Hello, my friends. Today is November 11th. My name is Joseph, and this is Markets Weekly. This week, we're going to talk about three things. First, we have to talk about the awful third-year bond option that led to a spike in treasury yields. Let's talk about what happened there and what that might mean for treasury demand going forward.
Secondly, let's talk a little bit about the reverse repo facility. So ROP balances surged to over $2 trillion earlier in the year, but since mid-year have been steadily declining. This past week, we saw ROP dip below $1 trillion for the first time in a long time. Let's talk about what's driving that and what that might mean for markets.
And lastly, last week, we got some pretty interesting consumer survey data from the University of Michigan. It seems like consumer inflation expectations are surprisingly trending higher. Let's talk about what that might mean for monetary policy.
Okay, starting with the treasury auction. First, let's level set a little bit. So in the US, Congress, which is the legislative body, decides how much money the federal government spends, and it also sets tax rates. In practice, Congress is always spending a lot more money than it takes in taxes, so it has to go and borrow the difference. That job falls to the US treasury.
Now, the US treasury does not decide how much money to borrow, but it does have some discretion as to how it goes about borrowing it. For example, the US treasury can issue a whole lot of treasury bills, which are short-dated treasuries that the market can easily digest, or it can issue say, 30-year bonds, 10-year notes, and so forth, which are more difficult for the market to digest.
More recently, the US treasury has been weighing issuance towards shorter data tenors, but because the overall size of the deficit is so large, it's been increasing issuance all across the curve.
The way the US treasury sells debt is through auctions, which for most tenors are monthly. In practice, what happens is that usually primary dealers go when they bid at the auction, and then take what they bought and resell it to their investor clients, say a generic pension fund. To be clear, if you are a big investor, let's say a sovereign wealth fund, you can also go and bid at the auction yourself, but for most investors, they buy their treasuries from their dealer.
If you are a primary dealer, it's not always easy to know what you should bid at auction. You can look at the market, you have your own experience, but at the end of the day, you don't really know how much demand the risk for treasuries until the rubber meets the road, and so after the auction is finished, and you see where the clearing yield was.
Now auctions are usually judged according to how they perform relative to expectations. So if an auction clearing yield was, let's say, lower than market expectations, then we think that the auction did well, and if the auction clearing yield was higher than market expectations, then we think the auction did poorly.
Now market expectations are usually done through something called when issued trading. So that's basically a bet among market participants as to where the treasury auction will clear at. Now this past week, we had a 30-year bond auction. Now 30-year bonds are the most difficult to digest treasury security because they are super long in tenor, and there's just not that much demand for something that matures in 30 years. You know, there's a lot of interest rate risk, and you really don't know how the world will evolve in the coming decades. So the auction clearing yield for that auction was five basis points above where the one issued was trading. So the auction did very poorly. There was a five basis point tail.
Historically speaking, a five basis point tail is really, really bad, and so the market got one look at those auction results and immediately a treasury yield spiked along the curve. Now I think this is really important because going forward, the US treasury is going to have to issue a tremendous amount of debt over the next several months.
Now the amount of debt they have to issue is one due to the deficit and two due to quantitative tightening. So of course we don't really know how much money the treasury will spend the next fiscal year, but the estimate is about $1.8 trillion. Now to be clear, these estimates tend to go up over time because the US government likes to spend money. For all we know, we could have some more war related spending that boosts that 1.8 trillion number higher. But at the moment, I think market participants estimate $1.8 trillion fiscal deficit.
Okay, so the treasury has to go and borrow that much debt. But on top of that though, we also have quantitative tightening to the tune of about $700 billion a year. So quantitative tightening is basically the US treasury going out and borrowing from private investors and taking that money to repay the Fed. So at the end of the day, quantitative tightening increases the amount of treasury securities private investors have to absorb. So you add $1.8 trillion in fiscal deficit with $700 billion in QT. Then you arrive at a number of about $2.5 trillion in treasuries that the private sector has to absorb.
Now the US treasury has been issuing a lot of bills, but they've also been gradually issuing the issuance of 10 years and 30 years as well. Now, if the auction is having some trouble, the market is having some trouble digesting issuance today, well, that suggests that going forward, it's going to have more trouble as there's more issuance going forward. And again, yields are probably going to have to trend higher. Again, at the end of the day, any financial asset like anything else is supply and demand. And as we've been discussing over the past several months, supply is very large. Demand a lot less certain.
One thing I'll also note though, is that an auction can never fail because if you are a primary dealer, you are obligated to bid at auction. So you're never going to have an instance where a treasury auction fails. They're always going to succeed. You want us to just notice whether or not there are big tails or not to gouge demand. And so far, things are not looking good. So we got to pay attention to these auctions, especially longer data 10 years, 10 years, one year, 30 year, going forward to see how demand is holding up because we know issuance is just going to keep going higher and higher.
Okay. Then the next thing that I want to talk about is the reverse repo facility. So the reverse repo facility, you can think of it as kind of like this repository of excess cash in the financial system. So money market funds have a lot of cash they need to invest and they are very conservative investors. Usually they just want to invest in treasury bills or treasury backed repo. But in an event that they can't find, let's say attractive and investments at attractive yields, they always have the backup option of investing in the reverse repo facility at the RRP offering rate.
Now over the past two years, money funds had tremendous amounts of cash inflows and they couldn't find investments to make attractive yields. So they ended up just putting a lot of that money in the reverse repo facility. So we saw RRP balances surge to over two trillion earlier in the year. But that all changed starting in June, starting in June, the US treasury began to issue a ton of treasury bills. Again, supply and demand increases supply of treasury bills. That means bill prices decline, which in fixed income world means that bill yields are going higher. So finally, the bill yields rose enough to be comfortably above the reverse repo facility offering rates and money market funds began to take money out of the RRP facility and buy bills. And they did that to an enormous extent. So we see the RRP declining around a trillion dollars in a few short months. And I expect that to continue going forward.
Now let's take the next step. So all that money left the RRP. Where does it go? Well, so well, the money market fund took money out of the reverse repo facility and lent it to the US treasury. And so it goes to the US treasury's checking account at the New York Fed. This is called the treasury general account. And indeed, we see the treasury general account balances surge to about 700 billion dollars. But of course, the US treasury is not just borrowing money to keep it in their piggy bank. They are borrowing money to spend. So when the US treasury then takes that money out of its checking account, it spends it. And that money ends up in someone else's account in the private sector. For example, let's say that the US treasury bought a whole bunch of missiles from a military contractor. The money goes out of its checking account and into the account of the military contractor. That account is held in a private bank. So at the end of the day, we have RRP money flowing into the treasury's account and then into the bank sector, it increases the cash level of commercial banks.
Now if you zoom out a bit, you'll notice that the cash levels of commercial banks, we call these reserves, have actually trended higher over the past year. Now this is a bit surprising because at the same time, the Fed is doing quantitative tightening. And one of the things that quantitative tightening does is that it sucks cash out of the banking system. Now, even though the Fed is doing quantitative tightening aggressively, yet the cash balances of the commercial banks are gradually rising. This is because the treasury's draining of the RRP is in part neutralizing some of the effects of quantitative tightening. And I expect this to continue in the for the next few months until the RRP goes to zero. So the strange thing is that even though the treasury, even though excuse me, the Fed is doing quantitative tightening, we may actually see the cash balances of commercial banks increase in the coming months.
So what does this all mean? One, so you could have different conclusions. One very concrete conclusion is that as commercial banks have more cash, that is to say the reserve balances increase, then their funding conditions ease. They have more liquidity and maybe there's less funding pressure for that. Maybe they don't have to go in bid as aggressively for competing for deposits and so forth. So it's supportive of the banking sector.
Now the second potential effect impact is that it could also be interpreted as a loosening of financial conditions. So from looking at social media and from my experience at the Fed, there's a lot of people in the investor community who look at reserve balances as a proxy of a quote unquote liquidity. And when they see that go higher, they think that is bullish for asset prices. Now I'm not sure if there is a good mechanical reason for that, but there is definitely a perception that when that happens, it's positive for risk assets. So potentially you could have some people look at rising reserve balances in commercial banks and think that, hey, financial conditions are loosening. Maybe that's positive for risk assets. Again, this is just a sentiment thing. Personally, I'm not quite sure if there's a strong mechanical reason, but that could be an interpretation going forward. So let's see what people are thinking about that.
Okay. The last thing that I'll talk about is this really interesting data from the University of Michigan, which suggests that consumer inflation expectations are actually rising. And this is going to scare the Fed a bit because from the Fed's perspective, inflation expectations are a very important part of determining what actual inflation is. Now this is standard PhD economist thinking. I'm not sure that's how the world works, but I'll explain the theory to you. The theory is that let's say consumers expect inflation to be 5% in the next few years. Well, if they think that inflation is going to be 5%, that means that they think that prices going forward are going to be higher than they are today. And if that's the case, well, then you should go and buy today, right? So if you, if everyone thinks that way, then demand is higher today, higher demand leads to actual higher inflation. You can also think about this from the business perspective. If businesses expect inflation to be 5% going forward, then when they set prices each year, they obviously have to set it 5% higher, right? Because inflation is 5%. And by doing that, they actually make actual prices higher. So that's why, according to traditional economic theory, inflation expectations is a really important thing that you have to watch.
Now, the Fed over the past year have been telling everyone that inflation expectations are stable. They're well anchored. So they're not really worried. And to be fair, that there is some validity to that. Now, when you're trying to figure out what inflation expectations are, there's a lot of ways you can go about doing that. You can do surveys or you can look at market-based measures and so forth. And there are very many different market-based measures and many different surveys. The University of Michigan survey is just one survey among many. Now, what the Fed has been looking at, many other surveys, and they're thinking that consumer inflation expectations look stable, or they can look at tips implied break-evens, which is a market-based measure. And they can also think that inflation expectations have been stable and they may be. But of course, what is stable could become unstable?
Now, from my own work, I've taken a deep dive into some of these inflation expectations readings. And when you look under the hood, the data actually is rather potentially concerning, because what it shows is that although median inflation expectations are trending towards 2%, that median hides a significant divergence. There's a large fraction of respondents to these surveys who adjusted their inflation expectations, notably higher during 2020-2021, and just kept them higher. So there's a large fraction of people in the public who have permanently adjusted their inflation expectations higher.
Now, even though the median is heading towards 2%, those guys, they still think inflation is going to be above 4%. Now this means that the median is going to be pretty unstable. You can easily have it shift if just slightly more people join the high inflation expectations camp.
So from my own view, my own work, I don't actually think inflation expectations are well anchored. Actually, I think they're quite fragile. But the Fed so far thinks that they're well anchored. If the Fed ever changes their mind, though, that's going to be biased their actions towards a more aggressive monetary policy, because the Fed is really, really scared of an unanchoring of inflation expectations. Because what they learned in the 1970s and 80s is that once inflation expectations become unanchored, it's really hard to get them re-anchored. So far, they think that things are well anchored, and so they've been proceeding in a leisurely place. If that ever changes, and to be clear, right now we have some indication from the University of Michigan that they're not, that they're taking higher. There's still a lot of other indicators to look at. But if the Fed ever comes to the conclusion that inflation expectations are becoming unanchored, I would expect them to become more aggressive. That's not the case today, but it's just something to look towards.
And also, I would note that from my read, there's not a lot of evidence that suggests that inflation expectations actually influence actual inflation. If you look at, for example, what happened over the past few years, it seems like inflation expectations rise when the public's actual experience with inflation rise. So when the public sees inflation in their inflation rise, high inflation in their own day-to-day lives, they tend to adjust their inflation expectations higher. And when they see inflation come down in their actual everyday purchase, says they tend to adjust inflation expectations lower. So I don't actually think inflation expectations is super useful in predicting future inflation. Obviously, it did not predict the surge in inflation in 2020 and 2021.
So I don't actually think it's a useful way of looking at the world. But again, markets are highly influenced by the Fed. So we have to put ourselves in the Fed's position and try to think about the world as they see it.
All right, so that's all I've prepared for today. If you like what I'm producing, remember to like and subscribe. And of course, if you're interested in learning more about markets, check out my online courses at CentralBanking101. If you are interested in my latest thoughts as to what's happening in the financial markets, check out my weekly research blog at FedGuy.com. And of course, if you're interested in my best-selling book on central banking, check it out at Amazon.com. Talk to you guys next week.