Hello, my friends. Today is November 18th, and this is Markets Weekly. This week, we're going to talk about three things. First, we have to talk about the very positive inflation data we got the past week, where CPI and PPI data continue to show steady progress on the inflation front. At the same time, the economic data show only modest levels of cooling. We have been and continue to be in soft landing world.
Secondly, and related to that, the markets saw the soft landing data and began to surge higher. Because the market began to price in sooner than expected Fed rate cuts, they are pricing in a quote unquote Fed pivot. Let's talk about whether or not that makes sense.
And lastly, I want to talk a little bit about the ICBC rents in where I attacked last week. So ICBC was subject to a cyber attack, and it seems like that led to more than usual treasury fails. Now, many people were concerned about this, but let me tell you why that's nothing that's not something that you should be worried about.
OK, first, starting with the soft landing data. Now, before we began, let's level set a little bit. Last year, inflation was high, and the Fed began to aggressively raise interest rates. The thinking was that with interest rates going up a lot, the economy would fall into a recession, unemployment would rise, and inflation would come down. A soft landing scenario, of course, would be inflation coming down without the economy going into a recession. That's what the Fed wanted to achieve, and many, many people doubted that was possible.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that inflation did steadily trend down this past year but at the same time, the economy continues to grow above trend. We have been living in soft landing. The data we got the past week shows that we still are in soft landing.
So on the CPI data front, it was softer than expected. CPI on a month-over-month basis was actually zero. On an annualized basis, you can see that although headline and core CPI continue to be above the Fed's 2% target, it's steadily trending lower. There's no question about that.
Looking at PPI, which are producer prices, basically the prices of businesses pay, you come up with a similar graph. So PPI prices have been steadily declining on an annualized basis. So we look at PPI because in theory, let's say that businesses are facing higher prices, they could turn around and try to pass the cost off to consumers by raising consumer prices. This is not necessarily true. Businesses could of course have narrow margins. It all depends on the supply and demand dynamics in that particular industry. So again, data shows that inflation is steadily coming down. Now, it might not get all the way to 2%. In fact, I don't think that it will, but so far, it continues to trend lower and we'll see where the direction goes in the coming months.
Now, at the same time, the past week, we also got some economic data. We got retail sales, which were just slightly slightly negative on a month or a month basis, suggesting some degree of cooling. But at the same time, I think it's worth noting that retail sales data for the past month was revised higher. So the economy continues to chug along and it is cooling. And this is something that's also mirrored in the labor market data as well.
So people have been watching very closely weekly unemployment claims data. So every Thursday that comes out and the thinking is that when the labor market breaks, if it breaks, you'll see a gradual increase in unemployment claims. And we did see a tick up in unemployment claims the past week. But again, if you zoom out a bit, you'll see that the levels continue to be very low. The labor market looks strong, but it is cooling like the rest of the economy. We still are in soft landing world, it seems.
Now things could change. We could, things could take a bad term in the next few months. I don't know. But I think though, that basically everyone who has been calling for hard landing over the past year has been really, really wrong. And so when we look forward, it seems that we have to be a bit more circumspect. Maybe the way that the things work are not what we expect. So looking over the past year, it seems to be my base case is that a soft landing continues. After all, we continue to have what appears to be a strong economy that continues to be supported by significant amounts of fiscal spending and potentially fed rate cuts next year, which brings us to our next topic.
So the markets saw the soft landing data last week and reacted very strongly. Now, first and foremost, you can see this in the risk markets. So equity markets surged higher. And you can also see this in the dollar selling off aggressively. And the underlying cause of all this, I think, is that the market is beginning to price in sooner than expected fed rate cuts.
Now the way that professionals look at this is through something called short-term interest rate futures, specifically so for futures, which are just a bet as to where short-term interest rates will be in the future.
Now, before last week, the market was thinking the first fed cuts may become sometime in the second half of next year. Now the market is thinking cuts can come as soon as March. Now this should not be a surprise to you because I wrote about this last month in my blog and I've been talking about it for the past few weeks.
So looking at short-term interest rate futures, you can see a very, very clear pulling forward of expected fed rate cuts and that is beginning to goose the markets a bit.
Now, why would the markets price this? Well, they would price this because inflation is really coming down under control sooner than expected. Now, if you're listening to the Fed over the past few months, they've been telling you that they look at the world through the lens of real interest rates, not nominal.
And what are real interest rates? Real interest rates are nominal interest rates minus expected inflation and expected inflation, difficult thing to measure, but strongly related to the inflation people are experiencing today.
So as inflation comes down, you think that expected inflation would also continue to trend lower. So if you keep nominal rates constant, what happens is that real rates continue to increase, which kind of doesn't make sense, right?
If the economy is slowing, if inflation is getting under control, you really want to further tighten monetary policy. You would probably want to ease a bit or at the very least, keep it where it is.
So based on this logic, if inflation is coming down steadily, then it would make sense for the Fed to adjust their stance of policy.
因此,基于这个逻辑,如果通货膨胀稳步下降,那么美联储调整其政策立场就是有道理的。
Not just my mistake, to cut rates slightly, adjust monetary policy a little bit to maintain their current stance of restricted policy, to maintain the level of real rates. That seems totally logical to me, and I think that's what the market is pricing in now.
Now, there are also very smart people who think this is not the right way to look at it. These smart people would tell you that if the Fed were to reduce interest rates a little bit next year, well, that could be bad because one, that could cause economic activity to re-accelerate and make inflation more difficult to get rid of.
And secondly, that it could cause financial assets to surge, which of course would also make inflation more difficult to get rid of.
其次,金融资产可能会飙升,这当然也会使通货膨胀更难以消除。
I think these are very good arguments, but I'm not really bothered by them. So the argument that stronger economic activity would re-accelerate inflation is makes complete sense. And that's really what you would be reading about in textbooks.
But it just hasn't been the case for the past year. Remember, third-quarter GDP printed at 4.9% annual rate. It was bonkers. And the whole year, we've been growing above trend, but also the past year, inflation has been steadily coming down. That relationship between economic growth and inflation doesn't seem to be very strong.
Now, I think Chair Powell still thinks that he needs to see some weakness in the labor market, and maybe the economy, to feel comfortable that inflation is on the right path. But I'm getting the sense that he's a bit more open-minded now, simply because the facts compel him to.
Now, the second thing is whether or not rate cuts would goose the markets and make inflation more difficult to control, because if the stock market is going to the moon, everyone has more wealth to spend. I think that's totally reasonable as well.
And indeed, if you look back the past few years, you can see that, well, you had the crypto boom, you had all these Ferraris with BTC and on their license plates. I think there is some connection between wealth and economic growth and inflation.
But we also have to be mindful of the experience after the great financial crisis. Ben Bernanke wanted to have a huge wealth effect and try to goose the economy by creating a big asset price bubble. And indeed, the stock market went up a lot after the GFC for several, several years. But growth and inflation remained relatively tame. So that connection between asset prices and economic growth and inflation, it's there, but it's also not super clear to me as well.
Again, these are all good arguments, and I think that's what's going to keep the Fed from easing. Of course, they're not going to change the monetary policy to be more accommodative. But I don't think those are good arguments against maintaining the SaaS monetary policy.
And to maintain the sense of monetary policy, I think you'd have to adjust nominorates in line with declining inflation. Remember, keeping real rates steady.
为了保持货币政策的意义,我认为你需要根据下降的通货膨胀率调整名义利率。请记住,保持实际利率稳定。
So my base case continues to be a rate cut in March, which is what I also mentioned over the past few weeks.
所以,我一直认为的基本情况还是三月份的利率降低,这也是我在过去几周里一直提到的。
Now, I've heard some confusion about this. How can I say that, let's say, Fed is going to cut rates next year and yet the 10 years continuing to rise? Well, I actually believe both things will happen. So you could have some a few rate cuts next year just to adjust the SaaS monetary policy, but you could still have the 10 year continue to rise simply because of supply and demand dynamics.
The way that you can think about this is an expansion of term premium. So if you are professional and you're looking at a longer deal of interest rates, you could break them down into two components. One, of course, is an expectation on the path of policy. That is what the Fed is doing. And the other is just an extra premium.
So what's been happening over the past few months is that the market stands to policy until the past week hasn't changed a lot and yet the 10 year yield has gone higher. That's just the expansion of the term premium. You can measure this through something called swap spreads, where you take the difference between where the 10 years trading and where the market is pricing in the path of 10 year overnight rates.
Now, from this chart, you can see that the swap threads have become increasingly negative over the past few months. Gave back a little bit, but it's still trending downwards. The more negative that means that is, and that means that the 10 year yield is rising, not because of expectations of what the Fed is going to do, but supply and demand dynamics in the market.
I think that will continue. And so I still think that next year we will have the 10 year yield above 5% and probably above 5.5% as well. So there's going to be a curve steepening.
Okay, now the last thing I want to talk about is the ICBC hack that happened last week. So I was looking in my comments and I saw some doomers talking about this, about how this is a big deal. And let me tell you right now, it's not a big deal at all.
So first off, ICBC is a ginormous ginormous Chinese bank. But let me also ask you how many ICBC branches do you see in your hometown? My guess is zero because they're actually very, very small in the United States. So ICBC, their securities branch was subject to a ransomware attack and that made it difficult for them to settle their trades. So is that a really serious thing?
Okay, well, let's pull up the filings of the ICBC securities dealer. It looks like their total assets are about 23 billion. Now, let me remind you, 23 billion is not a lot of money in the global financial system. It looks like the biggest thing on their balance sheet is, I'll say, I think it's 16, something like that billion in repo. Well, how big is the repo market? Well, the repo market overall is four or five trillion dollars, right? So again, if you have ICBC having trouble with their transactions, there are a microscopic part of the repo market. It's not really going to have any big impact, but it is going to have some impact.
And that is why over the past couple of weeks, we have an increase in treasury fails. You've seen people say that treasury fails soared and indeed they did, but let's look at the data set with more context. You can see that treasury fails did increase a little bit, but just a little bit. That's not kind of not a big deal.
But more broadly speaking, what is a treasury fail? So a treasury fail is when a buyer and a seller, okay, so a seller promises to give a buyer treasury securities and a buyer promises to give the seller money, okay? They agree on a trade and the next day though, the buyer has money ready, but the seller is not able to deliver the treasury security.
The seller fails. Now, looking at the treasury fails, you can see that this happens regularly and it can happen in four a variety of reasons. It could be just some kind of miscommunication or something like that.
But what happens when at a fail though, honestly, what happens is that a buyer convention, okay, so I wanted to buy a treasury security from you for settlement. You don't have the treasury security. That's okay. We'll do the deal tomorrow. So by convention, all that happens is that we roll forward the settlement day by one day.
So you don't have the treasury to deliver. We'll do the settlement tomorrow. That's all that happens. Now, the seller of course is motivated to not do this because the seller is losing the opportunity cost of the funds. So let's say the seller today could have sold his treasury security for $1,000. He could have taken that $1,000 and reinvested it overnight for 5%.
Now, if he's not selling the treasury today, well, then he's losing out on that 5% return so there's an opportunity cost for the seller that motivates the seller to not want to fail. So this is basically a self-correcting thing.
So what seemed to have happened in ICBC's case is that because of this ransomware attack, these repo trades, these treasury trades were not able to settle correctly. And so they had to go and do this the old-fashioned way. It seemed mainly by putting it on a USB drive and delivering it to the clearing bank or something like that. And the Fed of course, seeing that they had some technical difficulties just kept the market open just a little bit so that they can put in their trades.
Now, the treasury market is tightly linked. So even though this bank is only doing say $16, $17, $18 billion in trades, someone is on the other side of that trade. Maybe someone else wants to buy treasury securities from ICBC and then turn around and sell it to someone else. If ICBC fails to that person, then that person has to turn around and fail to someone else. There's a daisy chain effect here. So someone very small like ICBC can cause a greater than expected treasury fails. But then again, at the end of the day, all that happens is that you settle the next day. And to be perfectly clear, if you really, really want to get the treasury, you can actually borrow it from the Fed. The Fed has a special facility called the Securities Learning Facility. That's intention that is designed to help dealers through these problems. So this is really not a big deal. ICBC, small bank, treasury fails, not a big deal. Seen it a thousand times. In fact, we had a really big problem back in 9-11 when the Twin Towers went down and you basically had dealers have their entire computer databases destroyed. And yet the treasury market, with the help of the official sector, still struggled through. So this is something that the Fed and everyone else is well equipped to deal with. I wouldn't worry about it at all.
Okay. So that's all prepared for this week. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you like what I'm producing, remember to like and subscribe. And if you're interested in my latest market thoughts, check out my blog, FedGuy.com, or my market courses at centralbank101.com.
So this coming week is Thanksgiving week. I'm not sure if there's anything to talk about in markets. It's usually a very quiet market. So it's possible that we may not have an episode next week. I will see.