Hello, my friends. Today is December 2nd, and this is Markets Weekly. I hope all of you had a fantastic Thanksgiving break because we have a lot to talk about. This past week was an exciting week in Global Macro.
First, let's talk about the tremendous, tremendous rally we've seen in US interest rates. Let's break it down and see what's driving it.
首先,让我们来谈一谈美国利率所经历的巨大急剧上升。让我们分析一下是什么推动了这种变化。
Secondly, let's talk about how the decline in interest rates is fading through to other asset classes, from equities to effects to commodities.
其次,让我们谈谈利率下降对其他资产类别的影响,从股票、汇率到大宗商品。
And lastly, I want to talk a little bit about what's going on in the US banking sector based on the latest data from the FDIC, and we'll see how once again the doomers are totally and completely wrong.
Okay, starting with US interest rates. So this past week, we saw a huge decline in the 10-year treasury yield by about 30 basis points, continuing its decline over the past few weeks.
Now, when we see declines in US interest rates, we can break it down into two components. Now, the decline could be due to a change in the markets' expectation of the path of Fed policy, or it could be a decline in the premium that the market is demanding to hold treasury securities.
The way that we tease out the market's expectation of Fed policy going forward is to locate interest rate futures, in this case, sofor futures. So when you look at the implied path of Fed policy based on sofor futures, you walk away with a very striking result.
Over the past week, market has significantly, significantly, reprised their Fed policy expectations. As of Friday, the market is pricing in a better than even chance of rate cuts beginning next March. And not just that, they're pricing in as many as five cuts the next year. Now, that's a huge change.
If you just think back a couple months ago, the market was saying, you know, maybe the Fed is going to cut starting the second half of next year, and they're probably going to not going to cut a lot. The market has really changed its mind, which should not be a surprise to any of you.
Over the past six weeks, I've discussed how we've had very good progress on inflation and that the rise of long-roaded treasury yields is tightening policy. So the Fed probably doesn't have to stay as hawkish as long as it has been saying, and it's probably going to cut earlier than expected.
Now, that being said, what I see in the markets is, again, from my personal perspective, way too aggressive, and the market is again going to its bad habit of just assuming that the Fed is just going to massively cut interest rates. I think that this is probably going to be wrong, but we still have, you know, it's three to four cuts next year.
Now, why did the market suddenly get, begin to reprice so aggressively this past week? I think that the reason has to do with what Governor Waller said. Now, Governor Waller doing a great job, but also a noted hawk over the past two years.
Let's see what he said this past week. Now, if you think about in central banking, we talk about a Taylor rule or various types of Taylor rules to kind of give us a rule of thumb about how we think we should set policy.
And every one of those things would say, if inflation's coming down, you don't need to keep, you know, once you get rates are inflation down low enough, you don't necessarily have to keep rates up at those levels.
So there's certainly good economic arguments from any kind of standard Taylor rule that would tell you if inflation, if we see this inflation continuing for several more months, I don't know how long that might be, three months, four months, five months, that we feel confident that inflation is really down and on its way, that you could then start lowering the policy rate just because inflation's lower.
It has nothing to do with trying to save the economy or recession. Now, it sounds like Governor Waller is saying that, you know, if we continue to have very positive inflation prints, I'm open to cutting interest rates in a few months. And the market, of course, heard this and just ran with it.
Now, before, before we move on, I'd like to also address an alternative explanation. So some of the doomers I hear are thinking that we're pricing in aggressive cuts because the economy is falling apart.
But we also got some pretty good economic data the past week. We got the second revision of third quarter GDP. Now, to level set, US GDP growth, potential US GDP growth is thought to be about 1.8, basically slightly below 2%.
First quarter will be grew above 2%, second quarter we grew above 2%, and third quarter we grew at 4.9%, which is bumpers. So throughout the year, we basically be growing GDP above trend.
The second revision of third quarter GDP revised the third quarter numbers a bit. It revised them higher. And not just that, it revised inflation lower. So the revised data shows that the US economy continues to be fine.
So I think this doomer interpretation of what's happening in rates is totally wrong. It really does just seem to be a massive reprising and fed policy expectations that is probably too aggressive.
Now, let's talk about what this means to the broader markets. In my weekly blog post, I'll talk about how this in my perspective, I suggest the potential for a significant upside risk in equity markets.
But first, let's just look at what happened this past week. Now, of course, as we all know, when interest rates go down, that's bullish for risk assets. And the S&P 500 responded accordingly. We saw the S&P 500 do pretty well continuing. It's a persistent rise over the past few weeks.
When you think of mechanisms, you can postulate a few. If you look at textbooks, they'll tell you that, oh, cash flows are discounted because with low interest rates, and so the present value is higher. There are probably some people who think that way, or you can think of it as people seeing the industries are lower.
Maybe they prefer risk assets, or you can think of it as, let's say, your big portfolio manager, interest risk got cut, your bonds appreciated in value just to maintain your allocation. You sell a little bit of your bonds and you buy more equities. In any case, many potential mechanisms, but when you have a decline in interest rates, that's usually positive for equities.
Now, the reprising in the path of fit policy, of course, is going to have a big impact on currency. And we saw the dollar sell off notably against, let's say, Canadian dollar, GBP, and the Japanese yen. But interestingly, the dollar didn't really sell off against the Euro, because we also got some pretty interesting news from the Eurozone.
Now, Eurozone inflation looks like it's declining faster than expected. The market took one look at that and began to price in earlier than expected cuts from the ECB. So on the one hand, you had a reprising lower of Fed expectations. And on the other hand, you had a reprising lower of expectations of the ECB. And so that kind of washed out and led to the dollar a bit stronger against the euro over the week.
Now, I suspect that as inflation has come down sooner than expected in the US and the Eurozone, we'll probably see some of that in other jurisdictions like Canada and the UK as well. So maybe going forward, we can also see policy expectations for the Central Bank of Canada and the Bank of England also come down a bit.
Now, of course, when we have a weaker dollar, that feeds through to commodities, which are priced in dollars. Now commodities, though, it's a bit more complicated because we have a lot of other supply and demand stuff going on because commodities are used in the real economy.
Looking at oil, for example, oil was moving a lot this past week, because we had these geopolitical components as to whether or not OPEC will cut and so forth. But overall, if you have a weaker dollar, you would expect commodities to rally. One of the purest reads on that, of course, is gold, which responds strongly to monetary policy. Now, this past week, we saw gold soar.
And that could be, well, likely is because of the reevaluation of what's happening with Fed policy, plus reevaluation of what's happening to ECB monetary policy. And as we move towards a world where global central banks may be synchronized in their cutting, I would think that gold can continue to shine. And of course, as it goes up, you have even more people who go and chase momentum. So it seems like it's a very positive environment for gold going forward.
And the last thing that I want to talk about, of course, is what's happening in the US banking sector. Now, if you think back earlier in the year, we had a panic involving Silicon Valley Bank and we had all sorts of doomers come out and say that, you know, the US banking system is solving because it has all these unrealized losses.
There's going to be many bank failures. And even if the bank doesn't fail because the short term interest reaches so high, you know, the banks are going to go bust because they're going to have negative interest rate income. And if you've been following over the past few months, I told you that was all complete nonsense. But doomers are going to doom.
So we got this new data from the FEIC showing the state of the US banking sector system as of a third quarter of this year. And it's positive. First though, let's look at how their loan portfolio is doing because banks can give you a very good reading on the health of the US economy.
If banks start seeing a lot of defaults in their loan portfolio, well, that could mean that there's a lot of businesses and people struggling in the US economy.
如果银行开始看到他们的贷款组合中出现许多违约,这可能意味着美国经济中有许多企业和人民遇到困难。
When we look at data from the FEIC, we see that, you know, we see noncurrent, that is to say people not paying their, making their monthly payments, ticked up a little bit. And we can see that, say, charge offs, that is to say that defaults and never want to get that money back also increased a little bit. But we're seeing though that they're basically normalizing to the trend that prevailed over the past 10 years. It doesn't seem that the increases in noncurrent and charge offs are increasing in a meaningful way. And that's really in line with what you see in credit spreads, which are very narrow. And what you see in the GDP data, which shows an economy that continues to grow above trend.
So looking at the loan portfolio data, you can see that there really are no credit problems in the commercial banking sector. And so, you know, they're not going to have big losses there. I would also note that there's been an uptick in delinquencies when it comes to commercial real estate. But remember, the domestic US banking sector is about 20 trillion in assets. The uptake looks like it's about 20 billion in delinquencies. It could go higher, but at the end of the day, it's a fraction of a percent.
Now then, let's look at their net interest income. Has it been the case that because the Fed hydrates to let's say five and a half percent and the commercial banks paying a lot of interest on their deposits are going bust? Well, actually, that's not the case at all either. Because as interest rates rose, their income, that they receive on their loans went up much faster than the interest rate expense they pay on their deposits.
Remember, overall, there's still a lot of people who hold deposits at banks who basically receive nothing. Maybe they don't care because they don't have that much money in the bank or maybe they value the convenience of having a checking deposit at a bank. In any case, you can see that net interest margins at banks remain basically in line with what they've been over the past few years. They've narrowed very, very, very slightly the past quarter. But as the Fed can expect to cut interest rates next year, they're probably going to re widen again. So net interest rate margin, interest income from the banking sector is totally fine. That was never going to be a problem.
Now, the last common thing that we talk about when we hear about in the banking sector is the tremendous unrealized losses they have in their securities portfolio. So banks bought a lot of treasuries and agency MBS when rates are low, not that rates have gone up, but they're sitting on a lot of unrealized losses. So they are basically insolvent, right? Actually, that's totally wrong.
Why is it totally wrong? Well, so I've explained this before, but I'll just give you the brief version. So you're right that as interest rates go up, your assets, fixed income assets, they're marking their declines, right? So that's assets. But when you're talking about solvency, when you're talking about net worth, it's assets minus liabilities. What are the bank's liabilities? Well, they're largely deposits, right?
Now, what is a deposit? Is it an overnight? Are you lending to the bank overnight? Or are you lending to the bank for 30 years? Or are you lending to the bank for 10 years? You know, that's kind of a hard thing to say. Now, in theory, I can go and take my money out of a bank anytime I want, right? Let's say I have $100,000 in checking deposits out of bank. In theory, I'm just borrowing, I'm just lending to the bank overnight. And the next day, I can take all of that back.
But in practice, no one is going to take all of their money out of the bank, right? They're going to leave, you know, a lot of money in there, and they're going to take money out as they need it. In practice, though, even though a checking deposit is like lending to a bank overnight, in practice, it's more like a term loan, because you usually keep your money there for some time. Now, when you look at the data, it's more like a five-year loan to a bank.
So that is to say that people usually keep their checking deposits in a bank for some time. Deposits are sticky. So as interest rates go up, you got mark-to-market losses on your securities. That's very clear.
But what is a lot less clear, though, is that your liabilities, their market value also goes down. And so when you go, let's say assets, finance liabilities, it's not really clear whether or not the banking sector is insolvent or not.
Of course, if everyone asks for their deposits back at the same time, that's going to be a problem. And so banks go into great lengths to try to manage the deposit franchise, maybe by giving their people toasters, maybe by locking them in their ecosystem, say, for example, if you have a bank account at Chase, maybe they'll also give you a mortgage, maybe they'll also give you a credit card, maybe they'll also give you a brokerage account and you have all these big relationships and so forth.
But there's a lot of ways that banks can manage deposits so that whereas in theory, people can take out older deposits overnight the next day in practice, they keep them there so that they are in practice fixed-term liabilities. And you have to take that into account when you're measuring a bank's net worth.
In any case, the banking system remains sound. Banks continue to also create loans a bit at a slower pace than they did in the past. Obviously interest rates are higher, people don't want to borrow as much as interest rates are high, but everything is fine and all the banking doomers are totally wrong.
If you've noticing a trend is that if you listen to doomers, you will go broke. Okay, so anyway, that's all I've prepared for today. Hope you enjoyed it.
If you like what I'm producing, remember to like and subscribe. And of course, if you're interested in hearing my latest market thoughts, check out my blog, FitGuire.com, or if you're more interested in learning about how markets work, check out my courses at CentralBaking101.com. Talk to you all next week.