When did hedge funds and other liquidity providers stop accepting Treasuries for short-term operations? It is easy money! You get a safe asset, provide cash to borrowers, and take a few points above and beyond the market rate. Easy money. Are we not living in a world of thirst for yield and massive liquidity willing to lend at almost any rate?
Well, it would be easy money . . . Unless all the chain in the exchange process is manipulated and rates too low for those operators to accept even more risk.
In essence, what the repo issue is telling us is that the Fed cannot make magic. The central planners believed the Fed could create just the right inflation, manage the curve while remaining behind it, provide enough liquidity but not too much while nudging investors to longer-term securities. Basically, the repo crisis — because it is a crisis — is telling us that liquidity providers are aware that the price of money, the assets used as collateral and the borrowers’ ability to repay are all artificially manipulated. That the safe asset is not as safe into a recession or global slowdown, that the price of money set by the Fed is incoherent with the reality of the risk and inflation in the economy, and that the liquidity providers cannot accept any more expensive “safe” assets even at higher rates because the rates are not close to enough, the asset is not even close to being safe, and the debt and risk accumulated in other positions in their portfolio is too high and rising.
—Daniel Lacalle, “The Repo Crisis Shows the Damage Done by Central Bank Policies,” Mises Wire, entry posted October 11, 2019, https://mises.org/wire/repo-crisis-shows-damage-done-central-bank-policies (accessed March 30, 2020).
—Daniel Lacalle, “The Repo Crisis Shows the Damage Done by Central Bank Policies,” Mises Wire, entry posted October 11, 2019, https://mises.org/wire/repo-crisis-shows-damage-done-central-bank-policies (accessed March 30, 2020).
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