Confounded Interest – Anthony B. Sanders
Financial Markets And Real Estate
The headline screamed “NASDAQ PLUNGES 5%!
True, it did, but it simply lost the gain’s from yesterday’s surprisingly mild Fed announcement.
But the 10-year Treasury yield is rising faster than my blood pressure. The 10-year Treasury yield is up to 3.09%.
Cryptos? Bitcoin is down -7.27% and Dash is down -8.23%.
Watch out mortgage rates!!
Don’t panic … about the NASDAQ. EVERYBODY PANIC about rising mortgage rates.
Well, the Fed’s talking heads have been saying a 50 basis point hike was coming in May … and it appeared!
And it looks like 9 rate hikes are a comin’ by February 2023.
The Fed’s Dot Plots shows a cooling of Fed rate hikes by 2024 and beyond.
Here is the path of Balance Sheet peel-off.
The US Treasury actives curve is up by 14 bps at the 10-year tenor and up 17 bps at the 2-year tenor.
The plan will see $30 billion of Treasuries and $17.5 billion on mortgage-backed securities roll off. After three months, the cap for Treasuries will increase to $60 billion and $35 billion for mortgages.
I could read the Fed’s speech on their decision, but since The Fed has been so highly politicized, I don’t really care what they say. Only what they do.
The U.S. Treasury market is showing signs of stress that may have implications for whether the curve keeps steepening.
Over the past month the curve has retraced from an inversion to a steepening driven by a surge in yields on benchmark 10-year bonds. That has led to interesting outlier indications, as traders weigh the outlook for Federal Reserve interest rate increases and inflation.
The US Treasury yield curve has settled-in at 20.383 bps (effectively zero) as The Fed continues its war on inflation.
On the SOFR front, we see SOFR Coupons being slow to benefits from Fed rate hikes. So, SOFR Coupons are behaving like Stouffer’s lasagna, frozen and tasteless.
On the other hand, mortgage rates continue to soar on EXPECTATIONS of Fed rate hikes.
Meanwhile, CoreLogic revealed that March 2022 home prices were still sizzling at 20.9% YoY.
Phoenix AZ leads the top ten at 30.4% with Washington DC lagging at 9.9%.
So, its official. The Federal Reserve is best exemplified by former Yankee/Mets first baseman “Marvelous” Marv Throneberry. When players presented Mets’ manager Casey Stengel with a birthday cake but neglected to give piece of cake to Throneberry, Stengel replied to Throneberry when asked why no cake, “Because I was afraid your were going to drop it.”
Just like The Federal Reserve, the honorary Marv Throneberry of the the global economy.
Here is Marv’s baseball card from better days with the Yankees before they figured out that Marv was a terrible fielder. And strikeout quite a bit, like The Federal Reserve.
Today we saw the 10-year Treasury Note yield break through the 3% barrier, then retreat as is there was a reflecting barrier at 3%.
And in Europe, we saw a flash crash allegedly caused by Citi’s trading desk.
The selloff was triggered by a large erroneous transaction made by the U.S. bank’s London trading desk, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information. A knee-jerk selloff in OMX Stockholm 30 Index in five minutes wreaked havoc in bourses stretching from Paris to Warsaw toppling the main European index by as much as 3% and wiping out 300 billion euros ($315 billion) at one point.
The US Dollar rose again as expectations of Fed monetary tightening due to inflation become a reality.
Bond Rout Boogie by Powell and The Gang!
Is YET another Fed error in the making??
Rising home prices and The Fed signaling an end to the perpetual punch bowl have resulted in the University of Michigan buying conditions for houses to hit the lowest level since 1982.
While bearish sentiment in markets highest since 2009 in the stock market.
I don’t get why Biden created a “Disinformation Control Board” led by Nina Jankowicz – a disinformation spewer. We already have disinformation media outlets like CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, etc., so why create a Federal control board? All in time for the midyear elections!!
If this move by Biden doesn’t terrify you, then you didn’t study history.
It’s official! The Biden economy stinks!
US real GDP growth for Q1 slipped into negative territory (-1.4% QoQ) while GDP price growth rose to 8%. So, negative real GDP growth is negative coupled with horrid inflation.
Personal consumption expenditures were below expectations at 2.7%.
Now that the Biden Administration has created an old Soviet Union-style Ministry of Disinformation (called the “Disinformation Governance Board”), I hope that I don’t get censored for reporting that the Biden economy officially stinks.
Good luck to The Federal Reserve in withdrawing the monetary stimulus.
Heartaches in heartaches. US GDP growth for Q2 has stumbled to 0.446% as The Fed is launching quantitative tightening (QT) to fight the inflation that they caused in the first place.
According to the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow real-time GDP tracker, US GDP growth has stumbled to a meager 0.446%. Despite the massive stimulus from The Federal Reserve and Washington DC’s massive fiscal stimulus.
Biden, Powell and Congress are driving me crazy with inflation/price changes.
No corporate economists, inflation is NOT a good thing.
Pending home sales decline 8.9% in March, another heartache for Americans.
Will The Fed say good bye to its Snake Juice??
Here is Dvorak’s New World Symphony, an appropriate piece the global turmoil that has taken place after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Here is the ratio of the S&P 500 index against the Bloomberg Commodity Price Index. This ratio is plotted against The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet of assets. Notice the decline in the Commodity Ratio in 2022, even ahead of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Global currencies, on the other hand, have been really crushed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Japanese Yen, China’s Renminbi and Europe’s Euro relative to the US Dollar are falling due to a variety of reasons. Covid lockdown in China, Japan’s insistence on monetary easing while other Central Banks are tightening and the Euro with Russia threatening nuclear war.
WTI Crude is back to $100 a barrel. Critical metals are down today related to a slowing global economy and wheat is up 2.75%.
Could it be that US Dollar hegemony is nearly over and commodity-backed currencies are the way of the future?
M2 Money stock YoY skyrocketed during the Covid mini-recession, peaking at 21% during February of 2021. The Dallas Fed manufacturing outlook grew to 38.1 in March 2021.
However, as M2 Money growth has slowed 11%, the Dallas Fed manufacturing outlook has plunged to near zero.
So, with the economy faltering (and REAL wage growth in negative territory), will The Fed reinstate its “Low Rider” interest rate policies?
The US Treasury 10Y yield is down -12.5 basis points (never a good sign as investors buy Treasuries in a flight to safety).
Crude oil is down below $100 again and is down -5.61% today on … problems everywhere. ALL metals are down.
Cryptos are getting clobbered today as well.
Between Biden’s “Going green!” policies and The Fed’s allegedly trying to fight inflation, markets are getting trashed.
Do you want to see a magic trick? Like how governments shut down the US economy resulting in collapsing office occupancy rates while the price of office buildings rose dramatically (+16.3% since Q2 2020)?
Kastle’s “Back to work barometer” is showing that the 10 city average occupancy rate in the US is now only 42.8% as remote working has caught on. And the fear of yet another Covid mutation is keeping office occupancy below 50%.
Even Washington DC, home of Dr. Anthony Fauci, has only a 37.5% occupancy rate. Of the top 10 cities, Austin TX has the highest office occupancy rate at 62.4%.
So, the magic trick is not why America is so slow to return to the office, but why commercial office prices are rising so fast. Ah, Federal government STIMULYTPO! Aka, The Federal Reserve has been overstimulating the economy since 2008 and particularly since 2020 and Covid.
Speaking of a magic trick, here is how government’s make the average time to foreclosure up to over 7 years in Hawaii and 4.4 years in New York. In simple terms, you can buy a home in New York, never make a mortgage payment and live rent free for an average of 4.4 years.
Of course, the states with the longest average times to foreclosures at JUDICIAL foreclosures states (seen here is gray). Hawaii is now a judicial foreclosure state. That is, you must line up for a judge to hear your case.
So, the government’s magic trick is to 1) shut down local economies in fear of Covid, 2) provide excessive fiscal and monetary stimulus to combat the shutdown, 3) watch office building prices soar with stimulus as office occupancy remains below 50%.
Do you want to see a magic trick? Watch The Fed try to tighten monetary easing and NOT crash the economy.
Update for 04/25/2022. 10Y Treasury yields DOWN 8.7 bps.
And commodities are tanking. WTI oil is down 5%, iron ore is down almost 7%.
And the Dow is diving with increased expectations of Fed monetary tightening, but the expectations (green line) have been declining this morning.
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