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Tracy Alloway
Hello and welcome to a very special, special episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
Joe Weisenthal
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy Alloway
So what you are about to hear has the very, very modest title of the best ever panel on the world's most important market. That is the US treasury market, of course. This was recorded live at our New York event on June 26th.
Joe Weisenthal
That's right. We had our recent Odd Lots live event in New York and there's so much going on in the treasury markets. There's questions about rates, there's questions about foreign demand, there's questions about liquidity and the capacity of existing treasury market infrastructure to handle all of the volume of debt out there. So we wanted together some of our favorite people to actually understand what's going on.
Tracy Alloway
Yep. Who's going to buy all the bonds? And we did indeed have an absolutely amazing panel. So we had Nellie Lang. She is a senior fellow over at the Brookings Institution. She is also the former Under Secretary of the treasury for domestic finance. We had Ira Jersey, who you might remember from a previous episode, he is the US Interest rate strategist over at Bloomberg Intelligence. And finally, we had an Odd Lots favorite, Josh Younger. He is a lecturer at Columbia University, among many other things. So we hope you enjoy. Take a listen.
Joe Weisenthal
So is anyone worried about who's going to buy the debt?
Bloomberg
Who goes first for that one?
Nellie Lang
Well, I, I mean, I guess I'll start. I, I'm not worried about who's going to buy the debt. You know, when, when we think about markets and generally and especially markets for sovereign debt of large countries that are relatively liquid, there will be a buyer now, the price might change. And I think that's one of the Things we have seen somewhat in recent weeks. When you have somewhat of a slowing economy in the US you certainly see like two year yields have actually gone down better part of 50 basis points over the near term. But the long end hasn't done very much at all. And I think that that is at least in part an indication that there are some who are a little bit scared to buy that debt without having some type of premium put onto it. So it'll get bought. The question is at what price? And that's different. Right. I'm an investment strategist, I'm not a policymaker and I think that there's some people who kind of mess that up with what our job is. When Nellie was at the Treasury Department, she had a much different view of the world that she had to do as opposed to what we do as investors.
iHeart Podcast
Hmm.
Tracy Alloway
Well, I mean on that note, it is true that we have more, I would say price sensitive buyers in the market than we used to. Right. So we used to have a lot of central banks, a lot of sovereign wealth funds. They're still there, but compared to domestic buyers, retail like that has grown a lot more. Nellie, does that change the way you think about debt versus, you know, some years ago?
iHeart Podcast
Absolutely. So said prices will adjust, there will be a buyer. But it used to be decades ago we just had a much more stable investor base, central banks, foreign funds. Now it's like the non bank, what we would call the non bank financial institutions. It's hedge funds for various reasons, private funds who use Treasuries for liquidity risk management. So the minute things get volatile, they'll want to sell Treasuries to help manage their own positions. And so the investor base, there will be buyers. But it could change the price and change the way prices fluctuate. There's just going to be much more volatility given the changing investor base. And that's something that treasury, who has to issue the debt regularly, we when I was at treasury, probably 250 auctions a year, they think about that. And it does affect how you think about bills versus longer term coupons and all that.
Bloomberg
I guess it's a different way of saying the same thing. I should start with. I thought I'd get away from disclaimers when I left the Fed, but I have to say a disclaimer which is this is not investment advice and I work with this. There's no escape that has lots of positions and nothing I say should implicate what positions we may have or not have. That said, I Think it's a similar way to ask. The question is why are they buying the debt? Because the market's going to clear at a price. We may or may not like that price, but prices used to fluctuate all over time for various reasons. I mean, during the Civil War we had a captive demand base because if you wanted to be a bank, you had to buy Treasuries and yet the price moved, right? And so for me it's are you buying a security to hedge a liability that is of similar duration to the thing you're buying? Are you in it for the long haul? And a classic example is like a life insurance company which has very long term longevity indexed is the term of art, right? It's like as long as you people are alive, there's going to be life insurance companies that have to buy debt of similar length and they're going to be very stable. They might be price sensitive, but probably less so. And at the end of the day they have this liability that has to get funded. Banks to the same extent have these very long term liabilities. Deposits are long term liabilities as we talked about that on one of the episodes. So they need long term assets to hedge the long term liabilities. Because you know, you have bank accounts, you can get your money back whenever you want, but you tend not to, right? So that's a long term liability. A hedge fund is not in it for 10 years because that is not the nature of the business. They are responding to price signals and relative value. Treasury trading is really just a response to price signals where the market is attempting to find the lowest cost buyer. There's this great book from the 19th century which is inspiration for Friedman. I'm not a Freemanite, but it's an interesting story which is called Feeding Paris, which is by Bastiat and a French economist. And he was saying if one person was responsible responsible for feeding Paris, everyone would die. Because it's impossible to feed a million people if you're making all of these decisions on your own. So price signals get the food to where it has to go, when it has to go there. And so the miracle of the price mechanism is the fact that Paris wakes up every morning and has food to eat. And it's still true. Cities are complicated. And so in the treasury market case, the feeding Paris equivalent is basis trades and swap spread trades. And every instance of buying a security with levered money repo and things like that, and hedging the risk with the derivative, where the price difference between those things makes that worthwhile and that's also a signal that we don't have enough of those liability hedgers who are in it for the long haul. We have to find somebody else.
Joe Weisenthal
What are the data points we should be looking at? Because if I look at the 10 year yield, it's something to do with the long term trajectory of monetary policy. And that's going to fluctuate for various reasons, inflation growth, et cetera. If we want to capture some of these other dynamics, such as the change in who are the buyers, just the desire to even own US dollar denominated debt assets, what else should we be looking at?
Nellie Lang
Well, so the way that I look at US Treasuries, assuming that there's not real credit risk, I would still argue that there's still not credit risk more than a couple of basis points that's embedded in the current yield of say the 10 year treasury, then 10 year Treasuries. Again, the way that I look at it, it has to be somewhere around nominal GDP growth, right? So basically at the trajectory of what is the growth rate of the country in the longer run, and that's what the market is going to spit out, plus or minus, like you said, some kind of liquidity or either premium or discount. Now I would argue that with Treasuries, to Josh's point, right there is that markets that have deep liquid funding markets, deep liquid derivatives markets, in order to for someone to hedge that risk, you tend to get better outcomes and lower yields because of that. So we did a study. I actually, when I was back at Credit Suisse, I did something actually for a World bank study about what is liquidity in just about every single OECD government bond market in the world. And what you determined is bid offers were tightest when you had deep and liquid funding markets like Repo and when you had derivative markets. So you look at Italy that basically didn't have a derivative market that was particularly deep and liquid liquid versus a France which did, and a Spain that did actually. So Spanish spreads were actually tighter than Italian spreads. Not that the yield levels might have been the same, but the difference is those deep liquid like ancillary markets around things matter. And that's where the US is unlike any other country in the world because we have all of those things in abundance that very few other markets have. And I think that's one reason why it's going to be difficult for people not to be involved with Treasuries either as a liability management tool or as a trading instrument.
iHeart Podcast
Well, Nellie, please, I was just going to add, I think just to emphasize it is long term, how to think about yields long term nominal GDP growth, but there's a lot of uncertainty about that growth and that comes in, that fluctuates. And so if you're uncertain about inflation, even if you have an expected path of inflation, if it's high, it might be more volatile, or if you're uncertain about policies, any kind of policy, either whether you're going to support the dollar or you're going to support the US As a safe haven, or you're going to support debt or try to reduce debt, that adds uncertainty. So then treasuries, in long, long run it is nominal gdp, but in the meantime you're going to fluctuate what these we call premiums or discounts, depending on how much uncertainty there is about that. I tend to think there's a fair amount of uncertainty about that right now.
Tracy Alloway
Can you convince Joe that there is such a thing as the term premium?
iHeart Podcast
Well, yes, because if you define term premium as the expectations hypothesis, less whatever the current yield is, there's a residual and that is a term premium. Then you just try to define, you try to use things you know about to explain the residual. But there's always something left and that to me is a term premium. Empirically, Empirically. I don't know if I'm going to.
Nellie Lang
Convince you, but I think I called it on Bloomberg radio, actually I called it the dark matter of the treasury market, right. That term premium must exist. The question is, do we measure it properly? And that's the art of it as opposed to the science of term premium.
Bloomberg
So I like the easiest possible way to do this, which is just to ask people what they think short rates are going to be over the long run and what long term rates are going to be tomorrow. And the Philly Fed does this every quarter. And there is a term proof, the Philly Fed. So they just ask economists to make predictions as to what they think this, that or the other thing they're going to do. And there's like inflation and GDP growth and all these other things, but once a year I think the first quarter. So we probably get that either now or soon. They ask 10 year average T bill yields and then they also ask about the 10 year yield. And so you're just literally asking people, there's a lot of bells and whistles you can put on these models. And some of the models with bells and whistles incorporate the survey data. Some people just look only at the survey data. Some people do just the Modeling. But in all these cases there's a residual. Doesn't mean it's positive. Is the really key thing. Term premium can be negative.
Joe Weisenthal
You can see why I'm unsatisfied. Yeah, like this is the thing, it's dark matter. They ask these surveys, which doesn't really like they ask. They ask a random survey. Sometimes it gets negative. You can see why I'm skeptical. I'm not totally satisfied by any of this.
Nellie Lang
But there's a difference between the two year yield and the ten year yield. So therefore that difference also true?
iHeart Podcast
No, that could be the expectations of rate. This is what it is between 2 and 10 year. But you can write down what you think or a survey of what you think is between the 2 and 10. And there's usually a residual left and can be positive or negative. And having dealt with it can often be explained correlated with things like inflation expectations or other kinds of uncertainty.
Bloomberg
I'd say from experience with both dark matter and term premium.
Nellie Lang
Oh yeah.
Tracy Alloway
Josh was an actual astrophysicist.
Bloomberg
Both deeply unsatisfying.
Joe Weisenthal
Wait, what's dark matter in the. From the physics perspective?
Bloomberg
Well, we don't know what it is, we just know it's there. There were attempts to explain it away in various, like trying to hang on to the old way we think about the world is full of stuff that we can touch and see. But those never worked and there's just too much of it. And don't even get me started on dark energy, which is the opposite. Right. And so I worked for someone at Hopkins years ago who for his PhD thesis he was told to confirm other experiments to measure the size and shape of the universe. And part of that was weighing it. And so he did that experiment using supernovae, which is a different way to do this. Lots of different ways to do things. Got a negative number, super unsatisfying negative mass density of the universe, which immediately you'd say like okay, well this was a waste. Why did I spend two years doing this? Instead he ran with it and it turned out it was super real. And he got a Nobel prize from that outcome, which I'm not saying will come from term premium. But sometimes the deeply unsatisfying thing is the more you dig into it, the more it's real. And I think that any way you slice that information, either literally asking people or trying to model what the market's telling you in some super sophisticated way, you always come up with a residual. Now the question is what is that term premium telling you and can you find consistent ways to measure it and track it. And this positive and negative thing is clearly the case. And there's different microeconomic ways to explain why that should or should not be true. It really comes down to uncertainty, and is the uncertainty correlated with yields? So if I don't know what's going to happen in the future to the economy, is that uncertainty greater or lesser when rates go up or down, and that naturally generates these dislocations. Probably the most pressing concern that I.
Nellie Lang
See with regards to the investable quality.
Bloomberg
Of our industry is that it's so.
Nellie Lang
So tied to fuel price.
Bloomberg
So you'll see that as fuel prices.
Nellie Lang
Rise, our stocks go down and vice.
Bloomberg
Versa is just very difficult for people to manage through. But we have seen sustained periods of growth over the last decade, and a few of the airlines have done very well.
Joe Weisenthal
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Tracy Alloway
GreenSeattle can you talk about the existence of something else, which is bond vigilantes? So we just heard Taleb talk about the deficit, and yet I feel like the notion that there are investors that, you know, wake up one morning and say, oh, wait, I'm really worried about the deficit. Today's the day I'm going to, you know, sell all my bond exposure. That probably doesn't happen that often. And then secondly, Nelly, I would be very interested in your take on this. But, you know, when you were at treasury, did you sit in the office going like, oh, the bond vigilantes are going to get me. I better be disciplined with my issuance schedule.
Bloomberg
Was that a question for me or for everyone?
iHeart Podcast
Okay, well, let me just. No, I didn't sit there with that. And I was at the Fed for 30 years before I went to Treasury. And you do care a lot about bond yields. I mean, it's sort of fundamental to the way monetary policy works. It's fundamental to the way you issue treasury, but you don't think about it on a daily basis. But it really influences how you view events like these scarce events and if these shocks that you weren't, which by definition you're not expecting. But if you've got a system where there's a lot of leverage and you have an unexpected shock, people are going to make trades and change positions and that's when you worry. But it's not an ongoing thing. So those kinds of. To sort of prevent that you spend a lot of time as a policymaker. Where do we understand where the leverage is and how can we keep it manageable and make sure they can keep their funding? This gets to the point the funding being fundamental to being able to trade Treasuries. So it's kind of a bigger picture, but it's not a daily thing. I don't. But, but it's important. I actually think it's a really important market disciplining mechanism.
Nellie Lang
Yeah. The level of debt matters. Right. So the BOD fringelantes like there's no group of people who get together at a bar and say hey, we're going.
Tracy Alloway
To go sell Treasuries, Today's the day.
Nellie Lang
Yeah, exactly. Like hey, tomorrow, you know, the debt is going to be too big. Let's just sell Treasuries. The issue I think is manifests itself in multiple ways. And one is this the steepening of the yield curve that we've seen. Right. In a normal environment you'd expect that anyway if the Fed reserve was expected to cut rates, which it certainly has. But at the same time you do have a growing fear that when you have 2 trillion, $2.5 trillion deficits every year and we wind up in a debt trap where interest rates and the interest on the debt ends up being so large that the fiscal agents in Washington will have to do something about it, but the market hasn't yet forced them into it. And I think that forcing that, forcing the government to actually act and do something is really what might have to be the impetus for you to actually get some kind of fiscal response. The challenge is political. Right. And that is because 50 plus percent of our debt is interest, excuse me, of our spending by the federal government is Medicare, Social Security and interest on the debt. Well, those are hard things to contend with. Right. It is really, really difficult.
Bloomberg
So I believe in bond vigilantes. It's not in a US context. And what I mean by that is when we talk about bond vigilantes we're really referring to the 90s EM crisis where the concern was I'm not going to get my dollar. They were dollar bonds. I'm not going to get these dollars back because the counterparty to this debt doesn't have them and can't get them at a reasonable price. And so the bond will default. And therefore I want to get ahead of this default because the classic bank run, I want to get out before everyone else is, before I'm stuck in the US context, you don't have that problem. So the question is who's going to wake up and sell and why? I'm saying why again. And they will sell because they are forced to sell. And we've had the repo vigilantes, so to speak, strike in 2020 and in 2025 and they were forced to sell for a variety of reasons. One was just the increase in the volatility of the market in general. And then there were margin calls, especially in 2020, where they were de levered. And the question then becomes like, are we heading for that kind of scenario? And the reason why the debt growth matters is because these repo vigilantes are not worried about the credit of the bonds they hold. They're worried no one will buy them from them because the banking system or the bank affiliated dealers that are supposed to be on the other side of these trades won't have capacity. And every trade's going to keep ticking cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and they're going to be in a difficult mark to market situation. But that's a very different set of considerations. And it's sort of related to overall growth in the debt, but it's also related to the structure of the market and how it places it.
Joe Weisenthal
Since we're here and we're just clarifying things for me that I've always wanted to learn about for years. Over 10 years I've been sitting at my Bloomberg terminal. Every once in a while you get a red headline and it talks about bid to cover in the tail. And I can never tell if any of these auction statistics really make a difference. Like oh, terrible auction. And they say, oh, it was a good auction. How should I consume that information? How useful is that or for whom is that useful?
Nellie Lang
So we actually started just earlier this year in Bloomberg Intelligence having a grading methodology where we actually grade these from D to A plus and we look at a variety of the bidding metrics in order to do that and how they compare to recent history. So one of the big things that you've seen, and this goes to Josh's issues about structure, you go back about 10, 12 years and you saw that primary dealers were the biggest buyers of coupon debt today. They're the smallest. So you actually, in the recent auctions, for example, that we just had this week with a seven year auction earlier today, we had five year yesterday the dealers only bought about 10% of the bonds. Whereas if you went back to 2012, 2013, they would have bought 40 to 60% of those auctions. So the bidding metrics matter. And it matters because you can see where the primary demand is coming from. And we know now that dealers, because of the changes in market structure that have occurred, particularly since the institution of Basel iii, are much smaller buyers and basically end users are much larger buyers. And some of those are high frequency traders or maybe people who have repo books and kind of need to fill them by getting some collateral. So all of those bidding metrics matter, but the tails will show you that the market was mispriced at the time that the auction closed versus what the aggregate demand was at that auction. And that tail is the single most important thing to look at. Followed by then some of the details in there about who was actually purchasing and then you know how much they bid for.
Tracy Alloway
So since we brought up market structure, it is true that the treasury market has experienced a number of volatility events at this point, which is weird because in theory it's supposed to be a pretty boring, kind of stayed old fashioned market and it's been anything but.
Nellie Lang
You're telling me that I've been boring?
Tracy Alloway
I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Well, not anymore. That's good news.
Nellie Lang
It's supposed to be boring.
Tracy Alloway
Yeah, supposed to be. And we have all these things that have been put in place after every single volatility event. Like you know, the rrp, the standing repo facility. We just had a change to the supplementary leverage ratio to help dealer banks hold more Treasuries. Why do we still seem to have these volume events happening?
Bloomberg
I guess my. We should have them sometimes. So the idea that treasury markets never had volume, I mean go back to the 90s and there were massive volume events in like 2003, there's a massive mortgage extension, there was a surprise 75 basis point hike in the nice. There's always been these events. I think the difference now is it's harder to pinpoint a fundamental source. Usually back then you could say, oh, this was the GSEs, this was the Fed hiking rates in a way that people didn't expect. Now there's this whole process of trying to figure out why this is happening. And it tends to happen very quickly and it tends to disrupt a lot of relationships. But I think in one sense this is stuff that's been happening in the past. It's just the market is much larger, the banking system's ability to provide that offset is lesser and the frequency with which trades happen has just really gone up. I mean the markets are very active now. But I think that's all kind of a symptom of the issue which is it's kind of like a just in time supply version of treasury markets which is you have dealers can't hold a lot of inventory so they have to match trades really efficiently. It used to be if you didn't know the buyer and the seller, you just hold it overnight. Now the high frequency traders do that for them in a very efficient, fast paced way. And then the dealers are trying to get hedge funds through the price mechanism to hold inventory on their behalf because basis trades are basically what dealers used to do. And that's all very fragile. And so that combination of things generates these shocks because the whole that arrangement can collapse very quickly. But at the end of the day the size of the market is growing faster then the dealers have capacity to use.
iHeart Podcast
Nellie yeah, just to provide like a policymaker's perspective, like you just step back. There's just been so many changes in technology and then the changes in the buyer base. We talked about the structural change on who buys now versus then. So like in 2014 there was something called a flash rally in the treasury market. I remember that, remember and like no one understood why the treasury yield went up and down like 30 basis points in two minutes and reversed. And it kind of scared the public sector, the government officials, like how is this possible? What is the trade? And had to do a lot with these new high frequency traders. It took a lot of time to dissect what happened. So that was even before there was a lot of treasury debt. Now we have more treasury debt and there's just the volume. But I guess I would also separate, I would make a distinction between volatility events and then market illiquidity events. Just because if news is volatile, there's new changes in the economy. You would expect treasury yields and prices to be volatile. They should, they're supposed to reflect that. And I think a lot of what's been happening recently but the concerns are when you can't transact easily and quickly because you've pulled in more. Dealers say they have pulled in more than they might normally would just because of the higher volatility. So you should always get a little, well you should always get a little less liquidity when things get volatile just because risk is higher, but it's when they sort of stop making markets or stop posting or something, then, and you can't actually transact, those are the things that the policymakers really care about.
Bloomberg
There's this balancing thing where we want treasury markets to be deep and liquid. Deep and liquid means it's inexpensive to transact, which means the dealers don't make much money per trade. So the old joke like we're making losses but we'll make up for volume kind of thing, and hopefully not that. But if you want low transaction costs, the way you get that and sell a functioning business is leverage. And this has been the case for 75 years since the Treasury Fed Accord. This was always the core issue. And so when you leverage constrained banks, and even if the bank isn't leverage constrained, when the desk is leverage constrained, when leverage is a zero sum game within the institution, which is kind of what these leverage ratios do, everyone's fighting over the same resource and that process introduces friction. And at the end of the day, I think these volume are mostly just time slippage. If you have to think about things for too long, the market can run away from you. So in 2020, if you had to spend two days figuring out who gets incremental balance sheet, a lot can happen in two days in March of 2020. And these very human experiences are kind of what drive today.
Nellie Lang
And we talked about this on the show that we did back in late April about the April event. And that time slippage is exactly a big thing. Part of what happened right before you fell asleep on my couch on April 9, right. It's because look, you can't call the New York dealer desk to get more dealer balance sheet at 11:30 at night, New York time when you're trading in Hong Kong, right. It's hard to do that. So you get these volume events that create illiquid markets, but only at certain points in time, right. And then that always gets arbed away. You know, people are, you know, at the end of the day, we're definitely not price takers. Right. There's a lot of people who are, you know, basically want the price of their, of the asset to reflect the risk that they're taking. And so you're going to get these instantaneous shifts in expectations. When you get a news event, when you get a headline from Donald Trump and you think that maybe the dollar is not going to be the reserve currency anymore, that's going to affect dollar assets regardless of where they are in.
Tracy Alloway
Foreign. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Joe Weisenthal
And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Erman, Dash o' Bennett at dashbot, and Kell Brooks at Kell Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to bloomberg.com oddlots where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can chat about these topics 24. 7 in our Discord, Discord, GG Oddlots.
Tracy Alloway
And if you enjoy Oddlots, if you like it when we do these live recordings, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.
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Odd Lots Podcast: The Greatest Ever Panel on the World's Most Important Market
Release Date: July 2, 2025
Hosts: Joe Weisenthal & Tracy Alloway
Episode Title: The Greatest Ever Panel on the World's Most Important Market
Description: In this special episode, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway host an expert panel to delve into the intricacies of the U.S. Treasury market. Recorded live in New York on June 26th, the discussion features Nellie Lang, Ira Jersey, and Josh Younger, who share their insights on current trends, market structure, and future prospects.
Tracy Alloway opens the episode by highlighting the significance of the U.S. Treasury market, referring to it as "the world's most important market." The panel aims to address pressing questions about bond buyers, interest rates, foreign demand, and market liquidity.
Tracy Alloway [01:29]: “So what you are about to hear has the very, very modest title of the best ever panel on the world's most important market. That is the US Treasury market, of course.”
Nellie Lang discusses the evolution of the investor base in the Treasury market. She notes a shift from traditional buyers like central banks and sovereign wealth funds to a more diverse group including hedge funds and non-bank financial institutions.
Nellie Lang [04:13]: “We used to have a much more stable investor base, central banks, foreign funds. Now it's like the non-bank financial institutions. It's hedge funds for various reasons...”
This shift has introduced greater volatility as these new players respond more sensitively to price signals and market fluctuations.
The panel delves into the concept of the term premium—the extra yield that investors require to hold longer-term bonds. Joe Weisenthal expresses skepticism about its measurability, likening it to "dark matter."
Joe Weisenthal [12:44]: “You can see why I'm unsatisfied. Yeah, like this is the thing, it's dark matter. They ask these surveys, which doesn't really like they ask...”
Nellie Lang acknowledges the term premium must exist but emphasizes the challenges in accurately measuring it.
Nellie Lang [11:38]: “That term premium must exist. The question is, do we measure it properly? And that's the art of it as opposed to the science of term premium.”
Tracy Alloway brings up the notion of bond vigilantes—investors who might sell off bonds to force fiscal responsibility. Nellie Lang counters this by explaining that such coordinated selling is rare and not a daily concern for policymakers.
Nellie Lang [18:37]: “The issue I think manifests itself in multiple ways...forcing the government to actually act and do something is really what might have to be the impetus for you to actually get some kind of fiscal response.”
The panel agrees that while the concept exists, actual instances where investors collectively attempt to discipline the government through bond sales are infrequent.
The discussion shifts to the structural changes in the Treasury market, highlighting increased volatility and the rise of high-frequency trading. Tracy Alloway references past volatility events, such as the 2014 flash rally, to illustrate ongoing challenges.
Tracy Alloway [23:30]: “So since we brought up market structure, it is true that the Treasury market has experienced a number of volatility events...”
Nellie Lang explains that modern market dynamics, including reduced dealer participation and reliance on high-frequency traders, contribute to these volatility spikes.
Nellie Lang [23:46]: “...the high-frequency traders do that for them in a very efficient, fast-paced way. And then the dealers are trying to get hedge funds through the price mechanism...”
Joe Weisenthal seeks clarity on evaluating Treasury auction outcomes, questioning the significance of metrics like bid-to-cover ratios. Nellie Lang responds by detailing Bloomberg Intelligence's grading methodology, which assesses auction performance based on historical bidding metrics.
Nellie Lang [21:49]: “We actually started just earlier this year in Bloomberg Intelligence having a grading methodology where we actually grade these from D to A plus...”
She emphasizes the declining role of primary dealers in auctions, noting that their reduced participation alters bidding dynamics and necessitates closer examination of auction tails to understand market pricing.
The panel wraps up by acknowledging the complexities and evolving nature of the U.S. Treasury market. Both hosts encourage listeners to stay informed through Bloomberg's resources and upcoming events.
Tracy Alloway [29:55]: “Right. It really comes down to uncertainty, and is the uncertainty correlated with yields? ...”
Joe Weisenthel [30:09]: “You can follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Erman, Dash o' Bennett at dashbot, and Kell Brooks at Kell Brooks...”
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This summary was crafted based on the transcript provided and aims to encapsulate the key discussions and insights shared during the episode.