Category: Market Action

The big news today is that the Bank of Canada did not change policy:

The Bank of Canada today maintained its target for the overnight rate at 1 per cent. The Bank Rate is correspondingly 1 1/4 per cent and the deposit rate is 3/4 per cent.

Inflation has picked up in recent months, as anticipated in the Bank’s July Monetary Policy Report (MPR), reflecting stronger economic activity and higher gasoline prices. Measures of core inflation have edged up, in line with a narrowing output gap and the diminishing effects of lower food prices. The Bank projects inflation will rise to 2 per cent in the second half of 2018. This is a little later than anticipated in July because of the recent strength in the Canadian dollar. The Bank is also mindful that global structural factors could be weighing on inflation in Canada and other advanced economies.

The global and Canadian economies are progressing as outlined in the July MPR. Economic activity continues to strengthen and broaden across countries. The Bank still expects global growth to average around 3 1/2 per cent over 2017-19. However, this outlook remains subject to substantial uncertainty about geopolitical developments and fiscal and trade policies, notably the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Canada’s economic growth in the second quarter was stronger than expected, and was more broad-based across regions and sectors. Growth is expected to moderate to a more sustainable pace in the second half of 2017 and remain close to potential over the next two years, with real GDP expanding at 3.1 per cent in 2017, 2.1 per cent in 2018 and 1.5 per cent in 2019. Exports and business investment are both expected to continue to make a solid contribution to GDP growth. However, projected export growth is slightly slower than before, in part because of a stronger Canadian dollar than assumed in July. Housing and consumption are forecast to slow in light of policy changes affecting housing markets and higher interest rates. Because of high debt levels, household spending is likely more sensitive to interest rates than in the past.

The Bank estimates that the economy is operating close to its potential. However, wage and other data indicate that there is still slack in the labour market. This suggests that there could be room for more economic growth than the Bank is projecting without inflation rising materially above target.

Based on this outlook and the risks and uncertainties identified in today’s MPR, Governing Council judges that the current stance of monetary policy is appropriate. While less monetary policy stimulus will likely be required over time, Governing Council will be cautious in making future adjustments to the policy rate. In particular, the Bank will be guided by incoming data to assess the sensitivity of the economy to interest rates, the evolution of economic capacity, and the dynamics of both wage growth and inflation.

This led to mutterings that the bank is dovish:

The Canadian dollar sank more than 1 percent against the U.S. dollar and investors pushed back bets on the timing of further interest rate increases from the central bank after Poloz, who left his benchmark rate at 1 percent, warned that the prior appreciation of the currency would dampen export growth and inflation.
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Implied odds of a December rate increase fell to one-in-three after the Bank stood pat, from almost 50 percent before the decision. The yield curve for Canadian Bankers’ Acceptances shows markets are pricing in a less urgent path for rate normalization, with the total amount of tightening expected in 2018 only modestly reduced relative to a month ago.
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Excess capacity in the labor market suggests little risk of inflation overheating in the near term, said Poloz, who highlighted involuntary part-time workers, subdued work force participation among youths, lower than expected hours worked and softness in wage growth as signs the economy has further room for improvement.

The Bank of Canada expects a broad-based pick-up in business investment to continue, with capital spending playing a larger role in driving economic activity. Policy makers raised their assessment of how fast the economy can grow without generating inflationary pressures, with Poloz later telling reporters that the revision was a conservative one.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.30%, equivalent to 6.89% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates now yield a little over 3.95%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread [in this context, the “Seniority Spread”] is now about 290bp, a slight [and perhaps spurious] narrowing from the 295bp reported October 18.

How about a good news drone story?

One company may be giving your local food delivery person some cause for worry, or atleast a run for his money. Project Wing, which is a drone delivery service project supported by the Google-owned Alphabet-X Lab, is now sending drones carrying burrito food orders to various parts of the Australian countryside.

We need this in Canada! Specifically, Toronto. Particularly, my place.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.32%, equivalent to 6.92% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates now yield about 3.95% so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (in this context, the “Seniority Spread”) is now about 295bp, a significant widening from the 285bp reported October 11.

The Boston Fed has published a fascinating paper by Daniel H. Cooper, María José Luengo-Prado and Jonathan A. Parker titled The Local Aggregate Effects of Minimum Wage Increases:

As part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal government initiated a national minimum wage in 1938, which has since been raised 22 times, the latest increase in 2009 going to $7.25 per hour. State-level minimum wage increases have occurred with much greater frequency, especially quite recently, with 17 states raising minimum wages in 2016 and 19 states doing so in 2017. In total, there have been 247 changes in the minimum wage on the federal and state level between 1999 and 2014, resulting in substantial variation in current minimum wages across the United States. The policy intent behind minimum wage laws is to raise the return to employment for low-wage workers; indeed, the idea of a $15 per hour “living wage” has been growing—in 2016 California and New York passed legislation to gradually raise their minimum wages to this level (Seattle enacted a similar gradual $15 per hour increase in 2014), while other states are enacting more modest multi-year raises.

A voluminous empirical literature has largely found that within the range of the increases historically experienced in the United States, higher minimum wages have minimal employment effects. However, this literature has largely overlooked the fact that through general equilibrium adjustments that go beyond the labor market, the level of the minimum wage should affect prices and consumer spending. Moreover, higher minimum wages may cause fluctuations as local economic conditions adjust to the changed regulations. This paper addresses these less-studied issues by exploiting the variation in minimum wages across the United States and the fact that labor markets are defined by commuting distances. The authors compile a dataset of state-level minimum wage changes for the 1999–2014 period and use city-level price data from metropolitan statistical areas to measure the dynamic effects that minimum wage increases have on annual changes in city-level prices (inflation) and consumer spending.
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In particular, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage is associated with an overall (all-items) inflation rate that is 8 basis points higher relative to the preceding year. This effect is not precisely estimated and is quite small, especially given that a 10 percent minimum wage increase is nearly double the average MWPC in our sample. However, the increase in inflation is not evenly distributed across all goods and services. In particular, minimum wage changes have the largest measured impact on food prices — especially food away from home (column 8). A 10 percent increase in the minimum wage leads to prices on food away from home that are about 0.3 percent higher.
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Consistent with our findings for prices, we find the largest, most precisely estimated effects of a minimum wage increase on food away expenditures. In particular, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage raises nominal food away consumption by nearly 0.8 percentage point. There are also relatively large and positive, but imprecisely estimated, impact effects for nondurables, and food and beverages consumed at home. In addition, the cumulative increase in food at home consumption is precisely estimated and of similar magnitude to the impact (and cumulative) effect for food away. Consumption of services also increases slightly.
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In addition, the food away and food at home consumption effects are much larger than the respective food price effects, suggesting that nominal food consumption increases more than the amount that would be implied by higher prices alone. That is, consumers appear to adjust the quantity of food that they consume when the minimum wage rises, with the effect on food away from home being more immediate and the effect on food at home occurring over time.

There is a very good staff working paper published by the Bank of Canada, by Jean-Sébastien Fontaine and Guillaume Nolin titled Measuring Limits of Arbitrage in Fixed-Income Markets:

We use relative value to measure limits to arbitrage in fixed-income markets. Relative value captures apparent deviations from no-arbitrage relationships. It is simple, intuitive and can be computed model-free for any bond. A pseudo-trading strategy based on relative value generates higher returns than one based on the well-known noise measure. The relative value is therefore a better proxy for limits to arbitrage. We construct relative value indices for the US, UK, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland and Canada. Limits to arbitrage increase with the scarcity of capital: we find that each index is correlated with local volatility and funding costs. Limits to arbitrage also exhibit strong commonality across countries, consistent with the international mobility of capital. The relative value indices are updated regularly and available publicly.
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Using a static parametric yield curve, Hu, Pan and Wang (2013) (HPW thereafter) show that an index of fitting errors—the “noise” measure—is priced in the cross-section of returns from hedge funds and carry trades. In other words, aggregating these deviations tends to reveal an important financial risk factor.

Measuring fitting errors against a parametric curve is a component of HIMIPref™ I dub “disparity”. The BoC paper then states:

We introduce a new measure of deviations based on the relative value of bonds. This measure is model-free, bypassing the need for preliminary parameter estimation. It is intuitive and easy to compute. For any bond in our sample, we use a small number of comparable bonds to form a replicating portfolio with the same duration and convexity. This bond and its replicating portfolio should have the same expected return. The relative value for that bond is the difference between its yield and that of the replicating portfolio.

So it’s a tightly constrained yield maximizer, also a component of HIMIPref™.

Extending the analysis to several other countries, we find that the relative value index is correlated with local equity market volatility indices and domestic interbank lending market conditions. In addition, the relative value indices exhibit a large degree of commonality across countries. These relative value indices are available publicly and will be regularly updated. We hope that these indices will help to answer a number of research questions. In addition, future research could apply our methodology to create relative value indices for supranational, sub-national or corporate bond markets.

I have a number of technical quibbles about their methodology, but it’s a worthy effort. The two problems that come immediately to mind are first, the quality of the market data (I haven’t seen a bond database yet that hasn’t been riddled with errors) and the fact that there’s no allowance for the cost of shorting. I found in the Treasury Market in the ’90’s that there were a lot of unusually rich issues (particularly in the short end) … and that almost every one of those had ‘gone special’ in the loans market, meaning they were expensive to short. And just try getting data for THAT!

But, I will admit, the part I like best about this paper is that it provides third party validation of my investing style … which is always a useful thing to have on hand when marketing one’s services!