Tuesday Macros
China Stocks Implode...Hong Kong Off 10%... Margin Clerks Reduce 50% Borrowings
Chinese stocks continue to plunge overnight, the good news is that the US equity futures continue to ignore the fact that the Chinese government is crushing their equities that trade overseas... Clearly the Chinese are going for Global investors, or at least for those companies that played by the rules that are now changing... Hong Kong main index was at one point this morning down 10.7% from its 3 day highs... Hong Kong Enterprise index is down over 10% in the last two days... And Chinese CSI 300 is down about 7% in the last two days...Kweb, an etf we follow, is down 18% in the last three days... We listened to the rationale for the Chinese moves against education, and we disagree... Education companies charge so much for tutoring that Chinese can not have more than 1 child, and that is a reason to crush these companies?.. Moving on.
The good thing is that US equities continue to give lip service to the Chinese situation, going down marginally overnight and then bouncing back as NY walks in... No different today from yesterday... S+P were down 25 ish overnight at the lows and now down under 5 points... We heard a BB announcer use our quote from yesterday that the equity game in the US is the least dirty shirt in the laundry... While they got the quote and the person right, they attributed us to another like sounding firm... Heck, at least they got the quote right... And yes, the equity market still has legs through the Fed meeting that starts today, and more than likely, through the Jackson Hole conference... We will delay any additional upside until we see the reaction from Jackson Hole.
Treasuries rallied overnight to 1.24 for 10 years... Through the 200 day moving average, which continues to grind higher, at 1.27 today... In the last few hours the gains have been melting and now we are at 1.26... We don't expect much until Thursday morning, as the market needs time to digest... And of course what do we have right before the Fed announcement tomorrow? A 7 year auction... Always fun to bid an hour before the Fed...we do not expect the Fed to change much, but any reference to tapering and when and how, whether it is all mortgages, or a 2/1 treasury to mortgage tapering, or a clean punt that they will get back to us, should have some effect on rates.
We listened to various financial segments... We caught one yesterday where one treasury strategist claims that the Fed now owns between 50-55% of all the treasuries... And do not know whether that is true... But when someone who is price insensitive owns as much as they do, the liquidity, and the availability for dealers to make money trading on flow, is substantially reduced... Nonetheless we see the latest CTA flows report, which shows that CTAs are maintaining their "max long" in UST( meaning 10 year futures)... Should rates move south, with a definitive strong close below 134 on 10 year futures, these funds would be expected to sell 37 billion worth of treasury futures... They are also max long Bunds, Gilts and JGBs. So the potential set up off this Fed meeting, and/or the Jackson Hole conference, could see a big move in treasuries
Problems in infrastructure and Delta variant continue to be in the background... But a strong US economy, along with massive money on the sidelines, and strong earnings, continue to dominate the longer term flows for now... Fed meeting starts today with the announcement tomorrow...10 years should remain in a 1.20-1.30 range until Thursday morning.