Hello, my friends. Today is November 4th. My name is Joseph and this is Markets Weekly. Now this week was a super exciting week in global markets, so we have a lot to talk about.
First, excitement began in Japan when the Bank of Japan announced major changes to their yield curve control framework. Let's talk about what they did.
Secondly, from my perspective, the most important news this week was not the Fed, not foreign central banks, nor was it all the important data prints that we got. From my perspective, the most important announcement was from the US Treasury during their quarterly refunding announcement when they seemed to suggest that they were going to further goose the bond market. That contributed to a tremendous rally in Treasuries, which of course brought stability to interest rates and was risk positive. None of this should be a surprise to you because I wrote about it two weeks ago in my blog. Let's talk about what the Treasury did.
And lastly, we have to talk about the huge data prints we got the past week. We got non-form payroll, we got ISM, we got productivity, and broadly speaking, they're all pointing towards the same direction. The US economy is slowing and there's going to be more disinflation. All in all, that suggests that potential Fed cuts may be closer than expected and that is positive for risk assets.
Okay, starting with the Bank of Japan. So earlier in the week, the Nikkei Asia leaked that the Bank of Japan was probably going to do something with its yield curve control framework and indeed they did. But first, let's level set a little bit. So Japan, as we all know, had been in deflation or low inflation for a really long period of time. But as inflation picked up globally in the US and the Eurozone and so forth over the past few years, inflation also picked up in Japan.
So the Bank of Japan's inflation target is 2% and inflation in Japan has comfortably exceeded that for over a year. Now, not withstanding that the Bank of Japan has been reluctant to tighten monetary policy. They were afraid that this inflationary impulse was not durable. So they were still largely stuck in pretty loose monetary policy. So interest rates in Japan surprisingly are still negative.
But they have been making moves to gradually tighten policy. A few months ago, they raised their yield curve control ceiling from 0.5% to 1% for the 10 year GGBs. So that mentioned that the 10 year GGB yield could rise above 0.5% but not exceed 1%. That 1% yield curve control ceiling was a bright red line that will show not pass. If GGB yields, 10 year GGB yields ever exceeded that 1%, the Bank of Japan would be in the market basically buying an unlimited size to police that line.
Now, this past meeting though, they modified their yield curve control framework such that that 1% ceiling is no longer a bright red line. Now it's more like a dotted line, whereas it's still a ceiling for a yield curve control. But the Bank of Japan seems to signal that they're not going to enforce it as strongly. Again, this is a move towards tightening monetary policy by allowing 10 year GGB yields to maybe rise a little bit more than 1%.
Now, all in all, this is a sequence that the Bank of Japan is trying to do as a gradually tight-ends monetary policy. It seems like it's first wants to get out of yield curve control and then maybe it can get out of negative interest rates, which the market is expecting sometime in the first half of next year.
Now, of course, as the Bank of Japan tight-ends monetary policy, it's doing so gradually and it's having the impacts that one would expect. The tightening news caused the yen to strengthen and it caused GGB yields to decline. But those moves were reversed pretty quickly, suggesting that although the Bank of Japan is tightening monetary policy, compared to the rest of the world, it's still quite loose.
As we're looking at the yen, we can see that the yen has depreciated significantly against the dollar over the past couple years. Again, interest rates in the US above 5% in Japan still negative. Now, however, tightening the make of Japan is doing, those interest rate differentials are still quite large.
The Bank of Japan, though, is going to have to proceed cautiously with its tightening. On the one hand, it seems worried that tightening could have implications on financial stability. They've been in negative interest rates for a long time. They have a lot of debt. When you raise interest rates, that causes losses. Maybe there could be some financial stability there.
On the other hand, if they do things too slowly, the yen will continue to depreciate and that will make inflation even worse since Japan imports a lot of commodities. For example, as the yen depreciates, if you're a company in Japan buying oil, which is priced in dollars, well, oil prices continue to rise in yen terms and that's going to make inflation worse.
So far, though, the Bank of Japan is balancing these considerations well and they seem to be doing a good job. Secondly, let's talk about the quarterly refunding announcement, which, as I mentioned before, is what I think of as the big news this week. So let's level set a little bit.
So in August, which was the last time the Treasury had their quarterly funding announcement, which is when the Treasury tells everyone how much debt they're going to issue in what tenors. Now, in August, the Treasury surprised the market by announcing both that they're going to have to borrow more than expected and also that they're going to be borrowing more in longer data tenors. So they borrowed more across the curve, but they also suggested that they're going to raise their coupon issue sizes for the next several quarters.
Now the US Treasury does not have power over how much debt the US government borrows. That's set by Congress, which sets spending and which sets tax rates. But the US Treasury does have discretion over what tenors it issues in. And because it has that discretion, it can influence financial conditions. For example, suppose the US Treasury has to raise $1,000. Well, it can issue a whole bunch of Treasury bills, which would put upward pressure on shorter data interest rates or it could issue a whole bunch of 30-year bonds, which would put upward pressure on longer data interest rates.
Now, how much impact that has, of course, depends on demand. Everything is always supply and demand. Usually speaking, there's a lot more demand in the front end of the curve and a lot less demand the further out you go. So if you focus your issuance on longer data tenors, it's going to have a much bigger impact on interest rates. So going back to the last Treasury Refunding Statement, the Treasury, again, surprised the markets with higher than expected issuance. And that contributed to a significant rise in longer data treasury yields, which we've been talking about over the past few weeks. And so a lot of people were looking at what happened over the past few weeks and wondering if the US Treasury would do something about it. That is to say, maybe adjust their issuance towards fewer longer data treasuries and more short data treasuries to support the market. And that is what I speculated as well a couple weeks ago.
So even though the Treasury has a lot of discretion as to what tenors it will issue, it does have its own principles. So one of the principles that it operates under is that it wants its issuance to be about 15 to 20% in Treasury bills, so short data treasuries. In August, it said that, yeah, so we have our guidelines between 15 and 20%. But I also know that I have to find a huge deficit and I don't want to issue so much longer data debt. So I'm going to adjust that a little bit higher. Going forward, I'm going to issue 22.4% in Treasury bills, so above my 20% guideline.
Now, even after saying that, even after telling anyone everyone that they're going to issue more shorter data debt going forward, the absolute size of the debt was so large that it still meant a lot of coupon issuance and it still meant much higher yields. So this time around the Treasury in their currently funding statement made a few changes that was overall interpreted to be quote unquote, davish. Okay, so the first thing that they did was that, well, the good news was that the deficit was smaller than expected. So the overall size of debt issuance was going to be smaller than expected. The second thing was that in August, they guided towards coupon increases over the next several quarters. But this time, they said that, you know, I said that I'm going to issue coupon sizes for several quarters. But actually, I think I'm going to just issue coupon sizes, increase coupon sizes, one more quarter after this quarter. So again, lower than expected supply of coupon securities, supply and demand, that is bullish for bond prices.
The third thing they did, which in my, from my perspective, was the most meaningful, is that they strongly suggested that we were willing to further increase the share of treasury bills. Now, the guidance, of course, is 15 to 20%. Last time, they said they would be willing to do 22.4%. This time, they wrote that they were willing to tolerate meaningful deviations above the 20% guidance. And that could be 25%. That could be more. I don't know. But it suggests that they're going to further increase treasury bill issuance, which totally makes sense. There is a lot of demand for treasury bills. Again, the flip side of that is that there's going to be less issuance of coupons for the next few months than expected. And I think together that contributed to a huge rally in US surgeries pushing yields lower.
Now, to be clear, though, this is just a bandaid, a temporary reprive. If you look at the US Treasury's refunding documents, you'll note that basically issuance is going to be very high forever.
Now, looking nearly at the US deficit, the deficit is projected based on current law to be about 1.8 trillion next year. And it's going to be around there for the next several years. And of course, we could have new laws passed that further raise that. We could have a recession where tax receipts go lower. So the treasury will have to even borrow even more. And that's a lot of surgeries that the market has to absorb.
But that's not all. On top of that, the Fed is also doing quantitative tightening. So when you look at the deficit plus quantitative tightening, next year, the US Treasury next year, the private sector is going to have to absorb around $2.5 trillion in US Treasuries. And that's a lot. That's really, really a tremendous number. Now they can make it easier for the market to shift the composition towards bills and medium term treasuries. But at the end of the day, it's still a lot of issuance. So I suspect that as I mentioned last week, that the highs are in for treasury yields this year, this bought us some time. But it's only a speed bump towards a secular change in higher yields. Yours are going to trend higher until the Fed steps in and does something. But then again, I've already told you that we're not there yet. But I think that we will get there maybe sooner than expected.
Okay, the last thing that I want to talk about is all the big data prints that we got.
好的,我想要谈论的最后一件事就是我们获得的所有大数据打印。
We got some huge, huge a level data prints. We got the non-farm payrolls super important. We got ISM surveys also imported. And we also got the not as well known productivity data.
So first starting with non-farm perils. Of course, we printed out 150,000 lower than expectations. But you know, part of that seems to be due to the auto worker strike. So if you take the auto worker strike into account, maybe it's not so bad. But when you look at the internals of the non-farm payroll, you'll notice that overall it was just kind of slightly weaker than expected. Wages, month of a month increased slightly less than expected. Unemployment rate ticked up a little bit. Labor force participation rate ticked down a little bit, but just a little bit. It just shows that there is a gradual softening in the labor market which has been happening over the past several months.
Now let's look at ISM survey data both for manufacturing and services. Again, these prints were a little bit below expectations. Again, as we've all been seeing that the US economy is softening. Now we're at the point in time where I think this is actually positive for risk assets. Because when we have a softening US economic data, that implies that inflation is probably going to come down sooner than expected as data is below expectations. And if inflation comes down sooner than expected, then potential fed rate cuts are also going to come sooner than expected. So again, good news is bad news because the most important thing in markets is the stance of monetary policy. So I think that contributed to the significant rally that we saw this week. Again, looks really, really aggressive. Part of it is probably a lot of people being squeezed. But I think Sloan data is supportive of that.
Now the other thing that I thought was noteworthy in the data was productivity data. So productivity data was higher than expected. And this is important because productivity, high productivity is disinflationary. For example, let's say you pay someone, let's say you increase wages for someone at 4% a year. Is that inflationary? Well, it actually depends.
Let's say that you pay someone give someone a 4% a year raise, but at the same time, they're also producing 4% more stuff. Right? So that's non inflationary because you're paying someone 4% more, but they're also producing 4% more stuff. The inflation impulse would come if you're paying someone 4% more, and they're not actually producing 4% more stuff. So the higher productivity you have, the more disinflationary it is. Now this productivity data was higher than expected. And it also meant that the rise in employment costs was lower than expected. And so if we have wage growth continue around 4% to 5%, which is what we have now, but productivity is also growing at 4% to 5%, then that means that wage growth doesn't have to come down for inflation to come down because productivity is picking up to meet that.
Now to be perfectly clear, productivity is a very difficult to measure a thing. And some people think it's mostly nonsense, but it's another data print that suggests that disinflationary forces are happening.
And okay, that's all I prepared for today. And if remember, if you like what I'm producing to like and subscribe.
好的,今天我准备的就这些。还有,如果你喜欢我所创作的内容,请记得点赞和订阅。
And also, if you're interested in learning more about monetary policy, check out my book, centralbanking101.com bestseller on Amazon. And of course, check out my weekly blog, FedGuy.com, and courses on macroeconomics and financial markets at centralbanking101.com.