There is no "Maturity Wall" 101.
Though this is a myth you may not be relieved by this thread.
Have you seen the doomer charts about the maturity wall of US Debt. It is a clear signal that you should unfollow those who post it. It usually starts with 9TN of debt comes due.
Notice the huge wall of debt maturities in the last chart. Sometimes the FURU posting the chart will do it monthly. Particularly when trying to suggest the Fed should cut rates to save the FURU's precious bags. Close to 6TN coming due in the next 3 months. OMIGOD PANIC!
Whats going on here? Well to put it simply the US has outstanding as of 4/30 6TN T bills. The distribution of these tbills looks like this. Notice while the graph above does not include it every month 4 week tbills mature and refinance and should be added to the next month.
In fact the Debt wall is all about tbills and has hardly anything to do with coupon maturities. Notice how the orange columns are small and about the same size.
When corrected for the Tbills maturing and rolling each month there is no debt wall. Its a constant mountain of debt rolling which are mostly bills.
So there is no imminent debt wall. Not this year nor any future year. But are you reassured? Looking at that last chart between 2 and 2.5TN of US obligations are auctioned every month (AGAIN MOSTLY BILLS). Is that something to panic about? Almost certainly not.
The holder of the maturing bills, notes, bonds, TIPS, and FRN WANTS to roll. Even if on the margin the holder doesnt want to roll they have to buy something with their maturity proceeds. The seller of that something has to buy something and ultimately the seller buys the
auctioned treasuries. Its a circle of life. The debt gets refinaced because there is no place for the money to go.
The price can change but the circle of life is highly unlikely to break
That brings us to another topic not covered. Besides the maturing debt that needs to be rolled an additional pile of new debt is auctioned. That grows the pile by roughly 2TN this year and that adds 166BN per month to the auction pile. Again the circle of life will almost
certainly result in no problems getting the financing. But the price that the Treasury can finance its debt can change. Thats for a different thread. There is no debt wall approaching. For over 3 years the 2-2.5TN of auctions per month have gone mostly fine. They will
likely continue to go fine. Its okay to think that 2-2.5TN is alot but thinking that something new and dangerous is about to happen is simply not true
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Firstly it is not a time to make extreme statements. Breathe people.
What happened?
Moody's lowered its credit rating of the U.S. joining S&P who moved in July of 2011 and Fitch in August of 2023 at a AA rating instead of the highest grade AAA 🧵
Here's how I'm thinking about it.
1. Is there any technical consequences for holders of the debt 2. What happened in markets when S&P and Fitch downgraded and what was happening with fiscal policy? 3. Will the downgrade and possible market moves impact the fiscal policy makers
The technical concern that many will doom about is that some holders are prohibited from holding debt that isn't rated AAA by at least one rating agency. Those holders could be forced sellers.
In reality what has happened in the past and what is almost certain to happen
Fed reinvestment 101. It's in no way QE It's balance sheet size neutral and reserves neutral.
Ever since the Fed has held US Treasuries they have had some of those US Treaasuries mature. In periods when neither QE or QT is active
the proceeds from maturities are reinvested in treasuries. They are purchased for many years now via a process called an Add-on to a treasury auction.
The treasury auction today sold 42BN ten years to the private sector. The yield was set completely independently from the
Fed. Which had recently had 14.8BN of maturities reinvested that payment in a side deal with the Treasury at the auction price set by the private sector. The amount of US debt outstanding didn't change based on the Fed 's action, the bank reserves in the system didn't change
One of the classic arguments against market timing trading vs buy and hold is taxes. I totally get that but also it further exposes the basic problem most investors seem to have. That constantly merge long term long only passive beta with alpha
I am entirely consistent that almost everyone has no ability to beat the market and shouldn't even try. That means that everyone should own a well constructed low cost diversified long only portfolio of assets and add to that through time as they save and go about their lives.
However if for some likely overconfident reason you believe you can time markets as well and that "alpha" provides you a satisfactory after tax risk adjusted return then have at it. Yes you will pay taxes if you have alpha. Presumably you pay taxes on your wages? Alpha
On Thursday one of these two Fed Nowcast models is going to be wrong. Of course the Wall Street Sheep Consensus straddles both. Why are these models so different?
The NYFRM (and St. Louis fed fwiw) have a 2.5% Q1 GDP Nowcast and Atlanta has a -40bp Nowcast
We won't go through all the math but DSData and @DanielSimonyi and I have been working through the problem and these are our rough findings. The difference is based on the models.
Both models use the same data as it is released including hard and soft data. Atlanta is bottoms up and NY is top down.
Atlanta takes each piece of data as it's released and adds it up. NY starts with some sort of momentum driven spot GDP and adjusts that number based on the
Lots of folks think that choosing to NOT term out the debt is a bet by the treasury on interest rates. In other words keep financing in bills until long term interest rates decline and THEN issue longer term.
I totally get that idea but want to look
at the numbers a bit.
The first thing one has to ask is what is the end game of the Treasury debt composition if the current composition is undesired and is being held for market timing reasons
The second thing one has to consider is whether the "waiting" has a cost as if
waiting is free then why not wait?
The last thing is what is the benefit if the treasury times the market correctly?
As a caveat this is way more complex than what my napkin math will describe and the timing can backfire or end up being more beneficial depending on how the
Completely off the cuff here I have to say I see two things as possible.
Trump wants to lower interest rates to achieve his political goals
Trump has such a massive ego that he believes he could do a better job than the Fed in
Achieving the Fed's dual mandate and firing Powell and replacing him with a puppet would allow Trump to manage policy better for America and its future.
I think the latter case is a legitimate possibility. He may really think this. Maybe he can manage monetary policy better
But the next president may not be as well equipped as Trump. I mean is anyone as awesome as our glorious leader? Well when he dies and leaves office 10 or 20 years from now the next guy will be in charge of monetary policy by precedent.