Tag Archives: Repo market

Federal Reserve Will Pump Half a Trillion Dollars in One Month: A Sign of Sheer Panic, by Gary D. Barnett

The headline is not wrong, the Federal Reserve will inject $500 billion in fiat debt into the banking system in the next month to keep the repo market from blowing up. That is not a sign of a healthy banking system. From Gary D. Barnett at lewrockwell.com:

“The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”
The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York, 1863.

On occasion, the truth is fully exposed, even though the deliverer of that truth never meant for it to be seen by the public eye. In the case of the Fed, as the Rothschild’s pointed out, the truth is evident but will not be comprehended by the general population. Actually, the truth is not even desired, for acceptance of this truth, and reversal of the scam, would cause financial upheaval and hardship, and therefore would require individual responsibility. In this country today, the widespread acceptance of personal responsibility is clearly absent, so accepting the truth and the consequences of that truth is avoided at all cost. But this avoidance will only cause the associated problems to increase in severity over time, and when the levee finally breaks, the flood of misery may be insurmountable. The “mentally incapable” masses spoken about by Rothschild will likely not awaken in time, so their fate is almost certainly already established.

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“Massive… Huge… Largest Ever”: Fed Will Flood Market With Gargantuan $500 Billion In Liquidity To Avoid Year-End Repo Crisis, by Tyler Durden

It looks like the Fed will bring in very heavy artillery to prevent an end-of-year repo crisis. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

In previewing today’s Fed statement regarding repurchase operations, on Tuesday Curvature Securities repo expert Scott Skyrm said that he expects the Fed to announce a $50 billion (at least) term operation for Monday December 23 (double the current term ops) and a $50 billion (at least) term operation for Monday, December 30. This prediction was in response to Zoltan Pozsar’s warning that reserve levels are too low and the result would be a market crash that could spark QE4.

Well, moments ago the NY Fed did publish it latest weekly “Statement Regarding Repurchase Operations” as expected laying out the Fed’s expected repo operations for the period December 13 – January 14… and it blew Skyrm’s expectations out of the water

According to the statement, the NY Fed will continue to offer two-week term repo operations twice per week, four of which span year end. In addition, the Desk will also offer another longer-maturity term repo operation that spans year end. The amount offered in this operation will be at least $50 billion, just as Skyrm expected.

But there was more. Much more.

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“It’s About To Get Very Bad” – Repo Market Legend Predicts Market Crash In Days, by Tyler Durden

The nice thing about the headline prediction is that we’ll know fairly soon if it’s correct or not. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

For the past decade, the name of Zoltan Pozsar has been among the most admired and respected on Wall Street: not only did the Hungarian lay the groundwork for our current understanding of the deposit-free shadow banking system – which has the often opaque and painfully complex short-term dollar funding and repo markets – at its core…

… but he was also instrumental during his tenure at both the US Treasury and the New York Fed in laying the foundations of the modern repo market, orchestrating the response to the global financial crisis and the ensuing policy debate (as virtually nobody at the Fed knew more about repo at the time than Pozsar), serving as point person on market developments for Fed, Treasury and White House officials throughout the crisis (yes, Kashkari was just the figurehead); playing the key role in building the TALF to backstop the ABS market, and advising the former head of the Fed’s Markets Desk, Brian Sack, on just how the NY Fed should implement its various market interventions without disrupting and breaking the most important market of all: the multi-trillion repo market.

In short, when Pozsar speaks (or as the case may be, writes), people listen (and read).

“The Fed Was Suddenly Facing Multiple LTCMs”: BIS Offers A Stunning Explanation Of What Really Happened On Repocalypse Day, by Tyler Durden

This is far and away the best article SLL has seen on the explanation behind the explosive move in the repo market that saw repo rates go from 2% to 10% in a matter of minutes on September 16, and has forced the Federal Reserve to essentially liquify the repo market. The repo market is where banks, hedge funds, and other institutions finance various instruments, putting up those instruments as collateral for loans for a set term by selling them and agreeing to repurchase the instruments at a higher price that embeds an interest rate. It’s a little known but incredibly important part of the financial markets. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

About a month ago, we first laid out how the sequence of liquidity-shrinking events that started about a year ago, and which starred the largest US commercial bank, JPMorgan, ultimately culminated with the mid-September repo explosion. Specifically we showed how JPM’s drain of liquidity via Money Markets and reserves parked at the Fed may have prompted the September repo crisis and subsequent launch of “Not QE” by the Fed in order to reduce its at risk capital and potentially lower its G-SIB charge – currently the highest of all major US banks.

Shortly thereafter, the FT was kind enough to provide confirmation that the biggest US bank had been quietly rotating out of cash, while repositioning its balance sheet in a major way, pushing more than $130bn of excess cash away from reserves in the process significantly tightening overall liquidity in the interbank market. We learned that the bulk of this money was allocated to long-dated bonds while cutting the amount of loans it holds, in what the FT dubbed was a “major shift in how the largest US bank by assets manages its enormous balance sheet.”

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Is the Fed Secretly Bailing Out a Major Bank? by MN Gordon

So far there hasn’t been a good explanation for the Federal Reserve’s massive injections of liquidity. Bailing out a major bank is certainly a plausible hypothesis. From MN Gordon at acting-man.com:

Prettifying Toxic Waste

The promise of something for nothing is always an enticing proposition. Who doesn’t want roses without thorns, rainbows without rain, and salvation without repentance?  So, too, who doesn’t want a few extra basis points of yield above the 10-year Treasury note at no added risk?

The yield-chasing hamster wheel… [PT]

Thus, smart fellows go after it; pursuing financial innovation with unyielding devotion.  The underlying philosophy, as we understand it, is that if risk is spread thin enough it magically disappears. In other words, the solution to pollution is dilution.

With this objective, new financial products are fabricated into existence. The risk free rewards of several extra basis points are then packaged up into debt instruments and sold off to pension funds and institutional investors. The search for yield demands it.

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Is The ‘Mother of all Bubbles’ About to Pop? by Ron Paul

Is the repo market the canary in the coal mine for global financial markets? From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

When the New York Federal Reserve began pumping billions of dollars a day into the repurchasing (repo) markets (the market banks use to make short-term loans to each other) in September, they said this would only be necessary for a few weeks. Yet, last Wednesday, almost two months after the Fed’s initial intervention, the New York Federal Reserve pumped 62.5 billion dollars into the repo market.

The New York Fed continues these emergency interventions to ensure “cash shortages” among banks don’t ever again cause interest rates for overnight loans to rise to over 10 percent, well above the Fed’s target rate.

The Federal Reserve’s bailout operations have increased its balance sheet by over 200 billion dollars since September. Investment advisor Michael Pento describes the Fed’s recent actions as Quantitative Easing (QE) “on steroids.”

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Pondering the Collapse of the Entire Shadow Banking System, by Mike “Mish” Shedlock

The repo market is gigantic and very few people on the outside know much about it. Right now, the salient point is that it is not functioning properly and the Federal Reserve is quietly engaging in emergency measures to keep it going. This article is a good explanation of what’s going on and what may be causing the repo market stresses. The article links to a Pater Tenebrarum article “Repro Quake – A Primer” that is technical but worth the read for those who want to delve further into the matter. The repo market’s troubles may end up being the proverbial canary in the coal mine for an impending financial crisis. From Mike “Mish” Shedlock at moneymaven.io:

What’s behind the ever-increasing need for emergency repos? A couple of correspondents have an eye on shadow banking.

Shadow Banking

  • The shadow banking system consists of lenders, brokers, and other credit intermediaries who fall outside the realm of traditional regulated banking.
  • It is generally unregulated and not subject to the same kinds of risk, liquidity, and capital restrictions as traditional banks are.
  • The shadow banking system played a major role in the expansion of housing credit in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, but has grown in size and largely escaped government oversight since then.

The above from Investopedia.

Image courtesy of my friend Chris Temple.

Hey It’s Not QE, Not Even Monetary

Yesterday, I commented Fed to Increase Emergency Repos to $120 Billion, But Hey, It’s Not Monetary.

Let’s recap before reviewing excellent comments from a couple of valued sources.

The Fed keeps increasing the size and duration of “overnight” funding. It’s now up $120 billion a day, every day, extended for weeks. That is on top of new additions.

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Federal Reserve’s Latest Bailouts More Proof Bad Times Ahead, by Ron Paul

The Fed’s bailout of the repo market looks ominous. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

Since September 17, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has pumped billions of dollars into the repurchasing (repo) market, the first such intervention since 2009. The Fed has announced that it will continue to inject as much as 75 billion dollars a day into the repo market until November 4.

The repo market provides a means for banks that are temporarily short of cash to obtain short-term (usually one day) loans from other banks. The Fed’s interventions were a response to a sudden cash shortage that caused interest rates for these short-term loans to climb to 10 percent, far above the Fed’s target rate.

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The Repo Market Incident May Be The Tip Of The Iceberg, by Daniel Lacalle

Unfortunately, Daniel Lacalle may be right. From Lacalle at dlacalle.com:

The Federal Reserve has injected $278 billion into the securities repurchase market for the first time. Numerous justifications have been provided to explain why this has happened and, more importantly, why it lasted for various days. The first explanation was quite simplistic: an unexpected tax payment. This made no sense. If there is ample liquidity and investors are happy to take financing positions at negative rates all over the world, the abrupt rise in repo rates would simply vanish in a few hours.

Let us start with definitions. The repo market is where borrowers seeking cash offer lenders collateral in the form of safe securities.  Repo rates are the interest rate paid to borrow cash in exchange for Treasuries for 24 hours.

Sudden bursts in the repo lending market are not unusual. What is unusual is that it takes days to normalize and even more unusual to see that the Federal Reserve needs to inject hundreds of billions in a few days to offset the unstoppable rise in short-term rates.

Because liquidity is ample, thirst for yield is enormous and financial players are financially more solvent than years ago, right? Wrong.

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The Fed Created The Everything Bubble And A Liquidity Crisis – What Happens Next? by Brandon Smith

The Federal Reserve’s emergency measures in the repo market don’t address the dollar liquidity crisis. From Smith at alt-market.com:

It’s an interesting dynamic that the Federal Reserve has conjured in the decade after the 2008 credit crash. They spent several years using artificial stimulus measures to inflate perhaps the largest financial bubble in the history of the US, and then a couple years ago something changed. They addicted markets and investors to easy cash only to then cut off the flow of monetary heroin. The system was so dependent on the Fed’s “China White” that all it took to give everyone the shakes was interest rate hikes to the neutral rate of inflation and a moderate balance sheet selloff. Now, the system is dying from shock and it’s too late for intravenous stimulus to save it.

For many this might seem unprecedented, but it’s really rather common. The Fed has a long history of inflating bubbles using easy liquidity and then imploding those bubbles with the tightening of credit. It also has a long history of pretending like it is trying to save the economy from crisis when it is actually the source of the crisis. As Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. warned after the panic of 1920:

“Under the Federal Reserve Act, panics are scientifically created; the present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figure a mathematical problem…”

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