Wednesday Macros
Choppy Overnight Trading...But Range Bound... Two Fed Speakers..Minutes
The overnight markets started out with a mild risk on tone for Asian equities, that sent 10 year treasuries to 1.278 at 1.15 am.. Then some risk off selling led the 10 year to its low yield of the overnight session of 1.255 at 4 am... Now we are back near the high yields of the overnight session... This is a long way of saying liquidity stinks and no one knows the next big move.
Today will be led by the Fed speak... Both new Fed speak from Bullard and possibly Kaplan... We already had Rosengren in an FT interview... And of course the FOMC minutes at 2 PM... We think the Fed is closer to tapering than the markets anticipate . But as long as the Covid Delta variant remains in the headline, we do not think rates move too far... 10 year has resistance again at 1.22 and support at the 200 day moving average of 1.31...While many of our colleagues think the tapering is built in and well anticipated, we could not disagree more...
Kudos to our friends at the FT who had three good articles in the overnight press
1) Fed's Rosengren.."Massive bond purchases are ill-suited for US economy
2) Rennison..."Rating agencies caution on corporate debt after borrowing frenzy
3) China's Xi calls for wealth redistribution and clampdown on high incomes... Really that is what all the fuss is about?... No, it is about power...
New issue corporates are very quiet with less than 2 billion issued yesterday... The first two days of the week were just over 5 billion.. We doubt we reach the 15 billion expected for the week... Spreads are wider with CDX at 293... But still within the 280-300 range... While credit rating agencies are worried about the leverage health of corporations, we read a very different, positive, outlook on corporations from Citi last week... We are not worried about US corporations at this time... And according to the stats, neither are Asian accounts worried about US Corporate bonds as they are buying them faster than they can be printed.
Japan, Taiwan, and China all added record levels of Corporate bonds to their holdings in June, surpassing levels set during the start of the pandemic... Japan adding 17.1 billion, while Taiwan added 7.9 billion.
While Delta variant makes the first spot in the nightly news with a horrible outlook focusing on the worst of it... They fail to mention that a lot of the non vaxxers are waking up. The number of Americans getting a first vaccine shot rose to levels last seen in May.. And if you read the Target call discussing the results overnight, Brian Cornell, the CEO, said that the retailer is not seeing any change in consumer behavior amid rising Covid cases... He used the word resilient multiple times.
Equities... No idea whether this is the start of a correction... Equities rebounded from their lows in the last 2 hours... There is still lots of money on the sidelines... A 10%, or at least a 5% correction, is expected between now and the end of the quarter, but we just do not think this is the beginning... Investors continue to think that corporate spending and buybacks will support stocks. According to the WSJ, S+P 500 companies are projected to increase cash spending to 2.8 trillion in 2021 on capital expenditures, mergers and other types of investment.
20 year auction today... Right after Bullard, and before the FOMC minutes... BB says Kaplan is supposed to speak later today but the FOMC speech schedule has that on Friday...