Hello my friends, today is April 22nd, my name is Joseph and this is Markets Weekly. So this week we're going to talk about three things.
大家好,今天是4月22日,我叫约瑟夫,这是《周市》节目。本周我们将谈论三件事情。
The first thing we'll talk about is that the regional banks seem to be sounding the all clear. I'll send into a number of regional bank earnings reports and you know by and large they're saying the same thing. Things are okay and there doesn't seem to be have been a big fallout from the panic in March.
The second thing we'll talk about is the prospect of sustained stagflation. Stagflation is when we have low or no economic growth but inflation remains high. It's what happened in the 1970s and 80s and we have some indicators and some commentary that suggests that people are becoming aware that this is a very likely scenario.
And the last thing we'll talk about is what's happening with the debt ceiling and one measure we can try to tease out as to how concerned the market is about the debt ceiling.
最后我们要谈论的是债务上限的状况和一种我们可以尝试分析市场对于债务上限的担忧程度的措施。
Okay, let's start with the regional banks. So over the past few days we had the earnings reports of a number of major regional banks and they were all basically seeing the same tune.
First in all their earnings reports they strongly strongly differentiated themselves from Silicon Valley bank in a couple ways. All the regional bank earnings presentations made a special effort to show how their deposit base is very much unlike the deposit base of Silicon Valley bank.
If you're a bank which you're afraid of the most is everyone going and asking for their money back at the same time. In order to avoid that a prudently managed bank has a lot of tools at its disposal.
One thing it can do is it can diversify its and its depositor base. Make sure that it's not all one industry so that in case that industry does poorly like tech all the depositors will actually have fewer deposits at the same time.
And another thing banks often do is to make sure that their deposit base is diversified between insured and uninsured. If a bank is in trouble the insured depositors historically speaking don't really care because they know either way they're protected.
So a prudently managed bank makes sure that they have a large deposit base that is insured. And part of it the part that's not insured the uninsured deposit is to make sure that they're sticky in a different way. For example it's very common for a bank to cultivate long standing relationships with their corporate clients.
Or to make sure that corporate clients depend upon them for other things like payroll for example. Imagine you have a big corporation and you pay thousands of employees through direct deposit. That's a payment processing service that the bank provides. And even though perhaps you put money in a bank and it's not fully insured because the bank provides those services for you you're less likely to run away because obviously it's really hard to find a replacement for that.
Now the regional banks that I've seen basically all emphasized strongly that their deposit base has a lot of insured deposits and among the deposits that are uninsured they're usually deposits from corporations with long standing relationships or treasury functions. So the payment stuff that I was talking about. And that is actually true.
The regional banks any actually well run-burning bank behaves that way. It was really really silicon valley bank and perhaps signature bank that was an outlier in that sense.
地方银行通常都是运营良好的银行,这是一个普遍现象。只有硅谷银行和可能的信用银行在这方面有所不同。
One of the commentaries that I thought was particularly striking was commentary from PNC bank which has about half a trillion dollars. And PNC bank in their earnings called straight away the presenter I believe it was the CFO or the CAO.
Basically said that yeah we had all this excitement in March but we kind of looked at our own books and we really didn't see anything out of the ordinary. We didn't really notice it.
And I think that was both striking and in line with my expectations. If you remember over the past few weeks I have been repeatedly noting that this whatever happened with regional banks was very localized and likely not systemic and that is coming to pass.
Regional banks are largely as the name suggests regional. So what happens in California doesn't actually necessarily impact what happens in Ohio or in Texas and so forth. And regional banks because they're not systemically integrated and more local they are more insulated.
But anyway so PNC came out and they told everyone that everything is fine. In fact it looks like their guidance for the full year actually not this slide. Yes for the full year here is for loans average loans from 2022 to 2023 to be up 5% to 7%. Now everyone was worrying that the regional banks would pull back, they would be a credit crunch and then we'd have a recession or something like that.
And here is PNC telling you that no I don't really think that's going to happen. I don't really think it's a big deal. I expect loans to be up 5% to 7% this year. And they're not the only one who said that. Here's another one. This is Keybank that's smaller than reach a bit smaller than Silicon Valley bank, a little bit under 200 billion dollars in assets. And they're saying that they expect loans to be up 6% to 9% as well.
Now across the regional banks that I looked at there was a number of them. Some of them said they expect something of flatish loan growth. That US bank was like that. But generally they expect some growth. And they noted that growth would not be as strong as it would be last year. If you guys are familiar with my work then you know that last year was truly a year of epic, epic bank credit creation. Historically speaking banks make about 400 billion dollars in loans a year. Last year we made about 1.2 trillion. So last year was a bonkers year for credit creation. That year would not be repeated.
The regional banks that I looked at largely remarked that they expect that yes they were tight in credit standards a little bit. So that's going to decrease the supply of loans. And they also noted that there's a little bit less demand as well. Obviously interest rates are much higher. But all in all it's not a credit crunch at all. It is a gradual slowing of the economy from very elevated levels and as the economy gradually cools. So the impact of what happened in March looks to be very brief.
Just has another point looking at the macro data. So we had weekly data from the Fed showing the growth rate of loans and leases. Now three weeks into April we have the March numbers that are seasonally adjusted at the annual rates. And you can see here in March according to the aggregate data from the Fed loans and leases grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.2% and you really can't see any contraction at all. And we have the data weekly data for two weeks in April and you also see steady growth as well.
And now just to tell this all off I thought I'd share this with you as well. So this is the GDP now statistics from the Atlanta Fed. What the Atlanta Fed does is it collects data as it comes in and it gives a real time forecast of what it thinks the GDP would be. And as of last week it's thinking 2.5%. Now 2.5% is actually above trend growth.
The underlying potential for the economy is estimated by the Fed to be about 1.8% a year. So 2.5% is growing above the potential of the economy. And if you add inflation to that, let's say 6%, the nominal GDP is growing at 8.5% a year. So you really, the totality of the data suggests that the economy along with the weak employment, the strong employment data, low unemployment claims and persistently high wage growth suggests that things are fine. So see a lot of doom and gloom out there but I'm not sure it's justified by the numbers.
And if you remember from our discussion last week, the biggest thing in the market is that the market has been driving all market prices. Is that the market has been aggressively pricing in Fed cuts later in the year and that has led to a good is going higher, dollar slowing off rates lower. And now the market is slowly beginning to realize that that scenario is just not realistic. And so this past week, we actually saw the market take out some of the rate cuts that were priced in. And in line with that, we saw equities decline a bit, we saw rates go up a bit and we saw the dollar strengthen a bit. My expectation is still that eventually the market would take out all the rate cuts that are currently priced in.
Okay. Now that we are finished discussing that, let's talk a little bit about the prospect of stack flation. Okay. One more thing. This is just in line with the strong GDP data. This is Bank of America showing that their payments data. So let's say buying stuff through your credit or debit card and the Bank of America, big bank, lots of data, lots of people use them. So they have a really good sense of what's happening in the economy. And they're saying that the economy from a spending perspective, consumer spending is fine. Year on year, there's a 9% growth and more real-time spend data looks like it's fine as well. It's holding up. There's really nothing that's really obviously wrong about it.
So Christine Lagarde, who is president of the ECB, gave a very interesting speech the past week. And in that speech, she was basically highlighting something that many of people have been observing of people like Peter Zion, for example, that we seem to be having the reversal of globalization. And that has really big impacts for both inflation and for global currencies.
So in her speech, which is very accessible and I recommend everyone take a look, is that she's saying that over the past few decades, we had a period of pretty low and stable inflation in large part because the supply side of the economy was doing really well. We had globalization. So people from the Chinese were able to send stuff to the US, hundreds of millions of Chinese laborers basically entered the global labor force. And in the same way, we could import stuff from all over the world. That was a world of globalization. And when you increase the supply of goods and services into the economy, then prices decline. And the inflation is much easier to control. And in addition to that, we lived in the world where the US dollar was the indisputed champion of currencies.
So everyone used the US dollar to invoice goods and services. So that means that if you're a Japanese company buying from a, say, Indian company, you would often pay in dollars. And because everyone deals in dollars internationally, there wasn't as much of a currency impact when you talked about pricing. Now, Lagarde is saying that it looks like the world is breaking into two. We're breaking into maybe a block that's, say, Russia and China and North Korea, Iran and people who are closer to them. And we're breaking into another block that is the West.
And when you do that, there's not going to be as much globalization. And so all the stability, all the low prices that we enjoyed in the past might not be the same for the coming years. There's a prospect of, as we've already experienced, more volatile supply chains, which in turn leads to volatile inflation, which in turn suggests that we could have higher prices and lower growth in the future since we don't have the supply of goods and services is not flowing globally as well as it used to.
She also made an interesting point that now that people want to move away from the dollar, well, maybe the dollar is not going to be the international currency of trade anymore. And if that's the case, if in the future, say a Japanese company buying from an Indian company, well, the Indian company wants to pay in rupees and the Japanese company wants to be paid in again, well, maybe in that case, there's going to be a little bit more volatility in prices because of currency movements. And that's going to make inflation a lot more unstable as well.
Her interesting response to all this is that, hey, even though we have all these changes on the supply side in the real economy, we are a bank that is focused on inflation and we want to keep inflation expectations to be well anchored.
So even if we have decreases in supply, dropping up inflation, we're basically still going to hike rates and that's what she's saying in her speech. I think this makes a lot of sense. I think before Lil Brainer went to her new job, she also gave us a speech that echoed some of the sentiments. So that's good news. That means that there are people in policy making positions that are beginning to understand that maybe the world is a bit different.
In line with this, though, I also like to show something that's pretty interesting that I saw on Twitter. First off, looking at the earnings for Procter & Gamble, Procter & Gamble, which reported last week noted that their prices are going up about 10% across categories, but they're producing fewer goods, so their volumes are down. Again, if you produce fewer goods and services, but your prices go higher, that means there's less growth, but more inflation.
Now companies seem to be making up for, I guess, higher costs and lower volumes by raising prices. It's not just you need to Procter & Gamble. There's this really great chart by Carl. Carl here, who shows that across the consumer sepals, it seems to be a very common strategy for companies to basically maintain their revenue or expand the revenue by raising prices and lowering volumes.
Again, that's very obviously sacflationary. You're shipping and creating less stuff, but you're charging more for the stuff that you do make. There's a really good a lot of episode with Sam Ryan, who studies this stuff, and he also noted that companies seem to be understanding that they have more pricing power than they did before and are using that. I think politically some people call this to be greed, inflation.
Economically, in theory, you'd expect that if people were able to exploit their, I guess, market power to raise prices, eventually over time, there'd be more competition, competitors would enter into the market and compete those profits away. But in practice, that's really difficult, since it's not easy to build a big factory or build a big brand. People who can be able to do that have a lot of resources. They have a big moat around their business. In practice, market really is a super competitive, so you can see behavior like this, which, of course, makes the Fed's job more difficult as prices are going higher and inflation is necessarily coming down.
The last thing we'll talk about is the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is strongly related to something else that was in the market to mind a lot, and that is the one month treasury bills yields basically plummeted. There seems to be a tremendous amount of demand for short-dated treasuries. It's actually really easy to see why. If you are an institutional investor and you have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to manage, you have cash. So you really can't leave 100 million dollars just sitting in a bank. You could get Silicon Valley or something like that, and that's an inconvenience, and it really makes you look bad. You could put it in a money market fund, and that works as well, but a couple of downsides is that money market funds, charge fees, about 50 basis points, or less could be 25 depending on the fund. Of course, money market funds are, there's same-day liquidity, but it's still not completely cash-like.
So what you often do, if you are a corporation or a size of one institution, is you would manage your cash by investing in reposal lending to overnight on a secured basis, or you would buy treasury bills. Now the worst thing that you want to happen is that you buy a treasury bill, and then for some unanticipated reason, you can't get your money back because the treasury defaulted. So you want to avoid that at all costs. So now we know that in the coming months, there's going to be a debt ceiling episode. But what we don't know is when that happens. So if you have cash, you need to put it somewhere, but you're scared of debt ceiling episode that will happen sometime later in the year, and no one knows when, and it's really hard to know when. Then what you do is you best pile into short-dated treasuries like one month bills, because you're pretty sure there's no debt ceiling episode in the coming weeks, maybe in a couple months, but not right now.
Another way you can see that the debt ceiling episode is a big driver of market pricing, is this chart that I'm showing here. This is chart of federal home loan discount notes and treasury bills. Now federal home loan discount, federal home loan bank discount notes are basically bills issued by a government sponsored enterprise. They are credit risk-free. They're implicitly backed by the government. And usually though, they're not explicitly backed by the government like a US treasury bill, but implicitly backed. People know that pretty pretty sure that the government will bail out the home loan banks, but they're not 100% sure.
So the home loan banks discount notes would trade at a slightly higher yield than treasury bills, which are explicitly backed by the government. That's how it normally is. That's how it actually works. When there's a debt ceiling episode, what happens is that oddly enough, the federal home loan bank notes become more secure, more safe than treasury bills, because home loan banks don't have any debt ceiling episode. They're going to pay their investors. So investors who need safety then, who can't take any credit risk, one step by home loan bank discount notes rather than tea bills. The yields on the home loan bank discount notes trade below treasury bills, which is what we're seeing right now. So again, this high window, this high window of uncertainty as to when a debt ceiling will occur is reflected in how the home loan bank discount notes are trading below bill yields up to half a year. So that again suggests that there is concern, real concern in the market about when the debt ceiling will happen.
Now this is not a major thing. It's just that. So if you're a big investor lending money to the treasury and not getting it back, when you need it is a huge hassle. Eventually, you're going to get back, of course, because eventually the debt ceiling will be raised, but it's a huge hassle that you don't want to deal with. And that I think is driving a lot of the weird pricing we see in the Treasury bill market.