Hello my friends and welcome to Markets Weekly. So this week I'm recording a little bit earlier, so it's February 2nd, Friday afternoon. So what a week in markets, right? We had so many things going on as we previewed last week. And it looks like we're going to close at all time highs. So as you guys know, I'm super bullish on the equity market this year, but this is getting a little bit crazy. So I'm very cautious at the moment. So this week I want to talk about three things.
First, let's talk about the prospect of the UOS economy re-accelerating since that's what the data seems to be indicating.
首先,让我们来谈谈 UOS 经济重新加速的前景,因为数据似乎表明这一点。
Secondly, let's talk about what happened at the quarterly refunding announcement. As we all know, the QRA has been market moving the past two quarters. And this time around, it seems to be less important. So, but let's talk about what happened there and why the market might not be so interested.
Lastly, we seem to have a lot of excitement in the regional banking sector this past week. New York Community Bank, a regional bank based in New York reported earnings and had its stock price basically cut in half. Let's talk about what's happening over there.
Okay, starting with the data. So let's step back and level set a little bit. So as we all know, over the past couple years, Fed has been hiking rates, trying to slow the economy down. The economy hasn't really been cooperating. Quarter three of last year, we saw the economy grow at an annual rate of 4.9%, basically bonkers and far above the trend growth rate of about 2%. Now, quarter four, we slowed down a bit. Economy grew at estimated 3.3% annual rate, which is slower than 4.9, but still above trend. Now, many people were thinking that as we get deeper into the economic cycle, as things normalize, we're going to move towards 2% trend growth. Well, maybe we will this quarter, but so far, and to be clear, a lot of data is preliminary and the quarter is not even halfway done. So far, indicators are that maybe things are actually accelerating. So last time we talked about the PMI data, but let's talk about this GDP now indicator from the Atlanta Fed. So this is called a GDP now cast. And what it does is that it takes the latest data and it tries to predict where GDP will grow this quarter. So this is totally preliminary and it's going to be volatile. But so far, the Atlanta GDP now data is showing 4.2%. Now that's absolutely bonkers, probably definitely not going to be that high, but it is showing that the data that we're receiving so far has been a lot better than expected, which brings us to the Friday non-farm payroll print.
Now Friday non-farm payroll print was unambiguously very good. So as we've discussed before, when we look at these reports, there's a few underlying components we want to look at. Well, first and foremost, which is what everyone focuses on, we have the headline number. Now the expectations were for job growth this month to be about 150,000 and we printed above 300,000. So it was a big beat. Now when you look into the other components, they're also pretty good as well. Unemployment rate ticked down a little bit and most importantly, wage growth accelerated. So it's 0.6% month over month. And this is super important because wage growth has input has can potentially feed into inflation affecting monetary policy. Labor force participation was unchanged from last time. And the payroll print we got in December was revised higher. So unambiguously, this is a very good job print and it has big implications on monetary policy. Now the market took one look at this and the rates sold off across the curve. Market is pricing out some rate cuts and pushing them further into the future. And as they should, the economy seems to be a lot stronger than we expected earlier. And so maybe the Fed has on the margins is less inclined to cut rates. But we'll see more about that as you guys all know, Jay Powell has a 60 minute interview airing this weekend. I don't think it's going to be talking much about monetary policy, but what we'll see. Now one other thing that I'd like to address is that so the non-farm payroll is actually comprised of two surveys. There is the establishment survey where they ask businesses and there's the household survey where they ask households. And many people are pointing out that these two surveys are giving diversion views, whereas the establishment survey, which is the one where we rely on for our headline number, is showing strong employment growth, but the household survey is actually showing declines in employment.
Now, I think this is part of a broader discussion that many people and I've been seeing in social media and in the comments as to what indicators to look at. For example, if you look at GDP growth, do you look at GDP or do you look at GDI, which are two different measures trying to measure how much the economy is producing. Or if you're looking at inflation, do you look at, let's say, PCI, PCE, or do you look at private vendor things like true inflation? So my answer to this is what you focus on is really depending on your purpose. For myself, I look at this stuff because I want to see where markets are going, our prices are basically the number going to get bigger. Is the stock market going to go up or down? So that's what I focus on.
So when it comes to markets, the market cares about the headline number. So that's coming from the establishment survey about these other surveys that maybe show we can play mid growth. Maybe they're right, but honestly, the market doesn't care about that stuff and so I don't either. Same thing with inflation, maybe true inflation shows something different. But the Fed looks at PCE, market looks at PCE, so PCE is what matters. Same thing for GDP or GDI, market cares about GDP. And so that's what I focus on and that's what I think matters. Now if you're trying to figure out what the economy is actually doing, maybe you got out taken to look at these other measures, but if you care about what the markets will do, then you want to focus on what the markets care about. So far, it's looking like there is a prospect of the economy actually re-accelerating and if that's the case, it's going to be very interesting as to what the Fed would do because inflation is definitely coming down. But there is also the prospect of re-acceleration. So I guess we'll have more clues into what they're thinking heading forward.
Okay, now let's talk about the quarterly refunding announcement. So the QRA is the quarterly announcement where the Treasury announces to the world how they're going to fund the government. We get two things we want to focus on at the QRA. First is how much they're going to issue and that's going to be a function of the fiscal deficit. The fiscal deficit, even though we have all these things assigned into law, as to how much money the government will spend, we don't actually have a good grasp of tax receipts of the government's quote unquote revenue. This is because tax receipts are dependent upon a lot of things. How is the economy doing? If the economy is doing well, if we have a lot of growth, then you have a lot of payroll and so you can get a lot of payroll, a lot of employment taxes. Also depends on things like what's happening in the stock market. Stock market goes up a lot. Capital gains income tax receipts increase and so that decreases the fiscal deficit.
The first thing in the QRA is that we found out that the fiscal deficit was slightly smaller than expected. It's not a big deal. It seems like it's about 50 billion. Sometimes the surprise can be large. The second thing we want to talk about is, and what I've been writing about and many people have been focusing on, is whether or not the US Treasury will continue to shift issuance towards bills. As a reminder, the US Treasury has a policy of having marketable treasuries be about 15 to 20 percent in treasury bills. Last October, when they surprised the market by announcing a substantial increase in coupon sizes, the market seemed to panic a bit and we saw a large increase in interest rates. The Treasury began to, I guess, try to soften that blow by heavily leading their issuance towards bills. And expressing a willingness for their bills as a share of marketable debt to significantly deviate from their guidance. And so as of December, bills were about 21.5 percent of marketable treasuries, so notably above the 20 percent threshold.
Now, the thinking right now at the QRA is that Treasury going to continue to do this in a big way. If they were to do this, though, there would be monetary policy implications.
Like I wrote about last week, one of the things the Fed is looking at when they're taking about T-pring quantity of tightening, well, they're looking at a lot of things and it's not clear what's more important, but first, they're going to look at money market rates. If they see repo rates rising, for example, maybe they're getting a bit concerned that QT is getting too aggressive, reserves are too low, and maybe they'll stop QT.
There are also some Fed officials who have been looking at the balances in the reverse repo facility and thinking that when the reverse repo facility gets too low, maybe we should stop doing QT. And so this is the Fed's data reaction function, but those two things are directly impacted by Treasury bill issuance.
When the Treasury issues a lot of Treasury bills, that drains the RFP as it's been doing over the past few months. Again, it also puts upward pressure on repo rates. So the Treasury could have theoretically, if they wanted to, just kind of turbocharge bill issuance a little bit more and maybe gone QT a little bit earlier. But it looks like actually they were quite even handed.
Now the key word that I was looking for that I saw in these statements is that they increase coupon size one more quarter as they predicted last November, but then they're telling you that they're done for several quarters. So the coupon size increase that we got this time around is going to be the last increase that we'll get for until maybe sometime next year. So I think that's very encouraging to the market because then there's no more surprises like there was in October. So the market can feel comfortable that coupon sizes are going to be what they are for the foreseeable future.
Now Treasury did adjust them a little bit to try to soften the blow in the market. Looking at the guided sizes compared to last time, you can see that they slightly shifted lower the 30 year size. So the long bond, which we all know the market has had trouble digesting and said are issuing slightly more across the belly. So two to two to five years. So that that's them being sensitive to market demand. But even with this one more coupon size increase, the Treasury is still going to steadily increase its share of bills. It's not going to be an aggressive increase, but over the next couple years, we'll still see bills as a share of marketable treasuries steadily increase further from 21.5%. So they are definitely leaning towards short dated issuance, but you know, in a, I think in a moderate way. So it's going to gradually, I think, drain the RFP and gradually put upward pressure on money market rates. And so that has implications for the time of QTA. It doesn't look like they're going to be forcing it to do to pull it earlier.
All in all, I think this was a good quarterly refunding announcement in. It's hard to know whether or not it moved markets. There was a lot going on, but I'm thinking that it probably didn't have too much of an impact.
Okay. The last thing that we'll talk about is what actually did have a big impact on that same day. So the same day as we had quarterly quarterly refunding announcement, the same day as we had the Fed meeting, we also had this announcement from New York Community Bank that, you know, the quarter wasn't really what we would have liked it to be. And their stock price, as we can see, has basically been cut in half, which is kind of funny because at the same day, as the Fed released their statement, they deleted a line that said that the banking sector was really safe and everything was okay. And then you have this happen on the same day.
Now to be perfectly clear, I believe the banking sector has a whole totally sound, totally not a problem. But then when you have over 4,000 banks, you're going to have a few that are not doing well. New York Community Bank is one of them. So what was their problem? Well, the problem seemed to be two things. First off, they announced some degree of credit problems in large part due to their office portfolio. So when we look at commercial real estate, we have to be careful commercial real estate. It's not just one big asset. You have things like hospitals, you have things like data centers, you have warehouses, you have multifamily, and of course, you have office space. So across all these different kinds of commercial real estate, they all have different fundamentals. What's clearly not doing well, of course, is office, especially office in big office centers.
Now let's look at this presentation from New York Community Bank. Well, they have an office portfolio and unfortunately about half of it is Manhattan office space. So as you can see, a lot of these, a lot of loans against this Manhattan office space, you know, potentially not doing that well. And so their credit provisions have been rising. So there's a lot of people concerned that maybe this office space really goes south. Maybe the banks that hold a lot of loans against office space take big losses. And that's certainly the concern here. So that's totally understandable.
In fact, around the same time, we also had a report from a small Japanese bank that no one has ever heard of also having their stock price decline significantly. Reason US office space. So this small bank, which no one has ever heard of, actually had been very active lending in US office space. They were thinking that this was a stable asset. After all, everyone goes to the office, right? Well, yeah, except when COVID happened and everyone is working from home. And so they also took a big hit. So this could be suggesting that these small banks, which are not systemic, but who do have concentrated portfolios in office space, could be in some trouble. Now, I don't.
So one thing to note though is in part, this is due to high interest rates, but I think the much bigger part is just a structural shift where many people are working from home. Now, even if rates were much lower, if you have a lot of people working from home, that office space is just not going to be worth the same thing that I used to. So there are some things that are happening here that are cultural rather than, let's say, whatever the Fed is doing.
Okay. Now, the second thing that seemed to really bother investors in your bank core was they cut your dividend substantially. Now, this cut in dividend is more idiosyncratic. Now, although they have problems in their portfolio, they also have some regulatory concerns in that they got bigger. So New York Community Bank War swallowed part of Signature Bank, which as we know went under, that pushed the size of their balance sheet to over a hundred billion and put them under more stringent regulations. In the US, you are regulated according to how big you are. And when you get to a certain size, the regulators are forcing you to hold more capital.
Now, capital on a bank's balance sheet is a liability. What it is, is basically a cushion to absorb potential losses. Now, as you get bigger, you have to hold more capital. So where do you get money to fund that extra cushion? Well, if you're New York Community Bank, what you're trying to do is you're going to fund it out of your earnings. And so they are paying out fewer earnings as dividends to shareholders and just keeping that to cushion to top up their capital. So that's a regulatory thing that they kind of have to do. And maybe they could have prepared it a different way. But that's obviously going to hurt their stock price as well when investors are expecting a dividend.
So part of the story seems to be just exposure to US office space. Again, work from home is killing a lot of these portfolios. But part of it is just idiosyncratic regulation as the bank grew bigger. Now overall, as we've shown through FDIC data, commercial real estate as an exposure to banks, not that big, totally manageable. But if you are a small bank with big exposures to these office space things, I think you're going to have a tough time. It's not going to be systemic, but I think it's going to hurt if you're an investor in these individual banks. And
OK, all right. That's all I prepared for this week. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you're interested in hearing more about my thoughts, check out my blog, FIDGuY.com. And of course, if you're interested in learning more about how markets work, check out my courses at centralbanking101.com. Talk to you all next week.