The Greatest Ever Panel on the World's Most Important Market

Okay, that's quite a title but we think it's justified! In this special episode — recorded live onstage at our June 26 event in New York City — we bring together some of the best thinkers we know when it comes to the US Treasury market. US government bonds form the backbone of global financial markets, and are the "risk-free" rate to which all other rates are benchmarked. But recently, there's been concern about who will buy all those bonds as the US deficit explodes higher. Meanwhile, there have been long-running concerns about volatility and liquidity in the market. We speak with Nellie Liang, senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institution and former undersecretary of the Treasury for domestic finance, Ira Jersey, chief US interest rate strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, and Josh Younger, a lecturer at Columbia University and repeated Odd Lots guest. Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 0:58Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 1:39Speaker 02

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• 2:13Speaker 03

  Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:29Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to a very special episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alockway.

• 2:34Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:36Tracy Alloway?

  So what you are about to hear has the very, very modest title of the best ever panel on the world's most important market, that is, the US Treasury market, of course. This was recorded live at our New York event on June 26.

• 2:51Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. We had our recent Odd Lots Live event in New York, and there's so much going on in the Treasury markets. There's questions about rates. There's questions about foreign demand. There's questions about liquidity and the capacity of existing Treasury market infrastructure to handle all of the volume of debt out there. So we wanted to gather some of our favorite people to actually understand what's going on.

• 3:12Tracy Alloway?

  Yep. Who's going to buy all the bonds? And we did indeed have an absolutely amazing panel. So we had Nellie Liang. She is a senior fellow over at the Brookings Institution. She is also the former undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance. We had Ira Jersey, who you might remember from a previous episode. He is the chief US interest rate strategist over at Bloomberg Intelligence. And finally, we had an Odd Lots favorite, Josh Younger. He is a lecturer at Columbia University, among many other things. So we hope you enjoy. Take a listen.

• 3:46Joe Weisenthal?

  So is anyone worried about who's going to buy the debt?

• 3:50Speaker 06

  Who goes first for that one?

• 3:51Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, I guess I'll start. I'm not worried about who's going to buy the debt. You know, when we think about markets generally, and especially markets for sovereign debt of large countries that are relatively liquid, there will be a buyer. Now, the price might change, and I think that's one of the things we have seen somewhat in recent weeks when you have somewhat of a slowing economy in the US. You certainly see like two-year yields have actually gone down, you know, better part of 50 basis points over the near term. But the long end hasn't done very much at all. And I think that that is, at least in part, an indication that there are some people who are a little bit scared to buy

• 4:34Speaker 07

  Buy that debt without having some type of premium put onto it. So it'll get bought. The question is at what price? And that's different, right? Like, I'm an investment strategist. I'm not a policymaker, right? And I think that there's some people who kind of mess that up with what like our job is. When Nellie was at the Treasury Department, she had a much different view of the world that she had to do as opposed to what we do as investors.

• 4:58Tracy Alloway?

  Well, I mean, on that note, it is true that we have more, I would say, price-sensitive buyers in the market than we used to, right? So we used to have a lot of central banks, a lot of sovereign wealth funds. They're still there. But compared to domestic buyers, retail, like, that has grown a lot more. Nellie, does that change the way you think about debt versus, you know, some years ago?

• 5:20Speaker 06

  Absolutely. So you said prices will adjust. There will be a buyer. But it used to be, decades ago, we just had a much more stable investor base. Central banks, foreign funds.

• 5:35Speaker 06

  Now it's like the non-bank, what we would call the non-bank financial institutions. It's hedge funds for various reasons, private funds who use treasuries for liquidity risk management. So the minute things get volatile, they'll want to sell treasuries to help manage their own positions. And so the investor base has changed. There will be buyers, but it could change the price and change the way prices fluctuate. You know, there just can be much more volatility, given the changing investor base. And that's something that Treasury, who has to issue the debt regularly, we, when I was at Treasury, probably 250 auctions a year. They think about that.

• 6:19Speaker 06

  And it does affect how you think about bills versus longer-term coupons and all that.

• 6:27Speaker 07

  I guess I would, it's a different way of saying the same thing. I should start with, I thought I'd get away from disclaimers when I left the Fed, but I have to say a disclaimer, which is this is not investment advice. There's no excuse. That has lots of positions and nothing I say should implicate what positions we may have or not have. That said, I, you know, I think it's a similar way to ask the question is, why are they buying the debt? Because the market's going to clear at a price. We may or may not like that price, but prices used to fluctuate like all over time for various reasons. I mean, during the Civil War, we had a captive demand base because if you wanted to be a bank, you had to buy treasuries and yet the price moved, right? And so for me, it's, are you buying a security to hedge a liability that is of similar duration

• 7:12Speaker 07

  to the thing you're buying? Are you in it for the long haul? And a classic example is like a life insurance company, which has very long-term longevity indexed is the term of art, right? It's like, as long as you people are alive, there's going to be life insurance companies that have to buy debt of similar length and they're going to be very stable. They might be price sensitive, but probably less so. And at the end of the day, they have this liability that has to get funded. Banks, to the same extent, have these very long-term liabilities. Deposits are long-term liabilities. We talked about that on one of the episodes. So they need long-term assets to hedge the long-term liabilities because, you know, you have bank accounts, you can get your money back whenever you want, but you tend not to, right? So that's a long-term liability. A hedge fund is not in it for 10 years because that is not the nature of the, of the business. They are responding to

• 7:56Speaker 07

  price signals and relative value treasury trading is really just a response to price signals where the market is attempting to find the lowest cost buyer. There's this great book from the 19th century, which is inspiration for Friedman. I'm not a Friedman knight, but like it's an interesting story, which is called Feeding Paris, which is by Bastiat and a French economist. And he was saying, if one person was responsible for feeding Paris, everyone would die because it's impossible to feed a million people if you're making all of these decisions on your own. So price signals get the food to where it has to go, when it has to go there. And so like the miracle of, of, of the price mechanism is the fact that Paris wakes up every morning and has food to eat. And it's still true, right? I mean, cities are complicated. And so the- In the Treasury market case, the the feeding Paris equivalent is basis trades and swap spread

• 8:41Speaker 07

  trades and every every instance of buying a security with levered money repo and things like that and hedging the risk with the derivative where the price difference between those things makes that worthwhile. And that's also a signal that we don't have enough of those liability hedgers who are in it for the long haul. We have to find somebody else.

• 9:00Joe Weisenthal?

  What are the data points we should be looking at? Because if I look at the 10 year yield, you know, it's something to do with the long term trajectory of monetary policy, and that's going to fluctuate for various reasons, inflation, growth, etc. If we want to capture some of these other dynamics, such as the change in who are the buyers, or the just the desire to even own US dollar denominated debt assets, what else should we be looking at?

• 9:25Speaker 07

  Well, so the way that I look at US Treasuries, assuming that there's not real credit risk, right? And I would I would still I would still argue that there's still not credit risk more than a couple of basis points that's embedded in the current yield of, say, the 10 year Treasury, then 10 year Treasuries, again, the way that I look at it, it have to be somewhere around nominal GDP growth, right? So basically, at the trajectory of what is the growth rate of the country in the longer run? And that's what the market is going to spit out, plus or minus, like you said, some kind of liquidity or either premium or discount. Now, I would argue that with Treasuries, to Josh's point right there, is that markets that have deep liquid funding markets, deep liquid derivatives markets,

• 10:08Speaker 07

  in order for someone to hedge that risk, you tend to get better outcomes and lower yields because of that. So, you know, we did a study, I actually, when I was back at Credit Suisse, I did something actually for the for a World Bank study about what is liquidity in just about every single OECD government bond market in the in the world. And what you determined is bid offers were tightest when you had deep and liquid funding markets like repo, and when you had derivative markets. So you look at Italy, that basically didn't have a derivative market that was particularly deep in Versus a France, which did, and a Spain that did, actually. So Spanish spreads were actually tighter than Italian spreads. Not that the yield levels might have been the same.

• 10:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Interesting.

• 10:51Speaker 07

  But the difference is those deep liquid, like ancillary markets around things matter. And that's where the US is unlike any other country in the world. Because we have all of those things in abundance that very few other markets have. You know, and I think that's one reason why it's going to be difficult for people not to be involved with treasuries, either as a liability management tool or as a trading instrument.

• 11:16Tracy Alloway?

  Well, Nellie, please.

• 11:18Speaker 06

  I was just going to add, I think, just to emphasize, you know, that it is long term. How to think about yields, long term nominal GDP growth. But there's a lot of uncertainty about that growth. And that comes and, you know, that fluctuates. And so if you're uncertain about inflation, even if you have an expected path of inflation, if it's high, it might be more volatile. Or if you're uncertain about policies, any kind of policy, either, you know, whether you're going to support the dollar or you're going to support the US as a safe haven or you're going to support debt or try to reduce debt. That adds uncertainty. So then treasuries, you know, like in long, long run,

• 11:58Speaker 06

  it is nominal GDP, but in the meantime, you're kind of going to fluctuate what these, we call premiums or discounts, you know, depending on how much uncertainty there is about that. I tend to think there's a fair amount of uncertainty about that right now.

• 12:12Tracy Alloway?

  Can you convince Joe that there is such a thing as the term premium?

• 12:18Speaker 06

  Well, yes, because, so because if you define term premium as the expectations hypothesis, less whatever the current yield is, there's a residual and that is a term premium. Then you just try to define, you try to use things you know about to explain the residual. But there's always something left. And that, to me, is a term premium empirically, empirically. I don't know if I'm going to convince you.

• 12:46Speaker 07

  I think I called it on Bloomberg Radio, actually, I called it the dark matter. Of the treasury market, right? That term premium must exist. The question is, do we measure it properly? Right, that and that's the art of it as opposed to the science of term premium. So I like the easiest possible way to do this, which is just to ask people what they think. Short rates are going to be of the long run.

• 13:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 07

  And what long term rates are going to be tomorrow. And the Philly Fed does this every quarter. And there is a term premium.

• 13:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Who does this every quarter?

• 13:14Speaker 07

  The Philly Fed.

• 13:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay, say more.

• 13:15Speaker 07

  So they just ask economists to make predictions as to what they think this, that, or the other thing are going to do. And there's like inflation and GDP growth and all these other things. But once a year, I think the first quarter, so we probably get that either now or soon. They ask 10 year average T-bill yields. And then they also ask about the 10 year yield. And so you're just literally asking people, there's a lot of bells and whistles you can put on these models. And some of the models with bells and whistles incorporate the survey data. Some people just look only at the survey data. Some people do just the modeling. But in all these cases, there's a residual. Doesn't mean it's positive is the really key thing. Term premium can be negative.

• 13:51Joe Weisenthal?

  You can see why I'm unsatisfied. Like this is the thing, there's dark matter. They ask these surveys.

• 13:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 13:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Which doesn't really like they ask, they ask a random survey. Sometimes it gets negative. Like you can see why, like I'm skeptical, like I'm not totally satisfied by any of this.

• 14:08Speaker 07

  But there's a difference between the two year yield and the 10 year yield. So therefore that difference. Also true.

• 14:13Speaker 06

  No, that could be the expectations of rates between two and 10 year. But you can write down what you think or a survey of what you think is between the two and 10. And there's usually a residual and can be positive or negative.

• 14:28Speaker 07

  And having dealt with.

• 14:29Speaker 06

  And it can often be explained correlated with things like inflation expectations or other kinds of uncertainty.

• 14:35Speaker 07

  I tell you from experience with both dark matter and term premium.

• 14:39Tracy Alloway?

  Josh was an actual astrophysicist.

• 14:42Speaker 07

  So both deeply unsatisfying.

• 14:45Joe Weisenthal?

  What's dark matter in the from the physics perspective?

• 14:48Speaker 07

  Well, we don't know what it is. We just know it's there.

• 14:52Speaker 07

  There were attempts to explain it away in various like trying to hang on to the old way we think about the world is full of stuff that we can touch and see. Yeah. But those never worked and there's just too much of it. And don't get me started on dark energy, which is the opposite, right? And so I worked for someone at Hopkins years ago who for his PhD thesis was told to confirm other experiments to measure the size and shape of the universe. And part of that was weighing it. And so he did that experiment using supernovae, which is a different way to do this. There's lots of different ways to do things. Got a negative number, super unsatisfying, negative mass density of the universe, which you immediately you'd say like, okay, well, this was a waste. Why did I spend two years doing this? Instead, he ran with it and it turned out it was super real and he got a Nobel Prize from that outcome, which I'm not saying will come term premium.

• 15:36Speaker 07

  But sometimes the deeply unsatisfying thing is the more you dig into it, the more it's real. And I think that any way you slice that information, either literally asking people or trying to model what the market's telling you in some super sophisticated way, you always come up with a residual. Now, the question is, what is that term premium telling you? And can you find consistent ways to measure it and track it? And this positive and negative thing is clearly the case. And, you know, there's different microeconomic ways to explain why that should or should not be true. It really comes down to uncertainty. So, and is the uncertainty correlated with yields? So if I don't know what's going to happen in the future to the economy, is that uncertainty greater or lesser when rates go up or down? And that naturally generates these dislocations.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Rees, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  We're seeing a lot of institutional players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service institutional clients.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reese Merrick of Ripple says. A lot of regulators globally.

• 17:10Speaker 07

  Would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80 year old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Maser. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 19:01Tracy Alloway?

  Can you talk about the existence of something else, which is bond vigilantes? So we just, we just heard Talev talk about the deficit. And yet I feel like the notion that there are investors that, you know, wake up one morning and say, oh, wait, I'm really worried about the deficit. Today's the day I'm gonna, you know, sell all my bond exposure. That probably doesn't happen that often. And then secondly, Nellie, I would be very interested in your take on this. But, you know, when you were at Treasury, did you sit in the office going like, oh, the bond vigilantes are gonna get me. I better be disciplined with my issuance schedule.

• 19:36Speaker 07

  Was that a question for me? For everyone.

• 19:39Speaker 06

  Okay. Well, let me just, no, I didn't sit there with that. And I was at the Fed for 30 years before I went to Treasury. And you do care a lot about bond yields. I mean, it's sort of fundamental to the way monetary policy works. It's fundamental to the way you issue treasuries. But you don't think about it on a daily basis. But it really influences how you view events, like these scarce events. And if these like, you know, shocks that you weren't, which by definition, you're not expecting. But if you've got a system where there's a lot of leverage and you have an unexpected shock, people are gonna make trades and change positions.

• 20:24Speaker 06

  And that's when you worry. But it's not an ongoing thing. So those kinds of, to sort of prevent that, you spend a lot of time as a policymaker. Where do we understand where the leverage is? And how can we keep it manageable and make sure they can keep their funding? This is gets to the point of funding being, you know, fundamental to being able to trade treasuries. So it's kind of a bigger picture, but it's not a daily thing. I don't, but, but it's important. I actually think it's a really important market disciplining mechanism.

• 20:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, the level of debt matters, right? So the, the bad vigilante is like, there's no group of people who get together at a bar and say, hey, we're gonna go sell treasuries. Today's the day. Yeah, exactly. Like, hey, tomorrow, you know, the debt is gonna be too big. Let's just sell treasuries. The, the issue, I think, is manifests itself in multiple ways. And one is this, the steeping of the yields curve that we've seen, right? In a, in a normal environment, you'd expect that anyway if the Federal Reserve was expected to cut rates, which it certainly has. But at the same time, you know, you do have a growing fear that when you have 2 trillion, 2.5 trillion dollar deficits every year, and we wind up in a, in a, in a debt trap where interest rates and the interest on the debt ends up being so large that the fiscal agents

• 21:44Speaker 07

  in Washington We'll have to do something about it. But the market hasn't yet forced them into it. And and I think that that's that forcing that forcing the government to actually act and do something is really what might have to be the impetus for you to actually get some kind of fiscal response. The challenge is political, right? And and that is because fifty plus percent of our debt is interest of, excuse me, of our spending by the federal government is Medicare, Social Security, and interest on the debt. Well, those are hard things to contend with, right? It is really, really difficult.

• 22:21Speaker 06

  So I I believe in bond vigilantes, it's not in a US context. And what I mean by that is when we talk about a bond vigilantes, we're really referring to the 90s EM crisis, where the concern was, I'm not going to get my dollar. There were dollar bonds. I'm not going to get these dollars back because the counterparty to this debt doesn't have them and can't get them at a reasonable price. And so the bond will default. And therefore, I want to get ahead of this default. Because, you know, the classic bank run, I want to get out before everyone else is, before I'm stuck. In the US context, you don't have that problem. So the question is, who's going to wake up and sell and why? I'm saying why again. And and they will sell because they are forced to sell. And we've had the repo vigilantes, so to speak, strike in 2020 and in 2025. And they were forced to sell for a variety of reasons.

• 23:05Speaker 06

  One was just the increase in the volatility of the market in general. And then there were margin calls, especially in 2020, where they were delevered. And the the the question then becomes like, are we heading for that kind of scenario? And the reason why the debt growth matters is because these repo vigilantes are not worried about the credit of the bonds they hold. They're worried no one will buy them from them because the banking system or the dealer of the bank affiliated dealers that are supposed to be on the other side of these trades won't have capacity. And every trade is going to keep ticking cheaper and cheaper.

• 23:38Speaker 07

  And cheaper and they're going to be in a difficult like sort of mark to market situation. But that's a very different set of considerations.

• 23:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 07

  And it's sort of related to overall growth in the debt, but it's also related to the structure of the market and how it places it.

• 23:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Since we're here and we're just clarifying things for me that I've always wanted to, you know, learn about for years, over 10 years, I've been sitting at my Bloomberg terminal. Every once in a while you get a red headline and it talks about like bid to cover in the tail and I can never tell if any of these auction statistics really make a difference. Like, oh, terrible auction and there's always a good auction. Well, how should I consume that information? How useful is that or for whom is that useful?

• 24:19Speaker 07

  So, so we actually started just earlier this year in Bloomberg Intelligence having a grading methodology where we actually grade these from D to A plus. And, you know, we, we, we look at a variety of the bidding metrics in order to do that and how they compare to recent history. So one of the big things that you've seen, and this goes to Josh's thing, issues about structure, you go back about 10, 12 years and you saw that primary dealers were the biggest buyers of coupon, coupon debt. Today they're the smallest. So you actually, in the recent auctions, for example, that we just had this, this week, we did a seven year auction earlier today, we had five year yesterday.

• 25:01Speaker 07

  The dealers only bought about 10% of the bonds, whereas if you went back to 2012, 2013, would have been, they would have bought 40 to 60% of those auctions. So the bidding metrics matter and it matters because you can see where the primary demand is coming from. And we know now that, you know, dealers, because of the changes in market structure that have occurred, particularly since the institution of Basel III, are, are much smaller buyers and, and, you know, basically end users are much larger buyers. And, and some of those are high frequency traders or maybe people who have repo books and kind of need to fill them by, by getting some collateral. Also, all of those bidding metrics matter, but the tails will show you that the market

• 25:44Speaker 07

  was mispriced at the time that the auction closed versus what the aggregate demand was at that auction. And that's, that tail is the single most important thing to look at, followed by then some of the details in there about who was actually purchasing and then, you know, how much they bid for.

• 26:01Tracy Alloway?

  So since we brought up market structure, it is true that the treasury market has experienced a number of volatility events at this point, which is weird because in theory it's supposed to be a pretty boring kind of staid, old fashioned market, and it's been anything but.

• 26:15Joe Weisenthal?

  You're telling me that I've been boring?

• 26:17Tracy Alloway?

  I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Well, not anymore. That's the good news.

• 26:21Joe Weisenthal?

  It's supposed to be boring.

• 26:22Tracy Alloway?

  Supposed to be. And we have all these things that have been put in place after every single volatility event, like, you know, the RRP, the Standing Repo Facility. We just had a change to the supplementary leverage ratio to help dealer banks hold more treasuries. Why do we still seem to have these vol events happening?

• 26:43Joe Weisenthal?

  I guess we should have them sometimes. So the idea that treasury markets never had vol events, I mean, go back to the 90s, and there were massive vol events in like 2003. There was a massive mortgage extension. There was a surprise 75 basis point hike in the 90s. There's always been these events. I think the difference now is it's harder to pinpoint a fundamental source. Like, usually back then, you could say, oh, this was the GSEs. This was the Fed hiking rates in a way that people didn't expect. Now, there's like this whole, like, process of trying to figure out why this is happening, and it tends to happen very quickly, and it tends to disrupt a lot of relationships. But like, I think in one sense, this is stuff that's been happening in the past. It's just the market is much

• 27:24Joe Weisenthal?

  larger. The banking system's ability to provide that offset is lesser, and the frequency with which trades happen has just really gone up. I mean, like, the markets are very active now. But I think that's all kind of a symptom of the issue, which is, it's kind of like a just-in-time supply version of treasury markets, which is you have, dealers can't hold a lot of inventory, so they have to match trades really efficiently. It used to be if you didn't know the buyer and the seller, you just hold it overnight. Now, the high-frequency traders do that for them in a very efficient, fast-paced way. And then the dealers are trying to get hedge funds through the price mechanism to hold inventory on their behalf, because basis trades are basically with dealers.

• 28:05Speaker 07

  Used to do and that's all very fragile. And so that combination of things generates these shocks because the whole that arrangement can collapse very quickly. But you know, at the end of the day, like the, the size of the market is growing faster.

• 28:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 07

  Then the dealers have capacity to, to use.

• 28:22Joe Weisenthal?

  No.

• 28:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I just to provide like a policymaker's perspective, like you just step back. There's just been so many changes in technology. And then the changes in the buyer base, we talked about the structural change on who buys now versus then. So like in two thousand fourteen, there was something called a flash rally in the treasury. I remember that. Remember, and like, no one understood why the treasury yield went up and down like thirty basis points in two minutes and reversed. And it was, it kind of scared the public sector, you know, the government officials, like, how is this possible? What is the trade? And had to do a lot with these new high frequency traders. It took a lot of time to like dissect what happened.

• 29:06Speaker 06

  So that was even before there was a lot of treasury debt. Now we have more treasury debt and there's just, you know, the volume. But I guess I would also separate the, I would make a distinction between volatility events. And then market illiquidity events, just because if the mark, if news is volatile, there's new changes in the economy. You would expect treasury yields and prices to be volatile. They should, they're supposed to reflect that. And I think a lot of what's been happening recently. But the concerns are when you can't transact easily and quickly.

• 29:44Speaker 06

  Because you've pulled in more dealers that they have pulled in more than they might normally would just because of the higher volatility. So you, you should always get a little, well, you should always get a little less liquidity when vol, things get volatile. You know, just because risk is higher. But it's when they sort of stop making markets or stop posting or something then, and you can't actually transact. Those are the things that the policymakers really care about.

• 30:12Speaker 07

  It, it, it's, there's, there's this balancing thing where we want. Treasury markets be deep and liquid. Deep and liquid means it's inexpensive to transact. Which means the dealers don't make much money per trade. So the old joke, like, we're making losses, but we'll make up for it in volume, kind of thing. And like, hopefully not that, but the, the, uh, the response, if you want low transaction costs, the, the way you get that and sell that functioning business is leverage. And this, this has been the case for, you know, 75 years since the Treasury Fed Accord. This was always the core issue. And so when you leverage constrain banks, and even if the bank isn't leverage constrained, when the desk is leverage constrained, when leverage is a zero-sum game within the institution, which is kind of what these leverage ratios do, everyone's fighting over the same resource, and that process introduces friction.

• 30:57Speaker 07

  And at the end of the day, I think these vol events are mostly just time slippage. Like, if you have to think about things for too long, the market can run away from you. So, you know, in 2020, if you had to spend two days figuring out who gets incremental balance sheet, a lot can happen in two days in March of 2020. And, and, and these very human experiences are kind of what drive today. And we talked about this on, on the show that we did back in, in late April about the April event. And that's time slippage is exactly a big thing, part of what happened when, when, right before you fell asleep. On my couch. On, on April 9th, right? It, it, it's because like, look, you, you can't call the New York dealer desk to get more dealer balance sheet at 11:30 at night, New York time, when you're trading in Hong Kong, right? It's, it's hard to do that.

• 31:42Speaker 07

  So, so you get these vol events that, that are, create a liquid markets, but only at certain points in time, right? And, and then that always gets arbed away. You know, people are, are, you know, at the end of the day, we're, we're definitely not price takers, right? There's a lot of people who are, you know, basically want the price of their, of the asset to reflect the risk that they're taking. And so you're going to get these instantaneous shifts in expectations when you get a news event, when you get a headline from, you know, Donald Trump, and you think that maybe the dollar's not going to be the reserve currency anymore. That's going to affect dollar assets, regardless of where they are in the world.

• 32:35Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 32:40Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at theStalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kail Brooks at KailBrooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 33:02Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we do these live recordings, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.

• 33:42Speaker 03

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