MacroScope

Ben Bernanke has done it again. In his much-anticipated speech Friday, the Federal Reserve chairman managed to tell both investors and politicians what they wanted to hear – that “the stagnation of the labor market in particular is a grave concern” – all while saying next to nothing new about where U.S. monetary policy is actually headed. That the Fed, as Bernanke also noted, stands ready to ease policy more if needed was well known to anyone paying attention the last few months. We also know that the high jobless rate, at 8.3 percent in July, has long been Bernanke’s main headache in this tepid economic recovery.

Still, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on Friday, it was like Bernanke tossed a bone to the hounds on Wall Street and in the Beltway without even getting up off his lawn chair.

For markets, hungry as they are for a third round of quantitative easing (QE3), the “grave concern” comment says the high unemployment rate and mostly disappointing job growth since March gives the Fed little if any choice but to act. U.S. stocks climbed and the dollar dropped after the speech, with traders and analysts citing the remark. “‘Grave’ concern with labor market is striking,” said David Ader, head of government bond strategy at CRT Capital Group.

For politicians, battling as they are in an election campaign where jobs are center stage, Bernanke is saying the Fed shares their deep concern about jobs. Democrats have struggled to lower the jobless rate from its crisis-era peak of 10 percent in 2009, and some like Sen. Charles Schumer have urged the Fed to take more policy action to help out, while Republicans say the millions of Americans still unemployed is reason enough to turn away from President Barack Obama. Said Steven Ricchiuto, chief economist at MSUSA, of Bernanke’s “grave concern” remark:

You have to say that in an election year. You’ve got the Republican convention that just took place, which was all about how bad the labor market is, and how kids can’t find jobs. If you’re the central banker and you might have to deal with these people in the future … are you going to say the labor market is okay?

1. Since the second phase of Operation Twist just got underway, “it would be strange to announce outright purchases of Treasury securities.” 2. Fed officials have publicly noted that continued purchases of long-term Treasury securities “might compromise the functioning of the Treasury market — and undermine the intended effects of the policy.” 3. San Francisco Fed President John Williams “directly advocated” mortgage purchases and Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen has said that “beyond the Twist extension, ‘it’s more likely that [the FOMC] would do things that would take a different form.’” 4. “Purchases of mortgage-backed securities may be considered less controversial than Treasury bond purchases amidst the charged political environment, just prior to the presidential election.”

(Corrects to show CRT is not a primary dealer)

Bond bulls are ready to charge after Friday’s July U.S. employment data, according to a survey by Ian Lyngen, senior government bond strategist at primary dealer CRT Capital Group.

Says Lyngen:

Despite the vacation season and the multitude of ‘out of office’ responses we got, participation in this month’s survey was above-average and consistent with a market that’s engaged for the big policy/data events of the summer. As for the results of the survey, in a word: BULLISH.

Lyngen argued the survey results were the most bullish since November 2010, a point that was followed by a selloff that brought 10-year yields from 2.55 percent to 3.75 percent over the following four months.

The “big wildcard” in making July payroll projections is the size of the swing in public school teachers and other school workers.

Because of the size of teacher layoffs and the effect of the July 4th holiday on the data, the July seasonal adjustment factor can vary significantly from one year to the next, and the variation can be extreme, says Ward McCarthy, managing director and chief financial economist at Jefferies & Co in New York.

Many public school teachers, in addition to some other public school employees, are hired on a ten-month calendar that runs from September through June, large-scale layoffs occurring in July and large-scale hiring occurring in September.

Pity the Federal Reserve. Like an over-hyped Olympian, the U.S. central bank enters this week’s policy meeting with sky-high expectations and a high probability of disappointment.

Markets are salivating at the prospect of a decisive easing move when Fed policymakers emerge from their meeting on Wednesday. The S&P 500 is up 3.6 percent in the last four sessions as traders hold out hope the Fed will launch a third round of quantitative easing, or QE3, to blast the U.S. economy out of its funk. Stumbling job creation, manufacturing and spending, as well as a measly 1.5 percent GDP growth in the second quarter and serious spillover threats ahead from Europe’s debt crisis, all feed this thesis. Fed policymakers from Chairman Ben Bernanke on down the line to Cleveland Fed President Sandra Pianalto and James Bullard of St. Louis have also stoked the market with a more dovish tone the last little while. And yet, this is probably not the time for a big policy move.

Topping the list of reasons to disappoint – and to knock the market down to size – the Fed probably doesn’t want to front-run the July employment report that’s due on Friday, and which will give a fresh sense whether the spring-summer slump in the labor market is temporary or more permanent. Waiting until the Fed’s next scheduled meeting, Sept. 12-13, would give policymakers the added benefit of the August jobs report. And speaking of front-running, the U.S. central bank may not want to get out just ahead of the European Central Bank’s policy decision on Thursday. If, down the line, things get really ugly in Europe – or if the U.S. Congress sends the country off the so-called fiscal cliff – the Fed will probably want to have the QE3 bazooka ready in its arsenal.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke “might have something up his sleeve next week” when he delivers his semi-annual monetary policy report to Congress: he could hint at a “funding for lending” program similar to what the Bank of England announced last month, according to one long-time Fed watcher.

If the Fed wants to ease again, the first lever they pull might not be more quantitative easing where the Fed buys government bonds to help keep interest rates low in the hope that low rates will foster lending and economic growth, says  Decision Economics economist Cary Leahey.

Bernanke is scheduled to testify before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday and in front of the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday.

There appears to have been a significant slowdown in the second quarter. In particular we saw the pace of job creation slowed to a pace of 75,000 per month in the second quarter down from 226,000 in the first quarter and there are also concerns about slowing growth globally, beyond Europe but also in the emerging world and China, which was highlighted in the minutes (to the June meeting) this week. So, where do you think we’re headed? Are we just going to remain in a soft kind of pace? Are there upside risks to growth? Are there downside risks to growth?

Growth has definitely softened. The data are unmistakably weaker in the second quarter than we had hoped they would be. I think everyone recognized the first quarter and the end of last year were a little bit stronger than we might be able to sustain in the middle of the year but it’s definitely come in softer than I’d expected.

At the beginning of the year, it seemed as if Europe wouldn’t maybe weaken as much as we thought but lately the weakening from Europe has been coming online. In the U.S., I think we’re in a situation where we’re going to fluctuate from between the level where we are now to a level that’s more like we saw six or eight months ago. We’re going to have soggy patches, we’re going to have stronger spurts. If you look back over the last three years that’s the record you see. I don’t see a reason for that to change markedly.

It’s an arcane economics debate with all-too-real implications for U.S. monetary policy: Is high unemployment primarily the result of “structural” factors like skills mismatches and difficulties relocating, or is it largely due to insufficient consumer demand in a weak economic recovery?

The answer to that question may help determine how much further the Federal Reserve is willing to push its unconventional measures to bring down the jobless rate, currently stuck at 8.2 percent. If unemployment is cyclical, economists say, it would be more likely to respond to looser monetary conditions.

Research from Berkeley professor Jesse Rothstein, published earlier this year and featured recently on the National Bureau of Economic Research’s website, represents one of the most thorough academic efforts to date to discredit the structuralist version of events.

Ellen Freilich contributed to this post

The Fed did the twist. Will it shout as well? There has been some debate among economists about whether the U.S. central bank might launch a third round of outright bond buys or QE3 given that it just prolonged Operation Twist.

But a truly grim report on the U.S. manufacturing sector from the Institute for Supply Management, if coupled with further evidence of a deteriorating labor market, could certainly induce policymakers to press their foot to the monetary accelerator.

Not only did the index slip below 50 in June, pointing to a contraction for the first time in three years, but the reading of 49.7 was lower than the lowest forecast in a Reuters poll of economists. Moreover, the subcomponents showed the biggest drop in new orders since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Maybe the massive U.S. repo market isn’t as massive as we thought. That’s the conclusion of a study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that suggests transactions in the repurchase agreement (repo) market total about $5.48 trillion. The figure, though impressive, is a far cry from a previous and oft-cited $10 trillion estimate made in 2010 by two Yale professors, Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick. The Fed researchers, acknowledging the “spotty data” that complicates such tasks, argue the previous $10-trillion estimate is based on repo activity in 2008 when the market was far larger, and is inflated by double-counting.

Repos are a key source of collateralized funding for dealers and others in financial markets, and represent a main pillar of the “shadow” banking system. The market was central to the downfalls of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns in the 2008 crisis, and now regulators from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke on down are looking for a fix. Earlier this year, the New York Fed itself said it might restrict the types of collateral in so-called tri-party repos, after being dissatisfied with progress by an industry committee.

The study published by the New York Fed on Monday slices the complex market into five segments, mapping the flow of cash and securities among dealers, funds and other players. Because dealers represent about 90 percent of the tri-party market, the Fed study extrapolates that onto the broader repo market, to arrive at its estimates. Bottom lines: U.S. repo transactions total $3.04 trillion; U.S. reverse repo transactions total $2.45 trillion.