The NY Fed's Trading Desk Head Laments The End Of Stupid Leverage And Wants His Derivatives Back (Or Why We Are Stuck With ZIRP For A Long, Long Time)
by ilene - March 27th, 2010 11:12 pm
The NY Fed’s Trading Desk Head Laments The End Of Stupid Leverage And Wants His Derivatives Back (Or Why We Are Stuck With ZIRP For A Long, Long Time)
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
In a video conference before the ACI 2010 World Congress in Sydney, Australia, the head of the FRBNY’s trading desk, aka, the busiest daytrader over the past year, Brian Sack, demonstrated once again that Fed members are either completely clueless about ongoing market dynamics or are so good at octuple re-reverse psychology, that they make the squid pale in shame and squirt ink in envy.
Before we get into the meat of Sacks’ lament, it bears refreshing on Paul McCulley’s letter from yesterday. While Paul may have been merely pushing his book in an attempt to convince readers that rates will (or should) stay mega low for years and years (and Greenspan will be more than happy to admit that low rates have nothing, nothing, to do with asset bubbles), he did have one great observation, namely that the explosion in various forms of shadow credit: derivatives, securitizations, etc., were all dictated by the need to leverage a relatively flat yield curve.
When the 2s10s is in the 40-50bps range, financial institutions needed to find a way to leverage the long-dated end of the curve: if the Fed would not cooperate in bringing the near-end lower, well, demand for, and application of financial innovation, resulted in the multi-trillion shadow banking system. This extremely simple observartion is of remarkable consequence: securitization was not predicated on extra supply of cheap credit but arose out of bank demand for synthetic steepness: instead of capitalizing on the unlevered curve steepness, banks decided to go the volume route, making credit a way of life for everyone, thus allowing them to go all in on a massively-leveraged curve trade. The key implication is that in the current Fed-dominated environment, where the 2s10s is at record levels of almost 300 bps, banks have no need for shadow banking! Another way of saying this is that what financial institutions needed a multi trillion shadow system for, when the curve was flat, they can achieve now with the curve being as steep as it is and without shadow banking. The big banks simply do not have a need for shadow banking: ergo the demand pull side. And no…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site