'MarketWatch: "Hedge Funds Are on Pace for the Worst Annual Year Since Lehman Brothers." .. For the most part, the contemporary realm of speculative leveraging operates outside of traditional banking.
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..I am not convinced the Fed knows where to look for the leverage most germane to today's global Bubble. And, I'm compelled to add, the whole world seems oblivious. Speculative deleveraging is not on the Fed's radar, and this is a problem for the markets.''November 9 - Bloomberg (Andrew Mayeda and Shawn Donnan): "White House trade adviser Peter Navarro warned Wall Street bankers and hedge-fund managers to back down from their push for President Donald Trump to strike a quick trade deal with China's Xi Jinping. 'As part of a Chinese government influence operation, these globalist billionaires are putting a full-court press on the White House in advance of the G-20 in Argentina,' Navarro said… Their mission is to 'pressure this President into some kind of deal' but instead they're weakening his negotiating position and 'no good can come of this.' Navarro said investors should be re-directing their 'billions' of dollars into helping rebuild areas hit by manufacturing job losses. 'Wall Street, get out of those negotiations. Bring your Goldman Sachs money to Dayton, Ohio, and invest in America.'"
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November 9 - Bloomberg (Saijel Kishan): "After beleaguered hedge fund managers had their worst month in seven years, many are bracing for an industry D-Day: Nov. 15. That's the deadline for investors to put managers on notice to get some -- or all -- of their money at year end. If history is any guide, the rush for the exits will be swift and accelerate. Clients have already pulled $11.1 billion even before funds fell into the red for the year. The last time the industry careened toward annual losses was in 2015…The fallout: clients withdrew $77.2 billion between the fourth quarter of that year and the first quarter of 2017 -- the biggest withdrawals since the global financial crisis. Investors can cash out of most hedge funds quarterly after giving 45 days notice."
"Hedge Funds Face Reckoning After Worse Month Since 2011," was the headline to the above Bloomberg article. Other notable headlines this week included: MarketWatch: "Hedge Funds Are on Pace for the Worst Annual Year Since Lehman Brothers." WSJ: "Quants are Facing a Crisis of Confidence;" "Quant King D.E. Shaw Finds Stock-Picking Can Be Difficult;" and "Tech Swoon Stings Hedge Funds." Also from Bloomberg: "Hedge Fund 'Hotels' Burned Managers Who Sought Refuge in October." And from the FT: "Hedge Funds Overly Optimistic on Risk, SocGen Finds."
The odds of de-risking/deleveraging dynamics attaining destabilizing momentum are mounting. Many hedge funds now have losses for the year, which forces managers to take down both risk and leverage in anticipation of year-end outflows. I believe deleveraging is now having a growing impact on marketplace liquidity around the world - and across asset classes. Yields are rising and spreads are widening throughout global fixed-income. Unstable equities markets around the globe are indicating a fragile liquidity backdrop. And this week's $2.68 (4.3%) drop in WTI has all the appearances of a major leveraged speculating community panic liquidation (portending challenges for the - to this point - resilient junk bond market).
Bloomberg this week posed a most-pertinent question: "When will funding squeezes impact the Fed?" The market continues to focus on building rate pressures throughout the money markets, with added concern now that year-end funding issues are coming to the fore. The system is, after all, in its first experimental unwind (QT or "quantitative tightening") of some of the Fed's QE holdings. Market analysis is only further challenged by the enormous issuance of T-bills necessary to fund ballooning fiscal deficits. Three-month LIBOR added another two basis points this week to a decade high 2.61%. The effective Fed Funds rate (2.20%) remains stubbornly near the top of the Fed's target range (2-2.25%). There are also hints of waning liquidity in the mortgage marketplace. Furthermore, ebbing foreign demand at Treasury auctions is a rising concern.
At this point, conventional analysis has yet to factor in the liquidity impact from speculative deleveraging - in terms of money market rates, fixed-income yields and the risk markets more generally. The degree to which speculative leverage has accumulated over this long cycle is The Momentous Unknowable. Indeed, there's a portentous lack of transparency for something of such vital importance. For the most part, the contemporary realm of speculative leveraging operates outside of traditional banking. As such, it was just too convenient for the Bernanke Fed and global central bankers to ignore this issue as they collapsed borrowing costs, flooded the world with liquidity and committed to market liquidity backstops.
At this point, I seriously doubt the Fed has a solid grasp of the (direct and indirect) sources of the Trillions of global liquidity that have flooded into U.S. securities and asset markets over the past decade. I take them at their word that they don't see the degree of leverage that would typically indicate a Bubble. Yet this has been the most atypical of global Bubbles. I am not convinced the Fed knows where to look for the leverage most germane to today's global Bubble. And, I'm compelled to add, the whole world seems oblivious. Speculative deleveraging is not on the Fed's radar, and this is a problem for the markets.'
- Doug Noland,
Back to Fundamentals, November 10, 2018
Context'October’s market decline was a rather mild warning shot.'