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We are confident that the "99%" will be delighted to learn that Operation Twist, while flattening the 2s10s and 10s30s massively, a terminal scourge for the Net Interest Margin-reliant community, also contains in it the salvation for these very banks, and specifically the bonuses for their bond trading divisions: because all QE or Twist or whatever really is, is an ongoing subsidy via the bid/ask spread, funded by US taxpayers, to keep America's hurting banks solvent.

Home > Fed Is 4 Times More Efficient At Selling Government Bonds Than The US Treasury... With A Taxpayer-Funded Twist

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Fed Is 4 Times More Efficient At Selling Government Bonds Than The US Treasury... With A Taxpayer-Funded Twist

By Tyler Durden

Created 10/06/2011 - 13:07

[1]

Submitted by Tyler Durden [1] on 10/06/2011 13:07 -0400

Something curious happened today. As we pointed out earlier, for the first time as part of Operation Twist, the Fed, instead of buying bonds in the open market, actually sold bonds: a departure for Bernanke, and only the first time the Fed has practically rebalanced its portfolio since the first Operation Twist 50 years ago. In essence, by dint of its adjusted mandate, the Fed became the Treasury - what proceeded at precisely 11 am was the announcement of a sale of $8.87 billion in bonds with maturities from January 31, 2012 through July 31, 2012, bonds that were sold not by the traditional issuer of bonds, but by the Fed. Granted no new money was raised by the US in the process, but it was still a curious development. What was far more curious was the staggering turnout by the Dealer community, which indicated an interest for, wait for it, a whopping $242.6 billion in bonds! Said in conventional terms, the Bid To Cover was an unprecedented 27.3, or there was $27 in demand for every $1 of bonds finally sold by the Fed. Why is this worthy of bolding. Because, in a traditional Treasury auction, the Bid to Cover by the Dealer community is far, far lower. In fact, as the most recent 52 week Bill auction demonstrates, there was $89.5 billion in Bids for $14 billion in bonds allocated to Dealers, or a 6.4 Bid To Cover. Said otherwise the Fed is about 4.3 times more efficient at finding buyers than the Treasury. How is this possible? And should the Fed take over Treasury in all future bond sales? Nope: the answer is that this is nothing but yet another taxpayer funded gift to the (recently expanded by 2 Canadian banks) Dealers. Let us explain.
First, here is what the mechanics of the most recent 52 week Bill [7]sale looks like:
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One can see how the Dealer Bid To Cover is a respectable 6.4.
Alternatively, here is what today's Fed's POMO looked like in its final form [9]:
[10]
Bid To Cover? 27.4!
How is this possible? Is the Fed really 4 times more efficient at selling bonds than the Treasury? How and why can dealers have such a huge apetite for paper which yields inside of 0.1% and thus provides absolutely no real top or bottom line benefits?
Simple. As Zero Hedge has discussed many times in the past, POMO, in whatever format, be it under LSAP auspices or Operation Twist, is nothing but a taxpayer funded gift to the Dealer community. As a reminder, the actual POMO process is conducted in the form of a reverse dutch auction, where the collusive Dealer Community (recently expanded to include 2 more Canadian Banks, BMO and Bank of Nova Scotia [11], which simply means that US Taxpayers are now on the hook to bailing out two more banks which are part of the supposedly safe and stable Canadian banking system) submits best bids or offers to the Fed, depending on whether the community is buying or selling bonds. Today, for the first time, it was buying, so it was Bidding. And while we can not prove it as the actual details of the price allocation are a non-public mystery, we are 100% confident that the answer lies precisely in the risk-free arbitrage, funded by the Fed, and hence the US taxpayers, consisting of a collusive wholesale bid at prices far lower than prevailing market rates, and the ability to immediately flip the bonds to the open market upon allocation for a tidy profit.
How tidy? We have no idea: the data is private. However, it is tidy enough to generate 4 times more buying interest than would be there normally. Hence the, pardon the pun, twist.
We are confident that the "99%" will be delighted to learn that Operation Twist, while flattening the 2s10s and 10s30s massively, a terminal scourge for the Net Interest Margin-reliant community, also contains in it the salvation for these very banks, and specifically the bonuses for their bond trading divisions: because all QE or Twist or whatever really is, is an ongoing subsidy via the bid/ask spread, funded by US taxpayers, to keep America's hurting banks solvent.
What is the ultimate top line benefit? We are not sure. But we are confident the result will be made immediately obvious once the monthly POMO details are revealed. We are eagerly looking forward to reverse engineering just how much money the middle-class is now funneling into America's banks via what is once again a daily POMO bail out.
And here is what the actual flip looks like in process: below we show the price chart of one of the cheapest bonds in today's POMO, 912828NS5, which accounted for $1.2 billion of total, and how its price changed starting at 11 am once the POMO was concluded. One can only imagine the amount of leverage involved in this operation...
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And another:
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Fed Is 4 Times More Efficient At Selling Government Bonds Than The US Treasury... With A Taxpayer-Funded Twist

Your One-Stop Guide To Frontrunning Monday's Double POMO | zero hedge

Your One-Stop Guide To Frontrunning Monday's Double POMO

By Tyler Durden

Created 11/27/2010 - 13:04

On Monday, Brian Sack will go for an all-out onslaught of Netflix and Amazon shorts. For the first time ever the New York Fed will hold not one but two monetization procedures. Incidentally both will focus on the part of the curve that in the past two weeks has been performing best: the sides of the belly. The two operations, expected to be about $2 and $7 billion, will focus on bonds in the 10-17 Y and 2.5-4 Y sector. In keeping with the tradition of sharing with our readers the bonds that Sack will almost certainly end up monetizing, we present the 10 cheapest bonds that will likely end up being acquired on Monday. As the Fed is now the largest single holder of Treasurys [1](since the announcement of the SOMA reinvestment program on August 10, the NY Fed has purchased a total of $124bn Treasuries / TIPS: of the $105bn scheduled for the current month, the Fed has purchased $48bn per MS) expect to see increasingly more detailed analyses of the Fed's SOMA composition as cartoons about how to front run the Fed become increasingly more popular.
[2]
It is only fitting that on the near end, the bond most likely to be monetized is the just issued (November 8) PU8 [3] (3Y).
Below is a detailed summary of all QE2 OMOs via Morgan Stanley.
[4]
A detailed look at the long-side of Monday's second POMO:
[5]
The best cheat sheet available at the moment for future monetizations:

CNBC Market Blah, Blah ..Friday Look Ahead: Tech a Focus for Stocks Friday, as Gold Dazzles Investors

Friday Look Ahead: Tech a Focus for Stocks Friday, as Gold Dazzles Investors

Published: Thursday, 16 Sep 2010 | 9:10 PM E

By: Patti Domm
CNBC Executive Editor

Some good news from the tech sector could be a positive for stocks Friday.

Photo: Oliver Quillia for CNBC.com Outside the New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan.

Both Oracle and Research in Motion reported strong earnings after Thursday's bell. Separately, Texas Instruments boosted its $0.12 dividend by a penny and said it would buy back another $7.5 billion shares. All three stocks were higher in after-hours trading.

Stocks Friday morning could feel the effect of the quadruple expiration of futures and options. Traders expect the expiration to be low key at the open, and if anything, the impact should be slightly positive.

CPI, at 8:30 a.m., is expected to show a 0.3 percent increase in August consumer prices. Consumer sentiment is expected to improve slightly to a reading of 70, from 68.9 last month, but economists say the strong performance of the stock market this month could push that number a bit higher. August's sentiment reading was the second lowest of the year. Consumer sentiment is released at 9:55 a.m.

Stocks drifted on both sides of the unchanged mark Thursday. The Dow ended up 22 at 10,594, and the S&P 500 was off less than a half point at 1124.  The dollar weakened against the euro, and dollar/yen was barely changed after the Bank of Japan intervened to curb the yen's rise Wednesday.

"This intervention might have higher chances of succeeding, assuming we continue to see relatively acceptable U.S. economic data. That's the critical thing," said Boris Schlossberg of GFT Forex. "...as long as the idea of double dip keeps receding, Treasury yields should stabilize and go back up and that will be critical to dollar/yen."

On the other hand, if we see the 10-year yield move to 2.5 percent, or dip below 2.5 percent, I don't think any amount of money will stem the (dollar) decline," he said.

Barry Knapp, chief equities portfolio strategist at Barclay's, said the initial stock market reaction after a big intervention is often a short-term decline. "For the first couple of days, the market goes down a little bit..the first reaction is to look at the dollar," he said.

The view is "if the dollar is going up, that's bad for earnings, so sell it. Dollar's going down, that's good. That's a very simplistic approach. I don't think it's right at all," he said. "If you look back at 2003, when the Japanese were intervening dramatically, the initial reaction was that the stock market sold off, and then it regained its footing."

Knapp said the intervention at that time was about $360 billion, and he estimated this round could total $250 billion. The BOJ was reported to have bought more than $20 billion Wednesday.

"If somebody puts $250 billion into the markets, event though that money won't be buying riskier assets, it can trigger an effect," he said.

The impact on Treasurys could also be noticeable, he said. Traders have been speculating the Japanese will park their dollar holdings in shorter duration Treasurys. "Initially the Treasury curve steepens, but then that tends to drive investors who were in 2s and 5s to extend out the curve and it starts to flatten. Then it triggers a whole position rebalancing."

All that Glitters

Gold continued to dazzle investors Thursday, scoring its second record settlement of the week. Investors are betting it could try to break the $1,300 level, maybe even as early as next week depending on the outcome of the Fed's meeting Tuesday.  Gold Thursday rose about a half percent to settle at $1273.80.

Gold has faced some high-profile criticism this week, including from investor George Soros who called it a bubble. "If you think about a world where every major country is trying to find a way to devalue its currency, gold looks pretty good in that environment. Personally I think the dollar is going down more. There's lots of reasons why gold will continue to rise. I don't know if I'd buy it, but I know I wouldn't short it," Knapp said.

 http://www.cnbc.com/id/39223276

Richard Russell's Daily Letter

August 24, 2010 - "I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the great danger to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our leaders load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson. 

...................................................................................


Throw a tennis ball up in the air, and it will lose upward momentum as it rises. At some point upside momentum will completely fade, and the ball will stand still in mid-air. After standing still for a brief moment, the ball will head back toward earth.


Somehow, I get the same feeling about the stock market. The market gained initial upside momentum as it surged up from its July low. By early August the market had lost upward momentum. For seven days the Dow moved sideways as if suspended in midair. On August 11, the market suddenly plunged 265 Dow points, and in so doing it fell out of its sideway trading range. From there, the Dow whipped back and forth, and by August 19, the Dow had fallen bearishly below both its 59-day and 200-day moving averages.


The daily chart below shows us what the Dow looks like now. Note that RSI is heading down, and MACD has turned negative. At the same time, the Dow is situated below its 50-day moving average, and the 50-day MA, in turn, is below its (red) 200-day MA. Finally, note that the Dow has assumed the form of a head-and-shoulders top that has now broken down. In all, a classic set of bearish relationships. 


I'm including a P&F chart of the Dow below. Note the latest red column of X's which just plunged below the 10150 box and below the rising blue trendline. According to this P&F chart, we received a "sell signal" this morning when the Dow broke below the preceding column of 0s and below it rising blue trendline. The P&F "projection" is that this break should take the Dow down to the 9750 box.

Incidentally, there is no shortage of "distribution days." The latest score for the last two weeks is -- 6 for the S&P 500, 5 for the Dow, 5 for the NASDAQ and 5 for the NYSE Composite. That's far too many, and it implies heavy institutional selling.

Yesterday, I wrote about the Treasury bonds. Every "smart" trader and investor has rushed into Treasury bonds as the ultimate save-haven area. I believe Treasury bonds and high-grade corporate bonds are in a bubble. There are just too many believers in bonds as the ultimate safe place to be. 

When everybody piles onto one side of the ship, the ship lists. And just as quickly, everybody rushes to the other side of the ship. That's where I think we are with bonds. 


The weekly chart below follows the 30-year T-bond. RSI tells us that the bond is overbought. The full stochastics at the bottom of the chart confirms that the bond is overbought. And the blue histograms are slanting downwards towards zero. All in all, I don't like the looks of the bonds. Any hint of rising interest rates could send the bond market off the edge of the popularity cliff. 





Gold -- I took today's stock market sell-off as an indication that business will be rotten in the months ahead. Rotten business will put pressure on the Fed to print, print, print. Wide open quantitative easing will put pressure on the dollar, and this, in turn, will put UPWARD pressure on gold. And gold may have started to discount that situation today.




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If This Were A Stock....

If This Were A Stock....

By Guy M. Lerner

TheTechnicalTake

http://thetechnicaltakedotcom.blogspot.com/

See figure 1 a weekly price chart. The 40 week moving average (i.e, red line) is
heading higher, and prices are trading above key pivot points, which are areas of
support (buying) and resistance (selling). In essence, this is a "beautiful" chart with
lots of momentum (i.e., note the breakout gaps). If this were a stock, the analysts
and pundits would be all over the "breakout" ---blah, blah, blah.

Figure 1. Price Chart/ weekly

But figure 1 isn't a stock, it is the yield on the 30 year Treasury, and the chart has
been turned upside down. What I hear and read is this move in Treasury bonds isn't
sustainable. A sub 3% yield isn't possible, but isn't that what "they" said about a sub 4%
yield? Which happens to be in the rear view mirror.

People still don't believe, and they are not interpreting the significance of the price

action correctly. Maybe if this were a stock people would be wowed by the price

action. But they aren't. For the record, figure 2 is a weekly chart of the yield on the

30 year Treasury bond (symbol: $TYX.X). Are the low yields of late 2008 the next

stop?

If This Were A Stock....

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