Free Republic

A series of weak auctions for U.S. Treasurys are stoking investors’ concerns that markets will struggle to absorb an incoming rush of government debt. ... inflation not tamed ... Federal Reserve will leave interest rates at multidecade highs for .. years to come. The 10-year yield—the benchmark for borrowing rates on everything from mortgages to corporate loans—finished the week around 4.5%... At the same time, the government is poised to sell another $386 billion or so of bonds in May—an onslaught that Wall Street expects to continue no matter who wins November’s presidential election. While few fear a failed auction—an...

A month ago we reported that according to much delayed TIC data, China had just dumped the second-largest amount of US Treasurys in history. The problem, of course, with this data is that it is stale and very backward looking. For a much better, and up to date, indicator of what foreigners are doing with US Treasurys in near real time, the bond watchers keep track of a less known data series, called "Treasury Securities Held in Custody for Foreign Official and International Accounts" which as the name implies shows what foreigners are doing with their Treasury securities held...

The most devastating market events are those that no one sees coming. Take what happened to Lehman Brothers in 2008, for example. Up until the last minute, virtually no one could have imagined one of the country's leading investment banks would file for bankruptcy. The housing market crash was the same way. The Street believed housing prices would never go down. With the market totally blind to the growing risk in each investment, anyone who had investments in housing or with Lehman Brothers suffered huge losses. Despite these tough lessons, there is now another epic bubble developing and the market...

Following today's unprecedented POMO failure due to "system difficulties" (one would hope the Fed's POMO machine does not start and stop every time someone pulls the plug from the socket), Brian Sack's team (not to be confused with the PWG team of Eric Mindich) had to reschedule the literally failed auction. As it turns out, the first opportunity to sell $8-$8.75 billion in 2013 bonds is on December 2. And unlike the December 21 "reverse" POMO which is due to take place at 1:15pm, the rescheduled bond sale will instead occur at its usual time of 10:15-11:00am. Ironically, this is...

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said Tuesday there is "no risk" the U.S. will lose its top credit rating amid a new analysis that revised its outlook on American debt to "negative." Geithner took to the airwaves of financial news networks to push back against a report Monday by Standard & Poor's that lowered its outlook on U.S. debt to "negative," reflecting political uncertainty over whether lawmakers will reach an agreement to address long-term debt.

It has not been Jim Caron's decade. The Morgan Stanley rates strategist, riding on the coattails of the always wrong Morgan Stanley economics team led by David Greenlaw, has been wrong in his annual rates call year after year after year. Which is unfortunate because while unable to see the forest for the trees, Caron does have a better grasp of rates than most other Wall Street penguins. That said, just like everyone else in the status quo, Caron has just come out with another short duration call (i.e. sell bonds), probably the 6th time in a row he has...

Standard & Poor's on Monday downgraded the outlook for the United States to negative, saying it believes there's a risk U.S. policymakers may not reach agreement on how to address the country's long-term fiscal pressures. "Because the U.S. has, relative to its 'AAA' peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable," the agency said in a statement. The S&P said the move signals there's at least a one-in-three likelihood that...

This week's government debt sale ended on a sour note, with investors unfriendly toward a sale of long bonds. The $13 billion sale of 30-year bonds fetched a high yield of 3.82 percent, 0.042 percentage points above the "when issued" expectations. Bidders put up 2.73 times the amount bid, a measure known as the bid-to-cover ratio. Foreign demand also was soft, with indirect bidders making up just 36 percent of total buyers.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York bought $2.599 billion in Treasurys on Wednesday. Dealers submitted $13.087 billion in debt maturing between 2021 and 2026 to the Fed. When the Fed last bought debt with those maturities, it purchased about $3 billion. The U.S. central bank has purchased more than $250 billion of the $300 billion in U.S. debt it promised in March to buy in an effort to keep borrowing costs, particularly for companies and homebuyers, affordable. Fed policy makers said last week they will slow down purchases to finish the buybacks in October, a month later than previously...