While the market’s attention has recently focused on what is taking place in the world of unsecured funding, where Libor has been blowing out to 6 year highs, pushing the benchmark to the highest level in 6 years…
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… and where the the 3 month/ 6 month and 1 month/3 month Libor bases have soared to the widest since the financial crisis, due to a funding pull back for issuers in commercial paper ahead of money market reform (something which sadly means the Ted-spread is no longer a relevant metric of funding stress as explained before)…
… another curious thing is taking place in the plain-vanilla bond market, where according to the latest Fed Reserve balance statement, Treasury holdings in custody at the Fed – which peaked at $3.03 trillion in July 2015, tumbled by over $17 billion to $2.871 trillion as of the week ended August 10. This has brought the total Tsy custody holdings to the lowest since 2012 (apart from a sudden decline in March 2014 that was reversed over 2 subsequent weeks linked at the time to the sudden military escalation between Russia and Ukraine).
While TIC data released this Monday will give us some much needed, if substantially delayed, data on reserve manager activity as of June, the hypothesis is that OPEC countries such as Saudi Arabia are once again quietly selling Treasuries to raise cash in an environment of low oil prices and the consequent budgetary tightness, according to Citi’s Jabaz Mathai.
Additionally, Bloomberg cites strategists, who say that the drop “reflects FX operations by some of the smaller central banks.”The drop probably has been driven “by the smaller central banks being forced to sell to raise dollars to defend their currencies,†or simply to fund “general fiscal stimulus in struggling global economies,†according to Ian Lyngen.
In other words, while the world is blissfully content to ignore the currency wars taking place behind the scenes, various central banks are scrambling to defend their currencies by selling USD assets.
