Ah, the start of a new week with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen arguing (with a straight face) that there is no room in the Federal budget for cuts. Apparenly, Yellen never read any of the massive, pork-laden spending bills signed by Biden (no one else did in Congress either, nor did Biden).
Let’s start with the US credit default swap (1 year). It remains high at 68.72 (the price of insuring against a US default). And the US Treasury yield curve (10Y-3M)? It remains deeply inverted at -114 basis points this morning signaling an impending US recession.
Then we have SOFR (Secured Overnight Financing Rate). SOFR futures are pricing for the Federal Reserve to hike rates a few more times and to start cutting before the end of this year. The pricing for the 2023 rate path is little changed from a month ago, but this year the market has priced in deeper cuts in 2024, with SOFR now seen below 3% by early 2025 before stabilizing. The implication is that hedging recession and significant rate cuts in 2024 now seems to be fully priced in, yet there’s a risk that the Fed cuts even deeper than the market is factoring in.
We think the market is partially preparing for the risk of even deeper rate cuts than linear instruments are pricing. To see how dramatic those are, we can look at options on SOFR futures and model what’s being priced by the volatility surface.
We are seeing the same story if we look at Fed Funds Futures data. Fed rate hikes until June, then rate cuts to follow.
How did Biden’s lawyers and now the DOJ figure out that Biden has classified documents all over the place? Probably from reading “The Hardy Boys.” Except that Biden didn’t cleverly hide classifed documents. Rather, he carelessly left them lying around at The Penn Biden Center and his home in Wilmington Delaware that he shared with his son, Hunter. And probably on the Amtrak train he would take from Wilmington to Union Station in DC. And probably at Chinatown Garden, a short walk from The White House.
