Attention Finally Turns To Saudi Arabia's "Secret" US Treasury Holdings

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/22/2016 18:10 -0500
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-22/attention-finally-turns-saudi-arabias-secret-us-treasury-holdings

In November of 2014, we announced the quiet death of the petrodollar.

The system which underwrote decades of dollar dominance and kept a perpetual bid under USD assets met an untimely demise when the Saudis moved to bankrupt the US shale complex by deliberately suppressing oil prices.

The implications, we said, would be far-reaching.

For years, oil producing nations plowed their USD crude proceeds into USTs and other dollar assets in a virtuous loop both for the currency and for the nation that printed it. The “Great Accumulation” (as Deutsche Bank calls it) of USD FX reserves ended for good in early 2015 but no one noticed until China began to liquidate mountains of US paper in an attempt to manage a runaway devaluation effort.

By the start of September, all anyone wanted to talk about was the depletion of EM FX war chests as the world suddenly came to understand that the selling of FX reserves amounts to QE in reverse and might therefore serve to tighten global monetary conditions, drive up yields on core paper, and sap liquidity as traditional net exporters of capital suddenly stopped buying amid slumping commodity prices and the yuan fiasco. Some wondered if the reserve drawdowns would cause the Fed to delay liftoff as the FOMC would effectively be tightening into a tightening.

Against this backdrop we said that the most important chart in the world may well be one that depicts the combined FX reserves of Saudi Arabia and China.

Now that Saudi Arabia’s oil price gambit has backfired on the way to blowing a hole in the kingdom’s budget that amounted to 16% of GDP last year, the market is speculating that Riyadh’s vast SAMA reserves could disappear altogether - especially considering the added cost of funding the war in Yemen and maintaining the riyal peg.

As it stands, the Saudis have around $630 billion parked at SAMA. That's the third-largest rainy day fund on the planet.

How long the reserves will last given the myriad headwinds facing the kingdom is an open question, but here's a useful graphic from BofAML which endeavors to show how long Riyadh can hold out under various assumptions about oil prices and borrowing:

What’s interesting about Saudi Arabia’s UST reserves is that no one knows how “vast” they actually are.

For one thing, SAMA is a sovereign wealth fund, which means we can’t just look at the headline number and make assumptions about US paper because the fund’s holdings aren’t homogeneous.

But there’s more to the ambiguity than that. “It’s a secret of the vast U.S. Treasury market, a holdover from an age of oil shortages and mighty petrodollars,” Bloomberg writes of Saudi Arabia’s US Treasury holdings. Put simply: there’s no way for the market to assess the impact of the SAMA drawdown because the composition of the portfolio is a state secret of both Saudi Arabia and the US.

“As a matter of policy, the Treasury has never disclosed the holdings of Saudi Arabia, long a key ally in the volatile Middle East, and instead groups it with 14 other mostly OPEC nations including Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria,” Bloomberg goes on to note, adding that the rules are different for almost everyone else. Although Saudi Arabia's "secret" is protected by "an unusual blackout by the U.S. Treasury Department," for more than a hundred other countries, from China to the Vatican, the Treasury provides a detailed breakdown of how much U.S. debt each holds.”

For his part, Edwin Truman (the former Treasury assistant secretary for international affairs during the late 1990s) doesn’t get it. “It’s mind-boggling they haven’t undone it,” he says, incredulous. “The Treasury didn’t want to offend OPEC [but] it’s hard to justify this special treatment at this point.”

So who does know how much US paper the Saudis are sitting on? Well, the Saudis of course, “a handful of Treasury officials,” and some bureaucrats at the Fed, Bloomberg says, noting that “for everyone else, it’s a guessing game.”

Yes, a “guessing game,” and one that may have profound consequences for markets and for geopolitics.

With Iranian supply set to flood an already overflowing oil market, Saudi Arabia’s finances are likely to deteriorate further. Especially if the conflict in Yemen continues to fester and the kingdom refuses to cede the riyal peg. That means that unless the Saudis are prepared to take on more debt (and the kingdom’s debt to GDP is already set to rise to 33% by 2020 from just 2% at the end of 2014), they’re going to be selling something from SAMA and the market has no way of knowing what ahead of time.

Politically all of this comes at an especially critical juncture. The US is pushing to reduce its dependence on foreign (read: Saudi) oil and Washington’s rapprochement with Tehran has ruffled more than a few feathers in Riyadh. 

“Events in recent months, from President Barack Obama’s landmark nuclear deal with Iran to Saudi Arabia’s execution of a prominent Shiite cleric who challenged the royal family, underscore just how sensitive U.S.-Saudi relations have become, [but] whatever the political considerations, some analysts speculate Saudi Arabia may actually be trying to hold onto its Treasuries as part of a strategy to bulk up on dollar assets amid the deepening turmoil in global financial markets,” Bloomberg goes on to say. Here’s more:

“You need dollars if you’re an oil producer, you want to make sure you have dollars on your balance sheet,” said Sebastien Galy, Deutsche Bank’s director of foreign-exchange strategy, who suggests SAMA could be raising cash by liquidating riskier investments such as stocks, real estate and private equity. Holding dollars also makes sense as a hedge against the plummeting price of oil, which is priced in the U.S. currency.

Figures from SAMA suggest the kingdom might be reallocating some of its reserves into short-term, liquid assets to help the finance ministry meet budget commitments and defend its 30-year-old currency peg of 3.75 riyals to the dollar.

The central bank has increased foreign currencies and deposits held abroad by 7 percent in the first 11 months of 2015, while at the same time reducing foreign securities, consisting of equities and longer-term debt, by 20 percent.

If the Saudis are avoiding selling US paper for as long as they can, one wonders what it is they're selling instead to boost cash and deposits. As we noted last week, sovereign wealth funds are set to liquidate $75 billion in equities in 2016, an outflow which may or may not be covered by "dumb" money inflows from the retail crowd. 

In any event, those hoping for an end to the "legacy" policy of keeping Saudi Arabia's UST holdings shrouded in secrecy shouldn't hold their breath. "They'll want to deal with it sooner or later," the abovementioned Edwin Truman says.

We'll close with a simple question: who would be the new patron saint of the US Treasury Department in the event the Saudis drawdown all of their reserves and decide to diversify away from USD assets once the tide turns for crude, red ink turns to black, and the kingdom once again becomes a net exporter of capital? Put differently, who will monetize the US deficit if relations between Washington and Riyadh hit the skids over Iran? It damn sure won’t be China, where authorities are selling USTs by the hundreds of billions.

Foreign Central Banks Furiously Dump US Treasuries: Record $47 Billion Sold In First Two Weeks Of 2016

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/17/2016 18:58 -0500
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-17/foreign-central-banks-furiously-dump-us-treasuries-record-47-billion-sold-first-two-
It's not just stocks have a terrible start to the year, in fact the worst start in history: so is the amount of US Treasuries held in custody at the Fed, a direct proxy for the holdings of foreign central banks, reserve managers and sovereign wealth funds who park owned TSYs at the NY Fed for convenience.
According to the latest Fed data, after a drop of $12 billion in the first week of the year, another $34.5 billion in Treasuries held in custody was sold in the week ended January 13, bringing the total to just $2.962 trillion, below the previous recent low recorded in early November, and at levels not seen since April 2015.
Indicatively since April, total US Treasury holdings have increased by $570 billion, meanwhile not a single incremental dollar has ended up in the Fed's custody account.


As shown in the chart below, the drop recorded in the latest period is the single largest weekly drop recorded since China commenced liquidating its Treasury holdings in mid 2014.

Adding up the flows from the first two weeks of the year reveals the worst and most custody holdings "outflowing" start to the year in history.


The size of the liquidation promptly got the rate community's attention.
On Friday afternoon, MarketNews cited Louis Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP, who said "we have seen declines of more than $20 billion (in such Treasury custody holdings) on each of the first two weeks of this year. While accounts are volatile from week to week, that is certainly consistent with increasing intervention activity" from foreign central banks needing money to intervene either in the foreign exchange market or in the stock market, he said.
"There is no way of knowing" exactly what such central banks sold, he added. "But it could just as easily have been liquidation of coupon securities."
As MNI further writes, most observers saw China selling as behind the drop in Treasuries holdings at the Fed. "Circumstantially, that's the conclusion that people would jump to," said Crandall.
Some said it is not just China: Aaron Kohli, analyst at BMO Capital Markets, was less inclined to point to China. "It's definitely a drop, but keep in mind, every foreign central bank is in there," he said.

One other observer said that the decline "should be foreign central bank selling" as opposed to routine rolling of maturing securities. "Those are very chunky numbers. We did not even get such large sales back in August 2015 when we knew there was such selling" in Treasuries to get money to fund buying of China stocks, he said.

Others, however, disagree: "That kind of size could only be China," said the observer. But he added that at the margin, other Asian central banks could have been selling Treasuries to raise dollars for foreign exchange or stock market intervention.
One trader said China "must be selling, along with others. Look at the Hong Kong dollar, also down big. It is a game of musical chairs, and everyone is devaluing at once. The U.S. dollar strength is apparent."
* * *
One trader who has put all this together, and has linked it to the abnormal moves in the Treasury swap market is Ice Farm Capital's Michael Green.
As he puts it, "those who chose to seek protection in rates are only experiencing middling success due to the continued inversion of swap spreads which have traded to record highs."

Now this has been repeatedly noted in the press as irrational – why would US government bonds be trading at a risk premium to swap spreads which carry bank counterparty risk?  I would suggest there is one very simple reason:

His conclusion is that "swap spreads appear to be blowing out because foreign holders of treasuries, namely China, are selling them at a record pace to defend their currencies.  Currency levels are under attack in China, Saudi Arabia and now Hong Kong.  The specter of 1997-1998 is again haunting the markets."
As Green frames it, "the key question is “How long can this go on for?”  Consensus is clearly that China, in particular, has a deep pool of reserves with which to defend their currency; I am less convinced.  Having seen some contrarian work on the subject, my belief is that China is a paper tiger – with very little reserves left to defend their currency.  Perhaps as little as three months given their current burn rate."
If accurate (and Green's calculation excludes the hundreds of billions China may need to leave on its books if its NPL credit cycle finally hits as Kyle Bass is currently anticipating) then the coming months could see an unprecedented shock out of China which having spent hundreds of billions to slow a record capital outflow, has no choice but to let its currency finally float freely, leading to the biggest capital exodus in recorded history.

Mystery Buyer Of US Treasurys Revealed

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/08/2015 08:55 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-08/mystery-buyer-us-treasurys-revealed
Back in March 2014, we first revealed something quite stunning: a new, seemingly ravenous, and completely unexpected buyer of US Treasurys had emerged in the face of "Belgium" which was buying tens of billions in US paper at a weekly clip, without any explanation.
One year later, this website first confirmed that the identity of the "Belgian" buyer was none other than China, which had been using Belgian-based clearer Euroclear as an offshore venue for its bond purchases, and which starting in March 2015 had commenced dumping the US paper it accumulated so dramatically in 2013 and 2014, in advance of what has become the biggest story of the summer: China's liquidation of its FX reserves, read US Treasury holdings, in defense of its devaluing currency.


And while we knew that China was selling - and following the record selling of FX reserves in August, so does everyone else - an even more interesting question emerged: who is buying?
Thanks to the WSJ we now have the answer: "A little-known New York hedge fund run by a former Yale University math whiz has been buying tens of billions of dollars of U.S. Treasury debt at recent auctions, drawing attention from the Treasury Department and Wall Street."
The hedge fund in question, Jeffrey Talpins' Element Capital Management, which according to the WSJ has become "the largest purchaser in dozens of government-bond auctions over the past 10 months, people familiar with the matter said. The buying is part of an apparent effort by the fund to use borrowed money to exploit small inefficiencies in the world’s most liquid securities market, a strategy that is delivering sizable profits, said people close to the matter."

Jeffrey Talpins of Element Capital and his wife
For those unfamiliar, and Talpins certainly is not a household hedge fund name, "Mr. Talpins is an intense and reserved trader formerly at Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. He is known for a tenacious style that can grate on rivals and once tested the patience of former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke."
According to the NYT, in 2005, Trader Monthly named Mr. Talpins one of the top 30 traders under 30, when he was still an employee of Vega Asset management. "Youth is not wasted on this crop, any of whom could be a billionaire by 40,” the magazine said. “Or, then again, they could be belly up and bust."
Back in 2010 the FT profiled Element Capital, then at just $1.5 billion, saying that fixed-income relative value trading, "the hedge fund strategy pioneered – and made notorious – by Long Term Capital Management is returning to prominence amid one of its most successful years yet." It added that "fixed-income relative value trading – shunned by investors after the collapse of LTCM in 1998 – has been one of the industry’s few outperformers this year, thanks to massive pricing anomalies caused by fiscal stimulus packages and unconventional central bank monetary policies around the world."

As of the end of June, Element Capital, a $1.5bn relative value fund run by Jeffrey Talpins, was up 10.75 per cent. High returns have been driven by government bond markets flush with arbitrage opportunities, managers said.

By 2014, Element had grown substantially, and according to a Bloomberg note, last July it attracted the head of North America sales at RBS, Richard Tang: "Tang, who has spent almost two decades at the bank, is one of 16 members of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee that the U.S. government consults with on its debt sales. His departure was confirmed by Sarah Lukashok, a Stamford, Connecticut-based spokeswoman for Britain’s largest state-owned lender. He will be joining New York-based Element Capital, which manages about $4.3 billion in its macro fund, said the people, who asked not to be named because the move wasn’t public."
In other words, Element is not only growing its AUM exponentially, it now also employs a member of the TBAC, which we profiled in November 2011 as "The Supercommittee That Really Runs America."
Not only that, but according to a November 2014 presentation to the Wharton Investment and Trading Group, the fund, then already at a $5 billion AUM, boasting it "has delivered exceptional returns to investors over its 9+ year track record, with annualized performance greater than 20% and a Sharpe ratio greater than 2."
Quite an impressive performance for a smallish relative-value hedge fund, one that begs the question: just how much leverage is involved (an important question for later).
So why is this relatively obscrue hedge fund in the news? Well, it appears that the mystery buyer of all China's bond sales is none other than Element:

Element has been the largest bidder in many of the 62 Treasury note and bond auctions between last November and July, these people said. At many recent auctions, some of which involved sales of more than $30 billion of debt, Element purchased about 10% of the issue, these people said. That is an unusually large figure, analysts said.

And while Element may have grown substantially, some wonder how its most recent AUM of $6 billion can sustain this ravenous buying spreed.

Element’s activity has raised questions because the cumulative purchases far exceed the hedge fund’s $6 billion in assets under management. Treasury officials, who frequently meet with large auction participants, have asked Element about its activity, said someone close to the matter.

“Their buying is eyebrow-raising,” said a trader who once worked for a firm that deals in government securities and witnessed Element’s bidding. These primary dealers often know the identity of other auction bidders. Element “never shared its strategy, but we often asked,” the trader said.

And this is where it gets tricky, because as the WSJ admits, the US Treasury "likes to know who is buying its bonds and why, partly because it prefers long-term holders such as pension funds, insurance companies and central banks. Treasury officials fear purchases by trading-oriented funds could result in sales that increase market swings and potentially drive up borrowing costs.
“If you’re issuing debt, your preference is those ‘sticky investors,’” said Scott Skyrm, a managing director at Wedbush Securities.
Which brings us back to the "how much leverage is involved" question, because one bad day for Element and suddenly the fund could be forced to unwind its giant Treasury book into what is already a very illiquid market.
Which leads to the question of just what is Element's strategy: "Element had been shorting, or betting against, bonds in anticipation of higher interest rates but has been exiting from that wager, according to someone close to the matter. That is one reason the fund has been a big buyer of Treasurys lately."
It appears that is not only macro considerations that drive Element's trading strategy, but also market mispricings between the primary and secondary market: "people who have worked with the firm or are close to Mr. Talpins said there is another reason: Element is among the last to embrace “bond-auction strategies,” trading maneuvers that have become less popular since the financial crisis."

These trades aim to take advantage of the effects of supply and demand in the $12.8 trillion Treasury market. Demand for these bonds often fluctuates based on factors including investor perceptions of economic growth and market risk, while supply can be affected by regular auctions of different-maturity Treasury securities. A burst of new supply tends to slightly depress prices for short periods, sometimes for less than an hour.

Element's auction arbing strategy is relatively simple: "In the past, Wall Street dealers and hedge funds scored profits shorting “when-issued” bonds. These are contracts conferring the right to purchase Treasury securities when they are sold days later at auction. Then, these traders would buy bonds during Treasury auctions at the slightly lower prices and use these newly purchased bonds to close out their short sales."

The difference between the higher price at which they sold the Treasurys and the lower price they paid at auction was their profit.

Which incidentally explains our "discovery" earlier this summer why Treasury auctions that took place at a time when the OTR was trading "special" led to dramatic outperformance during the actual auction: it was hedge funds like Element that did all in their power to squeeze the market and send the high yield deep inside the When Issued.
The reason why Element has become the dominant player in this market is because most of its competitors disappeared after 2008:

After the 2008 financial crisis, bank traders pulled back as regulators discouraged trading risks. Some hedge funds also began shying away from bond-auction strategies. Wall Street banks have significantly cut back their lending to hedge funds.

The pullback by rivals has left Element with a large presence in bond auctions to complement strategies such as in foreign-currency derivatives, people close to the matter said. In 2008, the firm gained 35%, these people say, even as financial markets crumbled. The next year, Element was up 79%. Last year it rose just 2.9%.

And with nobody left to compete, and the Treasury market as illiquid as it is, it meant huge potential profits for Element: sure enough, the hedge fund "was up 18.5% through July of this year, an investor said, beating most hedge funds and overall markets. Some recent gains came from bullish wagers on the U.S. dollar, according to the person."
So can anything go wrong with this strategy? Yes, plenty. 

Once in a while, the prices of bonds being auctioned jump, rather than fall, for reasons such as bad economic news that prompts an investor flight to safety. Hedges sometimes don’t work out. And the strategy relies on inexpensive borrowing because each trade usually yields minimal profits.

In the 1990s, hedge fund Long Term Capital Management used leverage to profit from small discrepancies in the Treasury market before a market reversal swamped the firm. LTCM used much more leverage than Element does.

Only problem is nobody knows just how much more leverage, and whether Element's leverage isn't slowly but surely creeping up to Merton and Merrywether levels.
Still, luminaries such as Yale professor Robert Schiller vouch for Talpins:

Mr. Talpins graduated in 1997 from Yale, where he was a research assistant for Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who later won a Nobel prize in economics. In a 1996 letter, Mr. Shiller wrote that in terms of overall performance, he “put Jeffrey first out of the 52 Yale undergraduates” who attended his course Economics 252, Finance, Theory and Application.

“I thought he was particularly bright,” recalls Prof. Shiller.

Others, however, were less than enthused about Talpins. Such as former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke:

A year or so ago, Mr. Talpins was among 20 investors invited by a Wall Street firm to a private meeting with Mr. Bernanke, after his departure from the Fed. Mr. Talpins peppered Mr. Bernanke with about 10 successive questions, according to several people in the room.

Mr. Talpins elicited some detailed answers, such as who is in the room during interest-rate discussions. But he also asked questions that exasperated some investors because they seemed irrelevant. Mr. Bernanke looked increasingly weary under Mr. Talpins’s barrage, one participant said. “Jeff was persistent and it got a little uncomfortable,” said another participant. “It was like, ‘Dude, let it go.’”

But the biggest risk by far is that now that the "mystery buyers" has been exposed, it won't take long for the other, much bigger players - i.e., all the central banks who have been desperate to push yields lower to "confirm" the self-fulfilling narrative that the economy, and inflation, are growing - to inflict the proverbial "max pain" upon Element. In fact, if Talpins is indeed very long TSYs, and has lot of leverage embedded in the trade, one may expect a concerted shorting effort to find out just how much leverage is incorporate in the trades, and push it to the point of breaking. After all, hedge funds exposed with massive positions rarely survive an onslaught by their peers who seek to do just that - inflict "max pain" (see Ackman and Herbalife).
If so, China's selling of TSYs may very soon inflict precisely the kind of damage on US paper not because it is selling, but because the biggest "mystery" buyer of US paper has just been revealed and whose continued ability to keep buying unimpeded is now suddenly very much in question.
What's worse, if the result of a coordinated attack on Talpins leads to an LTCM-type blow up, hang on to your hats because the recent volatility in the equity market will be nothing compared to what is coming to the MOVE, TYVIX and US Treasurys...

The Numbers Are In: China Dumps A Record $94 Billion In US Treasurys In One Month

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/07/2015 20:10 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-07/numbers-are-china-dumps-record-94-billion-us-treasurys-one-month
Shortly after the PBoC’s move to devalue the yuan, we noted with some alarm that it looked as though China may have drawn down its reserves by more than $100 billion in the space of just two weeks. That, we went on the point out, would represent a stunning increase over the previous pace of the country’s reserve draw down, which we began documenting months ahead of the devaluation (see here, for instance). We went on to estimate, based on the projected size of the RMB carry trade unwind, how large the FX reserve liquidation might need to be to offset capital outflows and finally, late last week, we suggested that China’s official FX reserve data was set to become the new risk-on/off trigger for nervous, erratic markets. In short, the pace at which Beijing is burning through its USD assets in defense of the yuan has serious implications not only for investors’ collective perception of market stability, but for yields on core paper, for global liquidity, and for US monetary policy. 
On Monday we got the official data from China and sure enough, we find out that the PBoC liquidated around $94 billion in reserves during the month of August to $3.557 trillion (the lowest since September 2013)...

... and as Goldman argues (see below), the "real" figure might have been closer to $115 billion. Whatever the case, it’s a staggering burn rate and needless to say, were the PBoC to continue to liquidate its assets at this pace, it would necessitate a raft of RRR cuts and hundreds of billions in short-term liquidity ops to ensure that money markets don’t seize up in the face of the liquidity drain.
Here’s some commentary from across sellside desks on the official numbers:

• From RBC’s Sue Trinh: 
  • China FX reserves suggest about $140b used to defend yuan in April once valuation is accounted for
  • Believes PBOC has been intervening to maintain the yuan’s stability since the devaluation, but this kind of intervention can’t continue indefinitely
  • It’s unsustainable in the long run; yuan is overvalued by around 15% by RBC’s latest estimate; still targeting USD/CNY at 6.56 by year-end and 6.95 by the end of 2016
• From Commerzbank’s Zhou Hao:
  • Decline in foreign reserves clearly suggests China’s central bank intervened intensively in the FX market to stabilize CNY exchange rate
  • “One-off devaluation” in mid-Aug. triggered market expectations of further CNY deprecation, which has not only endangered the financial stability, but also posts a downside risk to the economy due to capital outflows
  • It’s costly because frequent intervention will burn foreign reserves rapidly and tighten the onshore market liquidity; that said, further tightening of regulations is expected near term
  • Expects spread between CNY and CNH is likely to persist as PBOC has become an active player in onshore market
• From Goldman:
  • The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) reported that its foreign exchange reserves dropped by US$94bn in August, to US$3.557tn at the end of the month. However, it is not straightforward to derive the actual scale of FX reserves sales from the headline FX reserves data, given uncertain valuation effects and possible balance sheet management by the PBOC.
  • It is possible to get an approximate sense about valuation effects stemming from currency movement: e.g., assuming the currency composition of the PBOC’s FX reserves broadly follows that of the average country’s (using the IMF COFER weights, which suggest roughly 70% in USD for EM countries), the currency valuation effect would probably be positive to the tune of roughly US$20bn (i.e., if we only look at the change in headline FX reserves as a gauge of sales of FX reserves, sales of FX reserves might have been underestimated by around US$20bn, given the currency valuation effect). However, besides currency movements, there could also be significant valuation effects from changes to the market prices of the PBOC’s investment portfolios, and the direction and size of those effects is hard to measure given the uncertainty of the asset composition. Moreover, there could also be possible short-term transactions and agreements between the PBOC and banks that may complicate the interpretation of the change in FX reserves as an underlying measure of RMB demand.

Of course the huge draw down was widely anticipated and indeed, we've explored and detailed virtually every angle of this story in the lead up to the data. The key takeaway here is that we now have official confirmation that August saw $94 billion in reverse QE (and more likely $115 billion) or, quantitative tightening as Deutsche Bank puts it.
We can, as we explained on Saturday, argue about what the ultimate effect on safe haven assets will be, but what's not up for debate is that conceptually speaking, China's massive UST dumping is the opposite of Western central bank QE and as such should be expected to pressure yields. More specifically, Citi has suggested that for every $500 billion in EM FX reserve liquidation, there's an attendant 108 bps or so of upward pressure on 10Y yields. Similarly, Deutsche Bank, citing the extant literature, flags 50-60bps of upward pressure on 5Y yields for every $100 billion in monthly EM FX reserve liquidations.
The takeaway, as we put it last week, is that if the Fed hikes this month, it will be tightening into a tightening.
But it's not that simple. It's also possible that, if China's FX reserve draw downs do indeed end up serving as a trigger for risk-off behavior (i.e. a selloff in risk assets), the subsequent flight to safety could end up driving yields on long bonds lower, not higher. We discussed this in detail over the weekend.
Still, China isn't the only country liquidating its USD assets. When you consider that global EM FX reserves amount to more than $7 trillion, it seems reasonable to ask whether the flight to safety that would invariably accompany a worldwide selloff in risk assets would be sufficient to replace the lost bid from massive reserve draw downs. Or, as we put it on Saturday, "the real question is what would everyone else do. If the other EMs join China in liquidating the combined $7.5 trillion in FX reserves (i.e., mostly US Trasurys but also those of Europe and Japan) shown below into an illiquid Treasury bond market where central banks already hold 30% or more of all 10 Year equivalents (the BOJ will own 60% by 2018), then it is debatable whether the mere outflow from stocks into bonds will offset the rate carnage."
And that consideration, in turn, puts the Fed in a very, very difficult spot. A rate hike cycle will put further pressure on already beleaguered EM currencies which raises the possibility that the FX reserve liquidation will be larger than the eventual safe haven flows and besides, there's bound to be a lag between the liquidation of USD assets and the flight to safety and given the potential for extraordinary bouts of volatility in UST, JGB, and German Bund markets, it's anyone's guess what happens in between.
Whatever the case, something will have to give here. That is, all of these dynamics (i.e. a Fed hike, China's massive UST dumping, an EM meltdown precipitating FX reserve drawdowns, illiquid markets for the same assets everyone is dumping, hemorrhaging petrostate budgets, etc.) simply cannot coexist for long without something snapping because, as we put it last week, in this very unstable arrangement, the smallest policy error will reverberate exponentially, and those reverberations can lead to only one thing: the Fed's admission of policy failure by adopting a tightening bias, and ultimately launching another phase of monetary easing, be it QE4 or perhaps even the long-overdue and much anticipated Friedmanesque "helicopter money" episode.

Sorry Bloomberg, Someone DID Notice That China Is Dumping A Record Amount Of Bonds

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/10/2015 08:36 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-10/dear-bloomberg-someone-did-notice-china-dumping-record-amount-bonds
Earlier today, Bloomberg TV blasted an amusing snippet from an article that was based on some deep revelations about what is happening in the bond market:



It says: "China sells $180 billion of US Treasuries but no one notices."
BBG TV references the following Bloomberg article "China Slashes U.S. Debt Stake by $180 Billion, Bonds Shrug":

China was a particularly voracious participant, boosting its holdings from less than $350 billion as its economy boomed and the nation bought dollars to keep the yuan from soaring.

Now, the Asian nation is stepping back as it raises money to support flagging growth and a crumbling stock market, and allows its currency to trade more freely. The latest update of Treasury data and estimates by strategists suggest that China controls $1.47 trillion of Treasuries. That includes about $200 billion held through Belgium, which Nomura Holdings Inc. says is home to Chinese custodial accounts.

All of this is quite ironic considering the following ZH headlines:

• May 18: Revealing The Identity Of The Mystery "Belgian" Buyer Of US Treasurys
• June 15: China Dumps Record $120 Billion In US Treasurys In Two Month Via Belgium
• July 17: China Dumps Record $143 Billion In US Treasurys In Three Months Via Belgium

and of course:

• July 22: "China's Record Dumping Of US Treasuries Leaves Goldman Speechless" ...

... an article that got over 400,000 hits, half of which originated on Wall Street (you are wellcome sellside strategists).

So yes, someone noticed.
Then again, Bloomberg is also pointing out something else: the fact that all those hollow chatterboxes who have been calling for the "Great Rotation" (coughbankofamericacough) for the past 3 years have been so wrong and on so many occasions, they may well have destroyed all of their clients who listened to the call.
Bloomberg goes on to note that to "get a sense of how robust demand is for U.S. Treasuries, consider that China has reduced its holdings by about $180 billion and the market barely reacted."
Here is the irony: the market was well-aware of China's liquidation  - which goes hand in hand with China's record plunge in reserves and capital outflow, in fact when you hear "China capital outflow", thing dumping of US treasury paper. What Bloomberg however was not aware of, is that there is no market, and the only marginal buyers and sellers of bonds in what was once the world's "deepest" market, has become a centrally-planned farce (incidentally, the reason there is no liquidity is because while the Fed owns some 33% of all 10Year equivalents, the other central banks own another 10-15% - a topic we expect Bloomberg will " notice"some time in 2016).
That said, Bloomberg is correct: as China is dumping, others - mostly banks and pension funds - are scooping up what little "high quality collateral" they can find, and in fact are hoping they can trade some massively overvalued stocks to retail investors (because "buy buy buy" as we "sell sell sell") in exchange for their bonds. After all, in a world in which Fed reserves have zero collateral velocity, Trasurys have never been more valuable.  To wit, after Bloomberg finally figured out that China is massively dumping Treasurys, it adds that "other sources of demand are filling the void. Regulations designed to prevent another financial crisis have caused banks and similar firms to stockpile highly rated assets. Also, mutual funds have been scooping up government debt, flush with cash from savers who are wary of stocks and want an alternative to bank deposits that pay almost nothing. It all adds up to a market in fine fettle as the Federal Reserve moves closer to raising interest rates as soon as next month.

“China may be stepping away, but there is such a deep and broad buyer base for Treasuries, particularly when you have times of uncertainty,” Brandon Swensen, the co-head of U.S. fixed-income at RBC Global Asset Management, which oversees $35 billion, said from Minneapolis.

Bloomberg is also correct that for the time being, China's supply is being easily absorbed, and that this is not the first time China has spooked the quote-unquote market:

The Treasury market overcame turbulence sparked by China in early 2009, just as the U.S. was ramping up borrowing and as the Fed was about to expand the supply of dollars as part of its stimulus efforts. At that time, then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said his country was “worried” about its investment in U.S. debt and wanted assurances the value of its holdings would be protected.

China’s pullback from U.S. securities is “far less ominous for the prospects for the Treasury market than some sensationalists might think,” said Ian Lyngen, a government bond strategist at CRT Capital Group LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. “It’s the macro and policy stories that give you the big overall level of rates, it’s not flows.” U.S. commercial banks have increased their stakes in Treasuries and debt from federal agencies by almost $300 billion since March 2014 to over $2.1 trillion, Fed data show.

As we have also shown in recent months, despite Chinese and Japanese selling, when it comes to primary bond auctions, Indirect, or central bank interest, especially in benchmark paper has never been higher:

The category of buyers at Treasury auctions classified as indirect bidders, which include foreign investors and mutual funds, won a record 55 percent of the $1.2 trillion of notes and bonds sold this year, up from 43 percent in 2014.

But where things get most amusing is when one considers the ever changing narrative when it comes to Treasurys: after all it was Bloomberg, as well as every other mainstream media outlet, screaming there is a bubble in bonds, get out, buy stocks, and so on, because the economy is better and deflation is going away. And then what happened? The 2s30s curve crashed, and even as the short end is soaring on concerns of a transitory rate hike, the long end has plunged and is rapidly approaching a recessionary inversion. How convenient it is then for Bloomberg to U-turn its goalseeked narrative and to remind us that, actually, things are not all that good, and there wil be much demand for Chinese paper:

Unlike “China’s central bank, global investors want to buy,” said Toshifumi Sugimoto, the Tokyo-based chief investment officer at Capital Asset Management Co., which has $300 million in assets. “Investors like pension funds or life insurance companies or institutional investors, they want a higher yield with a high rating. U.S. Treasuries are very attractive now.”

But... But... Great Rotation... Economic Recovery.

That depth of demand may stand the market in good stead as the Fed moves closer to raising interest rates. “I don’t see an egregious back-up” in yields happening, said Gemma Wright-Casparius, who manages about $50 billion in Treasuries at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based Vanguard Group Inc. “It’s a deep liquid market, it’s a safe haven and it’s a high-yielding asset right now.”

Or, precisely what we said in the summer of 2013 "but no one noticed"...