There are signs of liquidity decline and liquidity illusion in euro area government bond markets. Citibank research suggests that liquidity risk is rising due to increased capital requirements for dealers, reduced market maker inventories, enhanced dealer transparency rules, elevated assets under management of bond funds, and the liquidity transformation provided by these funds.
A 145-year empirical analysis suggests that asset price surges are most dangerous when they are associated with rising financial leverage. The combination of housing price bubbles and credit booms has been the most detrimental of all. This bodes ill for modern leveraged housing price booms, such as in China.
An ECB working paper explains formally why senior decision makers are unprepared for crises: they can only process limited quantities of information and rationally pay attention to rare events only if losses from unpreparedness seem more than inversely proportionate to their rarity. The less probable a negative event, the higher the condoned loss. Inattention gets worse when managers bear only limited liability.
A new BIS paper provides evidence that since 2013 fluctuations in EM fund flows and EM bond prices have reinforced each other. Both redemptions and discretionary sales of fund managers have been pro-cyclical. In liquidity-constrained markets this behavior is prone to transmitting shocks and amplifying crises.
Uncertainty over China’s exchange rate regime has accentuated local and global risks. Within China, fears of currency volatility and depreciation have reinforced capital outflows and asset price weakness. Globally, fears of ‘hard landing’ and financial pressure in China have reignited deflation concerns. Public information does not indicate a sharp slowdown or financial distress, but commentators distrust official data of an economy with great systemic vulnerability.
A new empirical analysis quantifies the (historic) link between public debt and economic growth. Critical thresholds depend on country features, such as access to financing. Average thresholds might be 60% and 80% of GDP for emerging and developed countries respectively. Importantly, debt dynamics matter more than levels. High debt is less of a drag when it is on a declining trajectory.
A recent speech by Fed governor Jerome Powell highlights recurrent episodes of short-term distress and vanishing liquidity in large developed markets. Increases in trading speed, market concentration, and regulatory costs of market making all may be contributing to these liquidity events.
A new “primer” explains how the Fed would tighten policy under current “superabundant liquidity”. Similar to the past, the focus would be on the fed funds rate, not the balance sheet. Unlike in the past, the fed funds target would be a range and pursued by setting in the interest rate on excess reserves (cap) and conducting reverse repo operations (floor).
Compressed interest rates raise the risk of hitting the zero lower bound. A new theoretical ECB paper shows that even before the ZLB is reached this creates a deflationary bias, as inflation expectations shift lower, real rates rise, and consumption and pricing power decline. To counter this bias central banks would need to accept positive output gaps (tighter labour markets) or even increase their inflation targets.
A new IMF paper provides evidence that increased foreign participation in local-currency emerging debt markets has made these significantly more vulnerable to foreign interest rate and risk shocks. Concentration of the investor base and poor economic fundamentals appear to amplify such vulnerability.
Macrosynergy is a London based macroeconomic research and technology company whose founders have developed and employed macro quantamental investment strategies in liquid, tradable asset classes, across many markets and for a variety of different factors to generate competitive, uncorrelated investment returns for institutional investors for two decades. Our quantitative-fundamental (quantamental) computing system tracks a broad range of real-time macroeconomic trends in developed and emerging countries, transforming them into macro systematic quantamental investment strategies. In June 2020 Macrosynergy and J.P. Morgan started a collaboration to scale the quantamental system and to popularize tradable economics across financial markets.
