Category: Market Action

Maybe we will have a return to Rae Days as well!

Ontario is prepared to miss its deficit-reduction targets to avoid deep program cuts as Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government walks away from austerity.

The shift in priorities – which will effectively see the minority Liberal administration embrace deficit spending as the best way to rev up the province’s sluggish economy – will be signalled in Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s fall economic statement on Thursday, government sources told The Globe and Mail.

Policy rates were slashed in Europe:

The European Central Bank surprised the market today by cutting interest rates to a record low as falling inflation threatened its mission of keeping prices stable in the 17-country euro zone.

Wholly unexpected by the vast majority of economists, the announcement triggered an immediate fall in the euro. My mid-afternoon central European time, it was down almost 1.5 per cent against the dollar. Commodities fell while stock indexes rose.
…
ECB president Mario Draghi said he expected a “prolonged” period of low inflation but would not define that period, insisting he would have a better picture in December, when the next inflation gauge and other economic date are due. “It’s not going to be a short, short time,” he said at the ECB’s press conference in Frankfurt.

I’ve always said – they may be in trouble, they may always be in second place to the foreign flavour of the month, but it’s hard to make money betting against America:

Specialty operations are finding new opportunities because of 3-D printers, said Patrick Hunter, senior vice president of marketplace operations for MFG.com in Atlanta. The technology allows three-dimensional designs created on computers to be sent digitally to industrial machines, which put down layers of materials ranging from plastic to metal to create parts or products.

“It’s opened the doors to smaller shops because people aren’t tied to the large mass manufacturers,” said Hunter, whose company has been matching companies with parts makers for about a dozen years.

Low volume typically means runs of products of more than 1,000, which exceeds capacity of a home workshop, and less than 5,000 to 10,000, which is usually the minimum to get work done overseas at a factory in China, he said.

More than 58 percent of small shops added new machines for so-called additive technology in 2012, the third year of gains since the recession ended, according to Wohlers Report 2013, which tracks the industrial market for industrial 3-D printing technology from Fort Collins, Colorado.

I have long criticized the standard five-year term for mortgage loans in Canada – it makes no sense to finance a long-term asset exclusively with a short-term loan, although it makes all kinds of sense for lender. The US model, for all its myriad faults, at least matches financing certainty with asset life. But in Denmark the mismatch is even worse:

Danish mortgage banks have struggled to wean borrowers off loans funded by one-year bonds as deadlines near to demonstrate they can withstand a 12-month funding market freeze. Standard & Poor’s in July told lenders they risked downgrades if they don’t cut use of the securities over the next two years. The central bank has also criticized the bonds and the risks borrowers face if interest rates rise.

One-year bonds fund about 40 percent of home loans in Denmark. Borrowers have been attracted to record-low rates thanks to AAA-rated Denmark’s status as a haven from Europe’s debt crisis. Still, households have grown more exposed to interest-rate shocks as debt burdens soar to a world-record of 310 percent of disposable incomes, according to data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Under the government’s proposed measure, short-term bonds would convert to longer-term securities if refinancing auctions fail or interest rates climb in auctions by more than 5 percentage points. Existing bonds would be excluded from the measure, which would go into effect Jan. 1 if approved by lawmakers.

The bonds convert if the auctions fail? Have the lessons of the financial crisis been forgotten so quickly?

It was a positive day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts flat, FixedResets winning 15bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 9bp. Volatility was average by long term standards, very low by standards of the past six months. Volume was well above average.

US regulators are making a a big move to extend their power:

BlackRock Inc. (BLK) and Fidelity Investments will be studied by U.S. regulators who are in the early stages of reviewing whether asset managers pose a potential risk to the financial system, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council’s discussion Oct. 31 and agreement to review New York-based BlackRock and Boston-based Fidelity don’t necessarily mean the companies will be designated systemically important by the council, according to the people, who requested anonymity because the meeting was closed to the public. The panel didn’t take any formal action regarding the companies.

FSOC’s preliminary talks may presage months of wrangling between the industry and officials charged with trying to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. Asset managers are among non-bank financial companies that the council is empowered by law to evaluate to determine whether their failure could threaten the entire system and thus require Federal Reserve oversight. BlackRock, Fidelity and the mutual-fund industry’s trade group have said money managers aren’t a threat.

Political cover for the investigation is provided by an Office of Financial Research (who?) report titled Asset Management and Financial Stability:

Reflecting these issues, this report describes:

• • the activities of asset management firms and the funds they manage;
• • the key factors that make the industry vulnerable to shocks: (1) “reaching for yield” and herding behaviors; (2) redemption risk in collective investment vehicles; (3) leverage, which can amplify asset price movements and increase the potential for fire sales; and (4) firms as sources of risk;
• • the key channels through which shocks can be transmitted: exposures across funds and firms and the impacts of fire sales; and
• • the data available to measure those activities, vulnerabilities, and channels, and the nature of the gaps in those data.

The report does not focus on particular risks posed by money market funds. In November 2012, the Council released a detailed analysis of these funds and their risks, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently proposed additional reforms.2
In addition, the activities and risks posed by hedge funds, private equity, and other private funds are not addressed in detail. Additional analysis will be conducted in conjunction with further analysis of data that these funds have begun to file on Form PF. The OFR, SEC, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are currently evaluating these data for monitoring purposes.

Assiduous Readers will remember that in the case of Money Market Funds, the much-needed regulatory reform was beaten back by the industry and MMFs can continue to operate as zero-capital banks. I have complete faith in the regulators to get everything backwards and regulate the hell out of asset management firms.

Here’s another region with a lousy economy:

Waning European growth and inflation will put pressure on the European Central Bank (ECB) to cut interest rates in an effort to keep the fragile recovery intact.

The autumn economic update released on Tuesday by the European Commission (EC) showed that the euro-zone economy will return to growth in 2014, after two years of recession, but at a slower pace than was forecast in the spring. Inflation in the euro zone fell to just 0.7 per cent in October, the lowest rate since 2009, when the financial crisis was at its peak.

Sometimes – not very often – there is some justice in the world:

Four Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) traders who won reinstatement of their jobs after they were dismissed following an internal probe into rate-rigging were awarded 365,474 euros ($493,370) in missed salary.

The total monthly pay of the four men, who were fired in February, ranged from 10,833 euros to 22,083 euros on average, according to the written version of the judgment made Sept. 11 and released by the Frankfurt Labor Court today. The men, whose names weren’t disclosed, returned to work on Nov. 4, according to the bank.
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The traders said that before they were dismissed, their bonuses for 2011 were reduced as a sanction for their allegedly inappropriate behavior and that an unidentified Deutsche Bank official said they would be compensated once “the situation had calmed down,” according to the ruling.

Deutsche Bank disputes that account, the document shows. A spokesman for Deutsche Bank, Christian Streckert, declined to immediately comment when reached by phone today.

The court said the total value of the wrongful dismissal claims is 1.9 million euros. That number reflects the pay owed to the plaintiffs, including any potential future earnings under their employment contract.

The poor regulators will have to fill in the notch they made in their red pencil! Well, never mind, there are other careers to destroy and lives to ruin. And after all, the the hysteria helps balance government budgets:

A number of finance firms, including Royal Bank of Scotland and Rabobank face billions of euros in fines next month from European Union regulators for colluding on global benchmark interest rates, reinforcing Brussels’ hard line on the sector after the financial crisis.

EU antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia is set to unveil a record fine of at least €1.5-billion ($2-billion) on six banks, including Barclays and RBS, for rigging the yen Libor interest rate benchmark, a banking source said on Wednesday.

There’s a new wrinkle in the Treasury market:

The U.S. Treasury Department will sell $10 billion to $15 billion of its first floating-rate notes Jan. 29 and said a period of political wrangling over the budget requires a delay in plans to reduce coupon auctions.

The floating-rate notes will have a two-year maturity and be the Treasury’s first new security in 17 years, the department said today in its quarterly refunding announcement. Note and bond sales next week will total $70 billion, the lowest since February 2009 and less than the $72 billion auctioned last quarter, the Treasury said.
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Floaters are securities with rates set periodically, and the Treasury’s notes will be referenced to the 13-week bill rate. They are the first new U.S. government debt securities since Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities were introduced in 1997.

It was a mildly positive day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts winning 13bp, FixedResets up 10bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 3bp. The Performance Highlights table is dominated by FixedResets with low Issue Reset Spreads. Volume was well above average.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.54%, equivalent to 7.20% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long Corporates now yield about 4.7%, so the pre-tax, interest-equivalent spread between the two is now about 250bp, a slight (and perhaps spurious, particularly given the index rebalancing as of October 31) increase from the 245bp reported October 31.

OSFI has released a letter to IASB about Insurance Contracts. Their first objection is serious – very serious indeed:

We are concerned that, if the ED is finalized as proposed, OSFI would likely need to make significant adjustments to the financial statements for regulatory capital purposes.

Oh golly! They might have to change their regulatory capital calculations!

Funny, I would have thought that the sole legitimate consideration was: do the proposed changes provide a materially better reflection of reality than the prior accounting paradigm? But I suppose I am only parading my naivety.

Their second objection is equally oblivious to the issues:

Moreover, the adjustments in question may have the effect of relaxing rather than constraining the assumptions that lie behind the requirements of the standard.

Well, that’s fine – as long as the new standards reflect reality better than the old ones, who cares whether they’re relaxing or constraining?

The meat of their letter highlights some motherhood issues, but doesn’t provide any suggestions:

In our 2010 comment letter, OSFI noted the potential for significant, inappropriate volatility if short term fluctuating market rates were used to discount very long-duration liabilities. The IASB has confirmed that either a bottom-up or top-down approach could be used to determine the discount rate. However, due to the high-level nature of a principles based standard, we understand there are a wide range of views of how the top-down approach could be interpreted for the long duration discount rates as currently drafted in the ED. We are pleased that the exposure draft allows more weight to be put on long term estimates than on short-term fluctuations when forecasting unobservable discount rates for long-duration liabilities. We believe current period fluctuations should not exaggerate the volatility of very long-dated liabilities. As such, long-duration liabilities beyond the observable period where deep and liquid markets exist should grade to a slow-moving long-term rate.

When discussing Asset Liability Management, they’re a little shy about stating their concern directly:

We believe the use of OCI for insurance contract liability measurement should be optional, rather than mandatory as currently proposed in the ED.

Asset Liability Management (ALM) practices are designed to ensure that there are sufficient assets to support insurance liabilities. This is achieved by investing in various types of assets with different attributes (e.g. yield, cash flow, risk and duration) that best fulfill various insurance liabilities obligations. Accounting standards should capture economic mismatches between assets and the insurance contract liabilities they support, but standards should not create accounting mismatches on their own. We believe the mandatory use of OCI may have an unintended consequence by reflecting both economic and accounting mismatches in the financial statements, making it difficult for users to distinguish between true economic mismatches and those created by accounting standards.

In order to fulfill various types of insurance liabilities obligations, investing in assets like mortgages, equities and derivatives instead of plain vanilla bonds could be appropriate for a portfolio that is well managed and diversified. We believe the interaction between IFRS 4 and IFRS 9 needs further consideration to take into account ALM practices of life insurers and to reduce accounting mismatches.

A very bureaucratic letter! All the substance will take place behind closed doors, to ensure opacity and non-accountability.

The latest housing bubble worry emanates from Australia:

Australia, where housing accounts for about 60 percent of average household wealth compared with a global average of 45 percent, joins countries from Canada to Sweden to China seeing rapid price gains amid low borrowing costs that are sparking fears of a housing bubble. For now, constrained housing supply and demand from investors are driving prices higher, overpowering the downdraft from slower economic growth and a rising jobless rate.
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In Sydney, the nation’s most populous city, the average home price surged 13 percent in the 10 months to Oct. 31 to a record A$718,122 according to the RP Data-Rismark home value index. That compares with $806,000 in New York as of Sept. 30, according to the Real Estate Board of New York, and 331,338 pounds ($536,237) in London, according to the Nationwide Building Society.

A report to the U.S. Treasury’s Borrowing Advisory committee titled Assessing fixed income market liquidity makes some cogent points:

• ● Market turnover has if anything increased since the financial crisis
• ● But liquidity is about much more than turnover
  • – Tendency to disappear abruptly when really needed
• ● Primary liquidity not really a problem; major issues all in secondary
• ● Neither turnover nor the street have been able to keep pace with the massive expansion in markets
• ● Regulations have created multiple constraints likely to curtail liquidity when it is really needed:
  • – Most have pushed liquidity towards Treasuries, reducing it in risky assets:
  • • Basel risk-weightings, swaps clearing, LCR requirements
    • – Now, supplementary leverage ratios risk curtailing it even in Treasuries: dealers likely to meet requirements by reducing assets rather than raising capital
  • ● Effects of regulations to date have been offset by Fed policy pushing investors in the opposite direction:
    • – Significant demand for fixed income assets in general, and risky assets in particular
  • ● Technology and shifts in market structure have added to the appearance of liquidity, but done little to add depth
  • ● Potential for significant dislocation when investor flows reverse

  …
  Secondary trading requires risk warehouses
  …
  Capital cost under Basel 3 … 3-5x increase in charges for corporate bonds
  …
  Dealers can no longer afford to act as credit warehouses

There are a lot of great charts in those slides and I thoroughly recommend a full reading of the presentation. It strikes me that at some point, some large hedge fund – perhaps one that already acts as an intermediary for retail equity trades, standing between the brokerage house and the exchanges – will find it worth their while to make markets from their long positions. I think that – subject to regulatory bullshit, which is probably extremely bullshitty – the big Canadian funds should be doing that now. Why not?

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 5bp, FixedResets gaining 2bp and DeemedRetractibles off 8bp. Volatility was dominated by FixedResets. Volume was well above average.

So what happens to US banks if skyrocketting interest rates cause another housing collapse? The Fed wants to know:

The Federal Reserve said it will examine how the biggest banks might react to a jump in long-term interest rates and another housing crash as it released the next round of stress-test scenarios designed to monitor the ability of the U.S. financial system to withstand economic shocks.

The central bank mentioned that as part of two adverse scenarios it will gauge bank resilience against declines in the prices of high-risk, high-yield loans and debt and some high-priced real estate markets around the country, according to a statement released in Washington today. The central bank also inserted a test for large trading and clearing banks on counterparty default.

There’s an interesting piece on Bloomberg about local government in the rural US:

Monroe is hemorrhaging residents, like rural jurisdictions across the U.S. Yet these communities operate with the same layers of government as when horse-and-buggy travel helped determine the boundaries of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties. As population drops and infrastructure decays, officials and residents concerned about the loss of jobs and identity resist shrinking their government.

“People like that eye-to-eye contact,” said Monroe County Judge Larry Taylor, the top elected official in the county of 7,800. It has lost 44 percent of its population since 1980 as its main budget grew 9 percent, even when adjusted for inflation.
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In North Dakota, public costs would have fallen 2.5 percent annually by combining general government, road maintenance, public safety, and health and welfare, according to a 1996 North Dakota State University analysis of a failed proposal to merge 53 counties into 15.

Rob Carrick of the Globe writes an interesting piece on BMO’s generic advisor, titled Investing advice: How adviceDirect stakes out middle ground:

In the investing business, there’s no surer validation of a new initiative than having your competitors copy you. AdviceDirect has struck out on that count. After a full year in operation, no one else has introduced a service where clients invest online while receiving a combination of Web-based and person-to-person advice.

But adviceDirect is on to something in targeting people who gravitate to DIY investing, but need help. “The discipline adviceDirect gives a do-it-yourself investor can be very attractive for people who don’t have the time, the experience or the confidence,” says Viki Lazaris, president and CEO of BMO InvestorLine.
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BMO won’t say how many people have signed up for adviceDirect, but you get an idea of how busy things are in the fact that the advice team there comprises just eight people right now. If adviceDirect manages to build its franchise, it will be a result of the work done by these investment specialists (that’s BMO’s title for them).

I’ll suggest that a good business case for adviceDirect can be made solely on the basis of insurance … insuring BMO against the risk that mutual fund trailers will be banned (see various posts and comments commencing on December 17, 2012). In such a case, they’ll be up and running with a working model of access to small investors and that head start could be quite an advantage.

Incidentally, there was a bit of an update on that situation in June:

Indeed, according to the OSC’s transcript of the event, Greg Pollock, president and CEO of Advocis, cautioned that “financial advice would become unaffordable, and therefore
inaccessible, to the average Canadian.”

There also are fears that any move away from embedded commissions could ultimately drive many advisors out of the business. Indeed, defenders of the current system point to the U.K., which introduced new rules outlawing embedded commissions, among other reforms, on Jan. 1. It was suggested at the OSC meeting that the U.K. has lost 25% of its advisory sales force due to its ban on commissions, with several large financial services institutions dropping out of the retail investment advice business altogether.
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According to data from London-based Matrix Solutions Inc., since the RDR took effect on Jan. 1, the number of authorized investment intermediary firms is down by about 6% as of May; the total number of registered individuals in this sector is off by 9.5%; and the ranks of so-called “customer-facing staff” is down by 12.3%.

Those figures are much lower than was suggested at the OSC’s January meeting, and it appears that the immediate effects now are being reversed a bit. In fact, the data show that the number of registered reps rose in May month-over-month, and the number of customer-facing reps rose for the second straight month.

Ontario has a message for business – Spend, spend, spend!

In a speech at Toronto’s Empire Club Monday, Finance Minister Charles Sousa took aim at so-called “dead money” – capital that corporations have been holding onto since the global recession. The federal government has already pressed companies to invest that money in the economy, and Mr. Sousa said his government would use the tax system to encourage them to do it.

These would include a tax credit for research and development spending, and an incentive for companies that buy new equipment or technology, or spend money to train employees.

Mr. Sousa said he understands why companies have been hoarding cash, but warned that doing so is holding back Canada’s economy.

Me, I’d say that what is holding back Canada’s economy is government distortion of the free markets, but I’m not the treasurer of Ontario.

Robert Shiller is warning of another housing bubble – but this one’s in Brazil:

The government increased the price limit of houses people can buy using the unemployment insurance fund on Sept. 30 after public lending for homes increased more than four times as much as private banks in the two years through June, to 202 billion reais ($90 billion), according to central bank data.

Rousseff’s homebuilding program has propelled demand as she seeks to stimulate the economy before next year’s presidential election. Robert Shiller, six weeks before winning the Nobel Prize for economics, cautioned that such demand may be fueling a bubble as home prices grow twice as fast as rent. Mortgage debt as a percentage of disposable household income has climbed to a record 15 percent, almost double the level at the start of Rousseff’s term.

It was a strong day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts winning 27bp, FixedResets up 26bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 16bp. FixedResets with a low Issue Reset Spread dominated the winning side of the Performance Highlights table. Volume was average.

There was a little pop in bond yields today:

Treasury 10-year note yields (USGG10YR) rose to the highest levels in two weeks after a gauge of U.S. manufacturing expanded at a faster pace than forecast, weakening the case for the Federal Reserve to maintain stimulus.

The benchmark securities extended the first five-day drop in three weeks as Fed Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said labor market gains in the past year could warrant a cut in the bond buying. Fed policy makers said Oct. 30 that the economy showed signs of “underlying strength” even as they maintained their $85 billion of monthly asset purchases.

Want a raise? Go west, young man!

Data released yesterday by Statistics Canada showed the difference in average hourly wages in Alberta and the rest of the country, but for Saskatchewan, widened again in August.

“Note that hourly wages are now nearly $6 less in Atlantic Canada than in Alberta, the widest gap on record, a factor that has contributed to pushing more than 11,000 migrants out of the region in the past year – a major headache for housing markets, government finances, etc.,” said senior economist Robert Kavcic of BMO Nesbitt Burns.

“Even B.C. is seeing the wage gap approach $4/hour versus Alberta, and not coincidentally is also seeing a decade-high net outflow of workers.”

The StatsCan report indicates that a decent economy is still comfortably far away:

Click for Big

… with an implication that those who decided to earn a living filing paperwork for construction companies are getting vindicated …

Click for Big

DBRS confirmed Enbridge at Pfd-2(low):

DBRS has today confirmed the Issuer Rating of Enbridge Inc. (ENB or the Company) at A (low) and ratings on ENB’s Medium-Term Notes & Unsecured Debentures, Commercial Paper and Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Shares ratings at A (low), R-1 (low) and Pfd-2 (low), respectively, all with Stable trends. The ratings reflect (1) a relatively strong business risk profile, (2) pressure on ENB’s near-to-medium-term credit metrics and (3) results under the ten-year Competitive Tolling Settlement (CTS), effective July 1, 2011.

Enbridge is the proud issuer of ENB.PR.A, ENB.PR.B, ENB.PR.D, ENB.PR.F, ENB.PR.H, ENB.PR.N, ENB.PR.P, ENB.PR.T and ENB.PR.Y, as well as some US-Pay stuff that I don’t track.

It was a negative day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts down 11bp, FixedResets off 3bp and DeemedRetractibles losing 18bp. The Performance Highlights table is longer than one might expect given the modest overall moves, with a preponderance of Straight losers. Volume was on the low side of average.

Nothing happened today.

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 37bp, FixedResets gaining 11bp and DeemedRetractibles off 3bp. The Performance Highlights table is notable on the downside for domination by BAM Floating Rate issues, while the upside has a surprisingly large population of FixedResets. Volume was high.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.49%, equivalent to 7.14% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates now yield about 4.7%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (in this context, the “Seniority Spread”) is now about 245bp, unchanged from October 23.

And that’s it for another month!

Today’s FOMC release was ‘Steady as she goes’:

Taking into account the extent of federal fiscal retrenchment over the past year, the Committee sees the improvement in economic activity and labor market conditions since it began its asset purchase program as consistent with growing underlying strength in the broader economy. However, the Committee decided to await more evidence that progress will be sustained before adjusting the pace of its purchases. Accordingly, the Committee decided to continue purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month and longer-term Treasury securities at a pace of $45 billion per month. The Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities and of rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction. Taken together, these actions should maintain downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative, which in turn should promote a stronger economic recovery and help to ensure that inflation, over time, is at the rate most consistent with the Committee’s dual mandate.

Joshua Zumbrun & Jeff Kearns of Bloomberg comment:

The consumer price index increased 0.2 percent after rising 0.1 percent the prior month, a Labor Department report showed today. The Fed’s preferred gauge of inflation, the personal consumption expenditures index, rose 1.2 percent in August and hasn’t breached 2 percent since March 2012.

The Fed removed a sentence from the previous statement that had said tighter financial conditions could slow the improvement in the economy.

Kansas City Fed President Esther George dissented for the seventh meeting in a row, citing the risk the Fed’s stimulus could create financial imbalances and cause long-term inflation expectations to rise.

Richard Vedder of Bloomberg rages against the cost of US universities’ hubris:

I have written before on how the expansion of federal student-loan programs has encouraged colleges to simply raise their costs. Students are left to pile up more debt while colleges indulge in their Edifice Complex — building luxury dorms and gyms and stadiums (all “sustainable,” of course) at the expense of poorer students. There is another, related government subsidy that also has perverse effects and needs reform: the tax-exempt debt binge by universities.

Schools are exuberantly borrowing, in some cases issuing 100-year (century) bonds. Some bond offerings are justified, even wise, as schools are taking advantage of low interest rates to reduce future debt-service obligations. But a lot of this activity is financing construction of high-end student housing, faddish “centers” and stadiums.

These perquisites appeal to the most affluent. For many students, however, the costs of college are rising relative to the perceived benefits, pushing them to consider lower-cost substitutes (online education, nondegree certificate programs).

Many bonds are tax-exempt. The more money borrowed, the more generous the exemption, creating in effect a taxpayer subsidy for rich universities. Should there be no cap on the tax exemptions private colleges can claim on their bond debt, and is it appropriate for the government to subsidize all types of projects at these schools?

And the argument regarding the cost of Too-Big-to-Fail rages on as well:

McCloskey’s confusion about the nature of the too-big-to-fail subsidy leads directly to another misconception: that regulatory compliance costs could somehow offset the subsidy. Compliance may or may not put a greater burden on larger banks (I suspect executives at small banks would disagree). In any case, the costs do nothing to reduce the taxpayer subsidy or the incentive to preserve it by becoming as big and systemically threatening as possible.

In other words, U.S. taxpayers are paying big banks to put the economy in danger, which is crazy. The best solution is to make banks less likely to fail by requiring that they finance themselves with more equity capital, which absorbs losses in bad times.

Regulators have taken a small step in that direction by proposing that bank holding companies have at least $5 in capital for every $100 in assets — a 5 percent leverage ratio that is a bit more than the global minimum of 3 percent. The proposal, to which banks are adamantly opposed, falls far short of the 20 percent that economists have argued would be best for the economy, but at least it’s a start. Let’s hope they stick to it.

Matt Levine writes a more sensible than usual piece about the so-call FX manipulation scandal, which I never-the-less disagree with:

There are two problems with this. One, while the bank is guaranteeing the client the WM/Reuters fix price, nobody’s guaranteeing the bank anything. The bank has to actually go trade and try to hit that price. The way the fix works is that it’s set by sampling trades over a 60-second window, so you have to have a certain amount of skill and luck to trade at (or better than) the official price. It’s risky.

Two — and this is important, too — banks are in the business of making money, and the trade they want is not “buy at WM/Reuters fix and sell at WM/Reuters fix” but rather “buy at less than WM/Reuters fix and sell at WM/Reuters fix.”
If your client tells you at 3:30 that they want to buy francs at the 4 p.m. price, there are fairly straightforward ways to try to ensure a profit. Like: If they’re buying a lot of francs, then you’d expect that to push the market for francs up. So what you could do is start buying francs at 3:30 when they’re trading at $1.1150 or whatever,**** and keep buying steadily until 4 p.m. when they’re trading at $1.1200, for an average price of like $1.1175, and then sell to the client at the 4 p.m. fix of $1.1200. You buy francs for $1.1175, you sell them for $1.1200, you make $0.0025 per franc, you do it a lot, boom, good business.
…
Also some things are right out:

In June, Bloomberg News reported that dealers pooled information about their positions through instant messages, executed their own trades before client orders and sought to manipulate the benchmark WM/Reuters rates by pushing through trades around the 60-second windows when the benchmarks are set.

The sharing client data among dealers seems self-evidently bad. The “executed their own trades before client orders and sought to manipulate the benchmark” is either bad, or just legit hedging that looks bad, or something in between, or some combination thereof, it is hard to know.

This shows a fundamental misconception of the order.

The bank has not agreed to act as agent, with fiduciary responsibility, for the client. What the bank has done is sold a very short-term (intra-day) forward contract to the client. When the dealers talk to each other, they’re not sharing information about client orders, they’re sharing information about their own orders, which they will be placing as principal in order to cover their position.

The big problem with the market is that there are too many fools and charlatans in charge of too much client money. Dealers are not your friends. Dealers are counterparties, just like Loblaws is my counterparty when I buy groceries. Loblaws and I get on well and have a mutually beneficial relationship – but they’re always trying to make it a little more beneficial for them and I’m always trying to make it a little more beneficial for me. Sadly, this fundamental truth escapes the Boo-hoo-hoo brigade.

The industry is staffed with MBAs, which stands for Minimal Brain Activity. There is nothing the dealers do that a large client – large enough to matter, large enough to be asked their intentions – cannot do himself. Trades can be sampled over a given period, whether it’s the period of the fix, or the run-up to it, or the aftermath … but, unfortunately, that involves actual work, which MBAs are fundamentally incapable of doing, or even understanding. Why, one might have to write, or commission, an algorithmic programme to buy your USD 100-million in million dollar chunks! Computer programmes? Those are for geeks! Daddy didn’t pay for a good school so I could write computer programmes! It might take more than one ‘phone call to execute the trade! More than one call? How are you going to discuss the analysis of Warren Buffet’s pronouncement on Yellen’s approach to the Fed if you have to make more than one call. Can’t be done. Call a dealer, just like Daddy calls his stockbroker.

It may be ugly and awful, but US sequestration might be working anyway:

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, said today in an interview such an accord could be a way to replace for a year or two the automatic spending cuts, known as sequestration, that both parties decry.

“A great number of entitlement programs, mandatory programs, are not Social Security and Medicare,” Sessions said. “There are a whole bunch of programs that are mandatory in nature and have never been looked at” and weren’t in the law setting up the automatic cuts, he said, citing farm subsidies and food stamps.

Asked if such a deal is a fallback to a broader deal, he said. “I would hope so.”

BAM closed a big deal:

If you have a railroad or a port for sale, there’s a big new buyer as Brookfield Asset Management just closed a massive $7-billion (U.S.) infrastructure fund that will invest in such things as transportation and energy assets. The new money has the potential to bump up Brookfield’s fee income markedly.

Brookfield blew right through the $5-billion target. There are more than 60 investors, including sovereign wealth funds, insurers, and public and private pension plans. Brookfield is putting in $2.8-billion of its own money (through its Brookfield Infrastructure Partners and Brookfield Renewable Energy Partners LP subsidiaries), meaning $4.2-billion is coming from outside investors. Brookfield said half the investors are rookies at putting money into Brookfield funds.

The new fund will surely significantly boost Brookfield’s fee income.

At a 1.5 per cent management fee, which is in the ballpark for funds of that size, the new outside assets would represent about $63-million a year in additional income for Brookfield. That would be before any performance fees.

It’s very encouraging to see business trying to take back control of the Republican party:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce fired an opening salvo yesterday in the battle for control of the Republican Party, endorsing a self-described “pro-business” candidate in a special U.S. House race whose opponent is backed by Tea Party groups and is vowing to “be like Ted Cruz.”

The endorsement in the Alabama contest is the chamber’s first political move since the 16-day partial U.S. government shutdown and debt-ceiling battle, which exposed a rift between the Republican establishment wing and the smaller-government movement. Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, was the chief proponent of the ill-fated plan to link defunding Obamacare to lifting the debt ceiling and passing a government spending bill.

In reaction to the shutdown, which Standard & Poor’s estimated cost the U.S. economy $24 billion, the chamber and other business groups said they will engage in elections — including Republican primaries — to help candidates aligned with their economic goals.

It would be nice to see that in Canada, too.

It was a strong day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 34bp, FixedResets gaining 10bp and DeemedRetractibles winning 59bp. The Floating Rate sector got whacked, perhaps in response to the FOMC release and those issues figured prominently on the wrong side of the Performance Highlights table. BAM issues were notable on the winning side. Volume was very high.

Nothing happened today.

It was a good strong day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts up 17bp, FixedResets gaining 10bp and DeemedRetractibles winning 39bp. The Performance Highlights table is dominated by winning insurance-sector DeemedRetractibles. Volume was very high.

Singapore is is seeking to encourage HFT:

Singapore Exchange Ltd. (SGX), Southeast Asia’s biggest bourse operator, wants to lure more high-speed traders onto its stock market as it grapples with lower volume.

Computerized trading firms, which execute transactions in fractions of a second, account for a negligible share of volume on Singapore Exchange’s cash equities market, according to bourse spokeswoman Loh Wei Ling, while they contribute 30 percent of revenue from derivatives. Singapore Exchange will seek to change that once it introduces safeguards, Chief Executive Officer Magnus Bocker said at a briefing this month.

“We will pursue high-frequency trading once we have circuit breakers and other policies in place,” he said. “That will enhance the liquidity and quality of the Singapore market.”

It’s nice to know that they’re not beholden to the Old Boys Club.

I understand that the SplitShare new issue, Prime US Banking Sector Split Corp. discussed on October 2, has been withdrawn. However, there is no confirmation of this as yet on the Quadravest website, the fund’s website or SEDAR. It’s a shame – new issues of this nature that get so far can cost the sponsor a great deal of money.

A gushing article about Raymond James brokerage makes a good point about the effects of bank regulation in Canada:

For instance, Raymond is looking to expand its corporate lending arm after acquiring the Canadian assets of Allied Irish Banks in 2011, and lending spreads are much more attractive here because there is less competition for loans. South of the border, everyone from banks to shadow banks to hedge funds are willing to lend money, and that hurts loan margins and covenant quality.

The Bank of Canada is very frightened of shadow banking, as are other regulators who want to work for banks eventually.

Seth Carpenter, Jane Ihrig, Elizabeth Klee, Daniel Quinn, and Alexander Boote of the Federal Reserve have written a paper titled The Federal Reserve’s Balance Sheet and Earnings: A primer and projections:

Over the past few years, the Federal Reserve’s use of unconventional monetary policy tools has received a vast amount of public attention, from discussing how these asset purchases have put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates and thus supported economic activity to evaluating the implications for Federal Reserve remittances to the Treasury and the effect on monetary and fiscal policy. As the economic recovery has gained some momentum of late, the focus has turned to issues associated with the normalization of monetary policy. In this paper, we consider a variety of scenarios consistent with statements by Federal Reserve officials about how the FOMC will normalize policy, including whether to sell mortgage-backed securities and the timing of lifting the federal funds rate off from the zero lower bound. In addition, we analyze the potential costs associated with using reserve-draining tools, which could become an important expense during the years of normalization. In each of these scenarios, we discuss the implications of these normalization policies on the size and composition of Federal Reserve asset holdings, which provides some indicate the length of time unconventional monetary policy will be in place, and on remittances of earnings to the Treasury, which capture the interest rate risk of these normalization policies.

What I find of interest is that Treasury remittances are affected only by realized capital losses on the sales – unrealized capital losses are a mere bagatelle, as higlighted by Joshua Zumbrun of Bloomberg. Mark-to-market is for suckers, losers and the private sector regulated by the Fed.

James Hamilton of Econbrowser comments:

The hot debate among Fed watchers– when will the Fed announce a “tapering” of its large-scale purchases– concerns a change in the stock of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities that the Fed ends up holding that comes to only a fraction of that $600 B reference point. For example, I noted earlier that if the Fed had (as some market observers once anticipated) announced at its September FOMC meeting that it would begin to reduce its net purchases of Treasury securities by $2.5 B per month beginning in October, the result as of the end of 2014 would be that the Fed would be holding about $100 B less in Treasury securities by the end of 2014 than if it waits to begin tapering until January. Using the above table as a guide, that suggests a difference of perhaps 2.5-5 basis points (that is, less than 0.05 percentage points difference in the annual yield) on a 10-year Treasury. Even if you double or triple that by adding in the consequences of MBS purchases, it’s hard to see this as the #1 news event with which financial markets should be gripped.

Matthew Klein of Bloomberg has some interesting commentary on cat bonds:

While we shouldn’t cry for the reinsurers just yet, some pension funds may end up buying these high-yielding assets before they fully understand how to model their risks, just as some loaded up on subprime mortgage securities during the mid-2000s. (On the bright side, investors won’t have to worry about fraud when calculating the probability of another Hurricane Sandy.)

Initially, this would depress the cost of disaster insurance, which might lead to overbuilding in risky areas and laxer enforcement of building safety codes. It could also push the insurers and reinsurers to underwrite new risks they are less familiar with in an effort to prop up margins, a danger that was highlighted by the UK’s Prudential Regulation Authority last month. The Bank for International Settlements, based in Basel, Switzerland, has also been looking into the impact of the reinsurance business on financial stability.

In the event of disaster, outside investors who didn’t appreciate what they had been buying might get so spooked by losses that they would cut their allocation to the entire sector. Small shifts from the perspective of pensions could have big effects on insurers’ ability to protect against future catastrophes. The result would be much greater volatility in the cost of insurance, to say nothing of the impact on pension beneficiaries. Plan sponsors and regulators should be careful.

It was a positive day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts gaining 2bp, FixedResets winning 16bp and DeemedRetractibles up 10bp. A surprisingly lengthy Performance Highlights table is dominated by winners. Volume was above average.

The BoC has released a paper by Bo Young Chang and Bruno Feunou titled Measuring Uncertainty in Monetary Policy Using Implied Volatility and Realized Volatility:

We measure uncertainty surrounding the central bank’s future policy rates using implied volatility computed from interest rate option prices and realized volatility computed from intraday prices of interest rate futures. Both volatility measures show that uncertainty decreased following the most important policy actions taken by the Bank of Canada as a response to the financial crisis of 2007–08, such as the conditional commitment of 2009–10, the unscheduled cut in the target rate coordinated with other major central banks, and the introduction of term purchase and resale agreements. We also find that, on average, uncertainty decreases following the Bank of Canada’s policy rate announcements. Furthermore, our measures of policy rate uncertainty improve the estimation of policy rate expectations from overnight index swap (OIS) rates by predicting the risk premium in the OIS market.

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts off 1bp, FixedResets down 5bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 9bp. Volatility was high, but without obvious patterns. Volume was high.