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本帖最后由 ByStander 于 2011-9-30 11:44 编辑
"Operation Twist" might be more powerful than many investors expect.
The Fed's latest effort to boost the economy is designed to ripple through markets. Here is one potential script:
A fund manager sells 30-year Treasurys to the Fed.
Now he has cash, but needs to use it to buy something with a better yield and/or similar risk characteristics.
He snaps up some 30- year mortgage bonds.
The seller of those bonds now has cash and may buy corporate bonds.
The seller of the corporate bonds now has cash and may buy 'junk' bonds or even stocks.
As the Federal Reserve Bank of New York prepares to release on Friday new details about the central bank's rate-lowering program, some bond-market strategists have done their own back-of-the-envelope assessment already.
Their conclusion: Operation Twist could in some ways do as much—or more—for the bond market than its predecessor, known as QE2. The program also could prove to be a boost for stocks.
When the plan was announced Sept. 21, it got a resounding raspberry from the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.5% that day and had its worst week since October 2008. Stocks have stabilized somewhat since then.
Operation Twist was initially maligned by some market participants because it mainly involves the Fed shuffling its bond holdings, rather than pouring new money into the system. By contrast, QE2, so-named because it was the second round of quantitative easing, saw the Fed pump in $600 billion.
Even though Operation Twist hasn't begun being implemented, it already is having an impact on long-term interest rates. It also is affecting what bond investors are buying and selling, pushing many to buy somewhat more risky bonds like mortgage securities and corporate bonds. That's the outcome the Fed has suggested it wants to achieve.
"Operation Twist has greater punch than the QE2 program, or should," said Ray Stone, an economist at Stone & McCarthy Research, a firm that focuses on research for the bond market.
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Prices on 30-year Treasury bonds have soared on the announcement of Operation Twist, at times driving yields below 3% for the first time since January 2009. The yield, which moves in the opposite direction to price, has fallen 0.21 percentage point since the day before the program was announced Sept. 21. Ten-year notes also have surged. Yields on both Treasury securities have moved off their recent lows.
Here is how the program works: The Fed will buy $400 billion of longer-term Treasurys—those maturing in six to 30 years—and in turn will sell $400 billion of Treasurys that mature in three months to three years.
Essentially, the Fed is sucking up bonds that have the most risk tied to interest-rate fluctuations. By doing that, the Fed shrinks the supply of those investments available to private investors, which raises the price.
But investors still need bonds with similar interest-rate risk, known as duration, in part because many of them have set duration targets within their investment portfolios.
Barclays Capital and other bond observers measure the impact of the Fed's buying through a concept known as 10-year equivalents, or the amount of 10-year notes an investor would have to buy to get the same amount of interest-rate risk.
In those terms, Operation Twist looks similar to, or a little bigger than, QE2.
Barclays Capital analysts suggest that Operation Twist will remove roughly $375 billion in 10-year equivalents from the market.
Credit Suisse put that number at $436 billion in 10-year equivalents from the market, more than the roughly $412 billion pulled out of the Treasury market during QE2. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate the impact at roughly $400 billion.
Those numbers don't count the impact of the Fed's surprise announcement that it would take the proceeds from its maturing mortgage-backed securities and reinvest them in other mortgage securities, which caused mortgages securities to rally and shrank the gap, or spread, between mortgages and Treasurys.
"Operation Twist is taking the exact same amount of interest-rate risk out of the market, so it should have effectively the same effect" as QE2, said Priya Misra, head of U.S. rates strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
But bond-market observers contend that the creation of new money wasn't what gave the QE programs their oomph, rather it was duration the Fed removed from the markets. Fed officials, including Chairman Ben Bernanke and the New York Fed's Brian Sack, who runs its market desk, also have pointed to the Fed's duration removal as a key aspect of how Fed policy works.
As the Fed buys bonds, portfolio managers see those prices rise, tempting them to sell. The managers then have cash, which they use to buy other investments that have better expected returns. To get those returns, they buy something slightly riskier, perhaps corporate bonds.
That pushes corporate-bond prices higher, pushing holders to sell and then buy something else, like higher-yielding corporate bonds. In theory, the pattern repeats itself, causing a ripple effect through the financial markets, pushing up prices of everything, even stocks at some point.
"It will force all money managers to venture into the riskier realm of whatever they're allowed to invest in," said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist within the fixed-income group at Jefferies & Co.
But as Mr. McCarthy points out, the Fed isn't operating in a vacuum. Worries plaguing financial markets—soft economic data and the prospects for a disorderly end to the European debt crisis—might cause investors to stay in safe assets like Treasurys.
"We look at it in the context of everything. Not just this one item [that] suddenly changes our mind as to how we are going to approach things," said Bob Auwaerter, head of fixed income at Vanguard, adding that his funds, which have roughly $620 billion under management, are cautious in the current environment. "I would say at this moment, from a risk perspective, we have some risk on but we're pretty close to home." |
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发表于 2011-9-30 10:44 AM
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