Primer: Basics Of A Swap Meltdown

I am now seeing more attempts to dig into what exactly happened in the United Kingdom interest rate market. In this article, I am not attempting to do that. Instead, I am just giving a primer on how interest rate swaps are used to hedge liabilities, and what can go wrong when interest rates rise. The mechanisms I describe were likely part of the issue, but I am not saying that this is “the” explanation. Since most people are unsure what liability-driven investment and swaps are, so I am hoping to cover big picture issues for those readers.

I have not seen too many longer articles about the “gilt crisis” in the United Kingdom, but have seen a variety of reactions on Twitter. My reaction is that the discussions reminded me why I mainly followed people who used the title “rates forecaster” and not “economist” when I was in finance. (The “rates forecasters” might have had economics degrees, but they knew that if they wanted people like me to take them seriously, they needed to not sound like the people with “economist” in their title.) It is rather impressive how the most interesting part of this crisis has been buried.

We finally have had the financial instability crisis that everyone was a bug about throughout the 2010s. Many people have spent more than a decade calling for a repeat of the Financial Crisis — well, we just had a small version of it. Based on the initial reporting (which may not be perfect), pension funds managed to blow themselves up with leverage (created by fixed income derivatives) by crowding into one side of a trade. This alleged distress forced the Bank of England to intervene to reduce gilt yields (and hence swap rates).

Gilt Market Mayhem!

Bond markets are finally getting interesting, with the Bank of England launching emergency purchases to restore order in the gilt market. Since I am not in constant contact with people trading gilts, I will just offer a tentative description of what seems to be going on, and what it “really means.”

Paper On Türkiye

I was passed a link to the paper “Exchange Rate and Inflation under Weak Monetary Policy: Turkey Verifes Theory” by Gürkaynak, Refet S. and Kısacıkoğlu, Burçin and Lee, Sang Seok. (They used Turkey, and not the apparently preferred Türkiye.) It was claimed by a well known blowhard economist to tell us something about MMT — but to be clear, that was an assertion by someone who makes a living by being wrong about macroeconomics, and not the authors of the paper. Although it has some relevance to some debates about MMT, it is a stretch to say that is telling us much that is useful.

U.K. Fiscal Policy: Boom

I normally stay away from commentary on budget statements, in that the analysis is mainly political in nature. In recent decades, the macro fiscal effects tended to be tepid and over-rated for political reasons. (The pandemic measures are the glaring exception, however, they were often enacted as stand alone measures and not part of the normal budgeting process. The same holds for the various fiscal measures enacted in 2008.) The recent “mini-budget” in the United Kingdom threw away that timidity. Since I have not been following the area closely, I will point you to Duncan Weldon’s piece, and offer a more theoretical response.

Primer: Bank Treasury Operations

I have been looking at The Moorad Choudry Anthology: Past, Present and Future Principles of Banking and Finance (Amazon affiliate link, and as the title suggests, by Moorad Choudhry) as a source for my banking primer. Professor Choudhry teaches in the M.Sc. Finance at the University of Kent Business school, and previously worked in a bank treasury department. The book is impressive, clocking in at 1252 pages (not counting end matter). As an academic text, it is not cheap, but is a good source for getting a handle on banking.

My primer is aimed more at the macroeconomic aspects of banking, and would be a lot shorter (and cheaper). However, my plan is to lean on the Anthology for more complex topics.

U.S. CPI: Ouch

The CPI report in the United States was a horror show for Team Transitory. Although there were other areas with jumpy prices (e.g., food prices), I think that the housing component (above) is the part I am most concerned about in the near run.

Comments On The Russian Military Collapse

Although I am supposed to be working on some material on banking, I have been distracted by the flood of news out of Ukraine. Although there is always great uncertainty, I think that a lot of geopolitical commentary has been based on the premise of a drawn out war (a “forever war” according to one economist). The problem with that view is that it assumes that the Russian troops are willing to fight in line with their theoretical capabilities. However, a collapse in morale means that theoretically superior forces can be rolled up. The classic example was the British/French army in 1940 that not only outnumbered the Germans, they had arguably better equipment — and lasted six weeks of contact.

Bank Reserves Demystified

Bank reserves feature prominently in Economics 101 discussions of banking. As is entirely typical for Economics 101 macroeconomics, the topic is either taught incorrectly or in a misleading fashion. Bank reserves — better referred to as “settlement balances” — are just private sector bank deposits at the central bank. If you know what a bank deposit is, you know what a “bank reserve” is.