Hear me out. Something’s brewing in the UK Gilt market.
#LettuceLiz
As the chart above shows, the cash swap spread has moved significantly & one-way recently.
Spread to swap is now 50bps.
But EU & UK insurers book their liabilities at NPV using swap curves, not UKT curves.
Still with me ?
This means that Gilts have become an excellent investment for life insurers.
The CSM for new business is going down (but still positive) but the charge for credit is now 0 so ROE increase significantly.
So far so good.
But according to a recent JPM study, insurers didn’t stop there.
They’ve engineered another magical money machine, using indexed Gilts....
The trick is that indexed Gilts often have dirty market prices way above nominal, even if clean price is 100 or below - that's because of the recent inflation spike ofc.
E.g. GB00B3MYD345 has a clean of 78% but a dirty of 145%
Why does it matter?
Bc insurers then swap indexed Gilts with normal Gilts.
Because of the price diff, the bank pays a large upfront, which is then reinvested in... normal Gilts…
& Bingo the insurer books twice the Gilt spread!
Meanwhile, Solva requirement is unchanged.
And here's ROEx2
True, this doubles the income but also exposes insurers to the classical “LDI type” risk: big MtM moves will trigger margin calls on the swap… & if you are forced to unwind it can get ugly.
The size of this market is unknown, but JPM think it’s significant.
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Bloomberg has some nice charts on the tariffs’ impacts.
The first one argues that tariffs on China are coming globally: too many countries will see a spike of imports from China & that's not sustainable.
The second shows GDP impacts, taking into account direct effects + indirect via trade partners (using a WTO macro model, so, you know...)
SE Asia impact is massive, -1% for EU, -1.3% Japan and -2.5% Korea. Mexico bonanza.
Some details on who’s going to stop which exports – very interesting split (especially if you try to model loan losses 😊). Overall 30% drop in US imports of goods (with retaliation modelled as 50% of US). China is -85%, Vietnam -75%, Taiwan, Japan, Korea Thailand -50%, EU -40%.
A week ago the Swiss gvt bravely decided to leave the decision on UBS capital requirement to Parliament.
I’m not sure that was such a great idea – as the recent proposal of the Swiss Social-Democratic Party shows.
If implemented, it would be a massive game changer. A thread.
First, a reminder: the SDP is not a fringe party, they’re #2 in the National council (41/200) & #3 in Council of States (9/46) & they’re also not particularly extreme (I mean, Swiss rarely are.)
But their proposals for UBS are a bit wild.
Let’s unpack.
1) A new leverage ratio surcharge of 3% for assets >300bn$ - in practice it means 40bn$ more capital required (out of approx 85bn of equity).
Ouch.
And having the biggest req on a non-risk adjusted basis is not exactly a very safe approach imho
Tomorrow is the end of the grace period for fentanyl-related tariffs (Canada Mexico), China ones r supposed to start on March 12. Time to look at some numbers. So far Trump has enacted 10% “fentanyl” tariffs on Chinese goods, enacted and cancelled 25% on Columbia and threatened :
Canada, Mexico (25% goods + 10% Canadian energy), China (+10% addtl), 25% steel & aluminium worldwide, “fees” for Chinese ships/freight operators, “reciprocal tariffs” (whatever that means) for all nations + 25% autos pharma & lumber, + unknown % on copper.
We’ll know more after the report on ‘America First Trade Policy’ on April 1st, especially on "reciprocal ones", but here are few thoughts from a great Autonomous report on this.
Some historical perspective: maybe raising tariffs in the early 1920 wasn’t a great idea?
You should watch the full unedited version of this unreal press conference All going as expected (Trump w/ his weird obsessions, Z trying to stay cool, Rubio wishing he was in bed) until it totally blows up bc Z can't help correcting Vance about diplomacy
The best summary of the twisted world we live in is how Trump ends the press conference:
"This is going to be great television"
You can't make it up
Also : the journalist who asked the suit question should really look at himself in the mirror tonight bc it clearly contributed to the unravelling of the meeting
This is pure gold, Greek edition.
How did Eurobank achieve such an increase in capital ratios, in Q3 24? The trick is in the +99bps.
Which comes from a mysterious decrease of 2.4bn€ in RWA. But how? Deleveraging?
Oh no, that would be hard work. I’ve got a better idea.
Thread.
It’s obviously the ICAP CRIF CQS, you idiot. Err, what?
Here’s the explanation, & it’s beautiful.
Under Basel/EU rules, banks using the standard approach (no internal ratings) have capital charges (RWA) based on external ratings which are then mapped on so-called “Credit Quality Steps” that give RWA using this table.
BNP has very good notes on the US elections and how to trade them. They are mostly focused on timing and the info you should focus on. Here's my summary
Before the elections
Apart from betting markets / polls, a source of info is mail-in ballot statistics.
Early voting doesn’t favor the Dems as much as 2020 (but Covid).
Before the elections
Some states - notably Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan North Carolina - start counting on Nov 5th. They are important states so could provide info.