Passa ai contenuti principali

Fed's Tapering Roadmap Sets Up A Volatile Summer

The Fed tipped its hand today, and unveiled its "viral reaction function" revealing the timetable according to which the Fed will start talking about QE tapering.

As discussed previously, James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that getting 75% of Americans vaccinated would be a signal that the pandemic was ending, which is a necessary condition for the central bank to consider tapering its bond-buying program. According to our calculations, extrapolating current vaccination rates would mean that - all else equal - we could see the Fed's 75% bogey be hit in just two short months.

As we further said, one thing Powell did not want to do is give any calendar estimation as to when the Fed could start "thinking about thinking" about tapering. Well, thanks to Bullard, it may have no choice but to do so as soon as the summer. And what's worse, now that the market is aware of the Fed's "viral reaction function", any sharp jump in the vaccination rate will provoke risk off moves as traders start pricing in the inevitable tapering of QE which they now know will be catalyzed by a "normalization" in the pandemic.

A subsequent calculation by Bloomberg came up with a slightly later D-day: as Bloomberg commentator Ye Xie wrote, "at the current rate of inoculation, that threshold could be met by early August, just before the Fed's Jackson Hole Symposium, a venue known for major policy announcements."

So assuming the Fed gives markets a couple of months to prepare for the move, the actual tapering could start early next year. That time frame is roughly in line with the median forecast in the Fed's survey of primary dealers, even though market pricing suggests a more aggressive timetable.

Meanwhile, as we also laid out last week, China's stimulus tapering is already under way, with Bloomberg pointing out that "the year-on-year growth of total social financing fell to 12.3% in March, from 13.3% in February and a peak of 13.7% in October. At this rate, the credit impulse, or the change of new credit as a percentage of GDP, could start to shrink by July or August -- just as the Fed may lay the groundwork for its own tapering."

So, as Bloomberg's Xie concludes, "from a liquidity perspective, the summer could be a challenging time for markets. In the past decade, the slowdown of China's credit impulse has consistently been accompanied by investors cutting the valuation of the MSCI China Index."

But it's not just Chinese stocks that are subject to the monthly injections and drains of the all-important credit impulse: As a reminder, the credit impulse first reaches assets that are driven primarily by the Chinese economy (Chinese bond yields and industrial metals). Next to be impacted are inflation breakevens and sovereign yields in Western economies. The peak correlation for other growth-sensitive assets such as eurozone banks and AUD/JPY arrives with bigger lag of around 4-5 quarters. This result, while logical, is quite significant, as it gives us a playbook for the ebb and flow in Chinese credit impulse.

In the chart below, SocGen provides a critical estimated timeline of the peak Y/Y performance for each of the assets it sees as impacted by China's credit impulse slowdown. While these assets are influenced by multiple factors and therefore could easily diverge from expectations, the chart below does present a neat output from a lagged regression analysis and is a useful guideline for the balance of this year and next.

Commenti

Post popolari in questo blog

Fwd: The Looming Bank Collapse The U.S. financial system could be on the cusp of calamity. This time, we might not be able to save it.

After months  of living with the coronavirus pandemic, American citizens are well aware of the toll it has taken on the economy: broken supply chains, record unemployment, failing small businesses. All of these factors are serious and could mire the United States in a deep, prolonged recession. But there's another threat to the economy, too. It lurks on the balance sheets of the big banks, and it could be cataclysmic. Imagine if, in addition to all the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, you woke up one morning to find that the financial sector had collapsed. You may think that such a crisis is unlikely, with memories of the 2008 crash still so fresh. But banks learned few lessons from that calamity, and new laws intended to keep them from taking on too much risk have failed to do so. As a result, we could be on the precipice of another crash, one different from 2008 less in kind than in degree. This one could be worse. John Lawrence: Inside the 2008 financial crash The financial...

Charting the World Economy: The U.S. Jobs Market Is On Fire - Bloomberg

Charting the World Economy: The U.S. Jobs Market Is On Fire - Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/charting-the-world-economy-the-u-s-jobs-market-is-on-fire Charting the World Economy: The U.S. Jobs Market Is On Fire Zoe Schneeweiss Explore what's moving the global economy in the new season of the Stephanomics podcast. Subscribe via  Apple Podcast , Spotify or  Pocket Cast . The last U.S. payrolls report of the decade was a doozy, beating expectations and doing its bit to keep the consumer in good health heading into 2020. That's good news given the various pressures still weighing on global growth. Here's some of the charts that appeared on Bloomberg this week, offering a pictorial insight into the latest developments in the global economy. U.S. Advertisement Scroll to continue with content ...

The repo market is ‘broken’ and Fed injections are not a lasting solution, market pros warn

By Joy Wiltermuth Published: Dec 7, 2019 9:35 a.m. ET Banks prefer to keep money at Fed instead of lending to other banks Getty Images Examining $100 bills. Getty Images By Joy Wiltermuth Markets reporter The Federal Reserve's ongoing efforts to shore up the short-term "repo" lending markets have begun to rattle some market experts. The New York Federal Reserve has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to keep credit flowing through short term money markets since mid-September when a shortage of liquidity caused a spike in overnight borrowing rates. But as the Fed's interventions have entered a third month, concerns about the market's dependence on its daily doses of liquidity have grown. "The big picture answer is that the repo market is broken," said James Bianco, founder of Bianco R...