an hour, which is still slow, but accelerating, or it could be going, let's say from 10 miles an hour to 100 miles an hour, which is, you know, accelerating, but accelerating a lot. So this survey only shows the direction of bank lending standards rather than the level. So you got to be very careful when you interpret this.
And broadly seeing it shows that banks are tightening lending standards. And that is completely in line with what we see in the aggregate data. So loans and leases by commercial banks in the US have basically flatlined for the past several months. That shows monetary policy is working. And this channel of monetary policy is doing as the Fed would like it to do. And we see the same exact thing happening in the Eurozone. So the Eurozone also have a similar survey. And according to their survey, bank credit creation is also slowing significantly.
On top of that, it seems like monetary policy in the way that it feels through interest rates is also a lot more effective. Recent data from the ECB shows that depositors in banks in the Eurozone are receiving pretty high interest rates compared to, okay, so interest rates much closer to the ECB's policy rate compared to the US, where a lot of people are still receiving around 0% on their deposit accounts, even though the Fed is high to 5%. So monetary policy seems to be transmitting much more effectively in the Eurozone compared to the US.
And this is important to me because the Eurozone is financially structured in a very different way. In the US, we have banks where you could that lend money, but in the US, we also have a lot of other ways that borrowers can borrow money. Borrowers, for example, can issue a bond in the capital markets. The US has very deep and liquid capital markets, deepest and most liquid in the entire world. So a company like Apple or Google, they're not going to go to a bank to get a loan. What they will do is they will just show up in New York and sell bonds to investors. So they're not dependent upon bank lending, and many companies are like that. But even if you can't get a loan from a bank, you will also have a whole lot of other shadow banks, let's say private equity funds, private credit funds, or business development companies in the US where you can get a loan.
So the US, as, generally speaking, is not that bank dependent. The Eurozone, but in contrast, is very bank dependent. They don't have capital markets that are nearly as deep, in part because it's really fragmented. You have France, Germany, and so forth. They all have their own capital markets with their own laws. They're working to unify it, but it's not there yet. So the capital markets are not as developed. They don't have a biggest presence of shadow banks, lending, and so forth. They're lending. So their lending is really predominantly from banks.
Now, if in the Eurozone, people are more bank dependent, and banks are tight, banks are tiny conditions quickly and passing on interest rate hikes quickly, in my view, that makes policy monetary policy much more effective in the Eurozone. And you could see inflation come down a lot faster there than in the US. It seems like the economy really is slowing a lot faster than it is in the US. You see, your zone growth has never been great. It seems to be slowing faster than it is in the US, whereas we discussed earlier, it seems to be accelerating. So that tells me that the ECB does not have to be as aggressive as a Fed. And in my mind, that means that the dollar is probably going to strengthen against the Euro. Now, this has always been my view since the beginning of the year, and the year has not turned out this way. But I think we're getting to the point where these policy differentials will become more apparent simply because the financial structure of the two economies is different. And so that's what I would expect going forward.
Now, the last thing I want to talk about is non-form payrolls on Friday. So on Friday, we got our monthly non-form payrolls, which shows the state gives you a glimpse of the state of the labor market. And non-form payrolls was, I guess, a little bit below expectations. It printed about 180,000 jobs created last month, which is slower than the trend over the past few months. So if you are a recession person or a bear on the economy, you can point to this and say, Aha, the US economy is slowing down. Look at the job growth. It's slowing down. But there's another way to look at this. It's the way that I look at this and that it's not so much that the US economy is slowing down. It's that the US economy is running out of people. Now, if you look at volumes, let's say volumes are declining. Does that mean there's less demand or does that mean there's less supply, not easy to tell? But if volumes decline and prices go higher, that suggests that it's not enough supply. And that's what we see in the labor market. Fewer jobs created but average earnings, average hourly earnings accelerating higher.
Now, this is going to be a messy process because the labor market, there's a lot of things happening. Past couple years, you had boomers, a lot of boomers and a lot of boomers suddenly leave the labor market and so forth. But the overall big picture as I look at this is that over the past few years, I've passed several years, the working age population in the US just hasn't been growing because of demographics. People had smaller families in the 1980s and now that's impacting labor market growth today. And if you have a labor market that's not growing and you continue to have a lot of growth in part because of significant fiscal spending, well, that means that you're going to have a structurally shortage of people and prices, which labor prices are going to go higher. And if that's the case, that has enormous implications because it's not that the US economy is slowing, wages are going to go lower and inflation is going to go under control. It's that the US economy is running out of people, wages are going to go higher and inflation is going to re-accelerate.
Now, this is a very, very different vision of the world because it implies that the Fed is either going to have to height again or at the very least, it's going to have to stay higher for longer. And that again, gives you a whole bunch of different asset implications. It's going to be negative for risk assets, it was going to be positive for the dollar and negative for the bond market that is, say, higher yields.
Now, we've had two prints this month and the past month, which both showed slower job growth and accelerating wages. So it's really too early to say this. And to be clear, I think of this as a structural change in the US economy that we haven't seen before in the past. So it's something we definitely have to wait to see more data to see if this really is what I think it is. But again, this is a minority view. And to be clear, the majority of you continues to be that small, slower pace of wage, slower pace of job growth suggests a slowing US economy. And we'll see over the coming months, which narrative is correct.
Okay, and that's all I've prepared for today. Thanks so much for joining in. If you like what I'm producing, please remember to like and subscribe. And of course, if you're interested in learning more about the financial system or my views on the markets, check out my blog at FedGuy.com. And if you're interested in learning more about understanding the financial system, I also have a great series of courses called Markets 101. I think of them as the next step after my book, Central Banking 101. All right, talk to you guys next week.