Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Aloway.

And I'm Joe Weisenthal. 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 26.

That's right. We had our recent OLATs 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.

Yep. Who's going to buy all the bonds? And we did indeed have an absolutely amazing panel.

So, we had Nelly 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 chief US interest rate strategist over at Bloomberg Intelligence. And finally, we had an OddLot's favorite, Josh Younger. He is a lecturer at Columbia University, among many other things. So, we hope you enjoy. Take a listen.

So, uh, is anyone worried about who's going to buy the debt?

Who goes first for that one? Well, anyone? I I mean, I guess I'll start. Um I I'm not worried about who's going to buy the debt. Um you know when when we think about markets 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 um 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, you know, 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 people who are a little bit scared to buy that debt without having some type of premium put onto it.

So it it'll get bought. The question is at what price? And and that's different, right? Like I'm an investment strategist. I'm not a policy maker, right? Right. And and I think that there's some people who kind of messed that up with what like our job is. When Nelly was at the Treasury Department, she had a much different, you know, view of the world that she had to do as opposed to what we do as investors.

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, um, retail, like that has grown a lot more. Nelly, does that change the way you think about debt versus, you know, some years ago?

Absolutely. So, you 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. Um, 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 has changed. There will there will be buyers but it could change the price and change the way prices fluctuate. You know there 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 can we we when I was at Treasury probably 250 auctions a year. they think about that and uh it does affect how you think about bills versus longer term coupons and all that.

I guess I would different way of saying the same thing. U I should start with I I I thought I'd get away from disclaimers when I left the feds but I have to say a disclaimer which is this is not investment advice and I worked at a place that has lots of positions and nothing I say should implicate what which positions we may have or not have.

That said, uh I uh you know, I think it's uh a similar way to ask the question is why are they buying the debt? Because the market's going to clear at a price. Uh we may or may not like that price, but prices used to fluctuate like 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 uh 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. I think we talked about that on one of the episodes. So, they need long-term assets to hedge long-term liabilities because, you know, you all 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 of the business. Um, 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 Freriedman. I'm not a Freeman knight but like 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 for feeding Paris, everyone would die because it's impossible to feed a million people if you're making all 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 like the miracle of of of the price mechanism is the fact that Paris wakes up every morning um and has food and and it's still true, right? I mean cities are complicated.

And so the the in the Treasury market case, the the feeding Paris equivalent is basis trades and swap spread trades and every 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. What are the data points we should be looking at? Because if I look at the 10-year yield, you know, it's something to do with the long-term trajectory of monetary policy and that's going to fluctuate for various reasons, inflation growth, etc.

If we want to capture some of these other dynamics such as the change in who are the buyers or the just the desire to even own US dollar denominated debt assets, what should what else should we be looking at?

Well, so so the way that I look at US treasuries, assuming that there's not real credit risk, right? And I would I would still I would still argue that there's still not credit risk more than a couple of basis points that's embedded in the the current yield of say the 10-year Treasury. Then 10-year treasuries the again the way that I look at it it have 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 for someone to hedge that risk, you tend to get better outcomes and lower yields because of that.

So, you know, we did a study. I actually um when I was back at Credit Swiss, I did something actually for the for a World Bank study about what is liquidity in just about every single OECD government bond market in the 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 you look at Italy that basically didn't have a derivative market that was particularly deep and liquid versus a France which did and a Spain that did actually. So so Spanish spreads were actually tighter than Italian spreads. Um, not that the yield levels might have been the same, but but the 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, you know, and 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 in instrument.

Uh, well, oh, Nelly, please.

I was just going to add I think just to emphasize you know 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 and you know 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 you know 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 you know like in long long run it is nominal GDP but in the meantime you're kind of going to fluctuate what these we call premiums or discounts you know depending on how much uncertainty there is about that I tend to think there's a fair amount of uncertainty about that right now.

Can you convince Joe that there is such a thing as the term premium?

Well, yes because so 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.

I empirically I don't know if I'm going to convince you, but I think I called it on uh Bloomberg radio actually. I called it the uh the dark matter of um of the Treasury market, right? That term premium must exist. The question is, do we measure it properly, right? That and and that's the art of it as opposed to the science of of term premium.

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.

Yeah. And what long-term rates are going to be tomorrow. And the Philly Fed does this every quarter.

The Philly Fed. Okay, same more. So they just ask economists to make predictions as to what they think this that or the other thing are 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 10ear average T bill yields and then they also ask about the tenure 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.

Um, doesn't mean it's positive is the really key thing. Turner term premium can be negative, which you can see why I'm unsatisfied.

Yeah. Like this is the thing. It's dark matter. They ask these surveys.

Yeah. Which doesn't really like they ask this they ask a random survey. Sometimes it gets negative. Like you can see why like I'm skeptical. Like I'm not totally satisfied by any of this.

No, but there's a difference between the two-year yield and the 10-year yield. So therefore that difference also true.

No, that could be the expectations of of race between two and 10.

But you can write down what you think or a survey of what you think is between the two and 10 and there's usually a residual and can be positive or negative and having it can often be explained correlated with things like inflation expectations or other kinds of uncertainty.

I can tell you from experience with both dark matter and turn premium. Oh yeah, Josh was an actual astrophysicist. So both deeply unsatisfying.

Um so wait, what's dark matter in the uh from the physics perspective?

Well, we don't know what it is. We just know it's there. Uh 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.

Yeah. But those never worked and there's just too much of it. Um and then don't get me started on dark energy which is the opposite, right? And so I I I worked for uh for someone at Hopkins years ago who for his 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 supernovings 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 you 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 modless but 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 there's positive negative thing is clearly the case.

And you know there's different microeconomic ways to explain why that should or should not be true. It really comes down to uncertainty. So 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 the rates go up or down? And that naturally generates these dislocations.

Can you talk about the existence of something else which is bond vigilantes? So, we just 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.

Um, was that a question for me or for everyone?

Everyone.

Okay. Well, let me just No, I didn't sit there with 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 treasuries, 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 um these like you know 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 policy maker where do we understand where the leverage is and how can we keep it manageable and make sure they can keep their funding. This is gets to the point the funding being you know 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 um but it's important.

I actually think it's a really important market disciplining mechanism. Yeah. The level of debt matters, right? So the the bod finchelantes, like there's no group of people who get together at a bar and say, hey, we're going to go sell treasuries. Today's the day. Yeah.

Exactly.

Like like, hey, tomorrow, you know, the debt is going to be too big. Let's just sell treasuries. The 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 in a normal environment. You'd expect that anyway if the Federal Reserve was expected to cut rates, which it certainly has.

But at the same time, you know, you do have a growing fear that when you have two trillion, $2.5 trillion deficits every year and we wind up in a in a 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 and I think that that's that forcing um 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 and that is because 50 plus% of our debt is interest of 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's really, really difficult.

So, I I I believe in bond vigilantes, is not in a US context. And what I mean by that is when we talk about bond vigilantes, we're really referring to the '9s 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, you know, the classic bank run. and 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.

Um and 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.

Um and then there were margin calls especially in 2020 where they were delevered. Um and the uh the the 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 dealer, the bank affiliated dealers that are be 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 like sort of marktomarket situation.

But that's a very different set of considerations.

Yeah. 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. Since we're here and we're just clarifying things for me that I've always wanted to, you know, 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 like 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 then it was a good auction.

What how should I consume that information? How useful is that? Or for whom is that useful?

Well, so so 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 you know we we we look at a variety of the bidding metrics in order to do that and and how they compare to recent history.

So, one of the big things that you've seen and this goes to Josh's thing uh issues about structure. you go back about 10 12 years and you saw that primary dealers were the biggest buyers of coupon uh coupon debt. Today they're the smallest.

So you actually in the recent auctions for example that we just had this this week uh we did a seven-year auction earlier today we had five year yesterday. Um the uh dealers only bought about 10% of the bonds whereas if you went back to 2012 2013 it would have been 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 you know dealers because of the changes in market structure that have occurred particularly since the institution of Basil 3 are are much smaller buyers and and you know basically end users are much larger buyers and and some of those are high frequency traders or maybe people who have repo books and kind of need to fill them by 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's 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 u you know how much they bid for.

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.

You're telling me that I'm I've been boring. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

Well, not anymore. That's the good news. It's supposed to be supposed to be. Um, 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 V events happening?

I guess my we should have them sometimes. So, the idea that treasury markets never had events. I mean, go back to the 90s and there were massive V events in like 2003. there's a massive mortgage extension. There was a surprise 75 basis point hike in the night. So, there's always been these events.

I think the the difference now is it's harder to pinpoint a fundamental source. Like usually back then you could say, "Oh, this was the GSC's this was the Fed hiking rates in a way that people didn't expect. Now there's like this whole like process of trying to figure out why this is happening and and it it tends to um happen very quickly and it tends to disrupt a lot of relationships."

But like I 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 is is lesser. Um and uh the the the the frequency with which trades happen just really gone up. I mean like 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 and 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 you know at the end of the day like the the size of the market is growing faster. Yeah. than the dealers have capacity to to use.

Nelly. Yeah. I just to provide like a policy makers perspective like if 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 trade. I remember that. Remember and like no one understood why the Treasury yield went up and down like 30 basis points in 2 minutes and reversed and it was it kind of scared the public sector, you know, the government officials like how is this possible? What is the trade and had to do a lot with these new highfrequency traders?

It took a lot of time to like 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 you know the volume. But I guess I would also separate the I would make a distinction between volatility events and then market illiquidity events just because if the mark 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 pulled in more than they might normally would just because of the higher volatility. So you you should always get a little well you should always get a little less liquidity when things get volatile you know 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 policy makers really care about.

it it there's there's this balancing thing where we want treasure marks to be deep and liquid. Deep 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 it in volume kind of thing and like hopefully not that but the the uh the respon if you want low transaction costs the the way you get that and still have functioning businesses leverage.

And this this has been the case for you know 75 years since the Treasury Fed that this was always the core issue and so when you leverage constrain 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 V events are mostly just time slippage like if you have to think about things for too long the market can run away from you so you know 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 and and these very human experiences are kind of what drive uh the thing.

And we talked about this on on the show that we did back in uh in late April about the April event and that time slippage is exactly a big thing part of what happened when when right before you fell asleep on on April 9th, right? Um it's because like look, you you can't call the New York dealer desk to get more dealer balance sheet at 11:30 at night New York time um when you're trading in Hong Kong, right? It's it's just hard to do that.

So So you get these VA events that that are create illquid markets but only at certain points in time, right? Right. And and then that always gets arbed away. You know, people are are, you know, at the end of the day, we're we're definitely not price takers, right? There's a lot of people who are um 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, you know, 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 the world.

This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Aloway. You can follow me at Tracy Aloway.

And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Arman, dash Bennett at D-Bot, and Kellbrooks at Kalebrooks.

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