Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/22/2011 15:25 -0400
With everyone chiming in with their take on Operation Twist, here is one of the few actually worthy ones on the matter.
From David Rosenberg
First, the Fed once again downgraded its outlook on the economy, citing “significant downside risks” (the word “significant” was not there on August 9th) and added “strains in global financial markets” as one of the reasons for the more downbeat assessment.
If there hadn’t been so many trial balloons being floated in recent weeks over the prospect of an Operation Twist (“OT”) style of policy easing, perhaps the stock market would have rallied as it did in rather dramatic fashion six weeks ago. At that time, the Fed did surprise the market by not merely signalling to investors that the central bank would remain accommodative beyond just what may be considered to be an “extended period”, but by actually stating that rates would be kept near 0% through mid-2013 at the very least. That was something that both bonds and stocks were not anticipating — a specific date well into the future.
This time around, there was very little that was not anticipated, particularly from a stock market perspective. Considering that Mr. Bernanke made this a two-day meeting instead of the one-day confab which was originally planned (the last time he did that was in December 2008 when QE1 was pledged), there were high hopes that the Fed was going to go further than just embarking on OT yesterday.
But the reason why equities may have sold off hard in the aftermath of the press release could boil down to these three other factors:
- By radically flattening the yield curve in this Operation Twist program (where the Fed sells short-dated securities and buys maturities between six and 30 years), net interest margins in the banking sector will likely be negatively affected.
- The dramatic decline in the 30-year bond yield is going to aggravate already-massively actuarially underfunded positions in pension funds
- The Fed says it is going to extend this Operation Twist program through to June 2012. This is a subtle hint to the markets that barring something really big occurring, there is no QE3 coming — not over the near term, in any event, and certainly not at the next meeting on November 1-2. So a stock market that has continuously been fuelled on hopes doesn’t have any in this regard for at least the next month and a half.
There is now likely to be very little talk about another round of Fed stimulus, and as such, one less crutch for the bulls to lean on. If the Fed, for instance, had said that the OT would have a December 2011 expiry date, the markets would be salivating over what would come next. But June 2012 is a good nine months away (it was deliberately drawn out). It would seem strange at this point, barring a cataclysmic event, to have the Fed embark on a new QE strategy at a time when OT is still in play, not that it can’t happen. What is key is that the Fed did find a way to say to the market that this is it for a while, perhaps until we are well into 2012.
