Chart Of The Week: Ummmm

Back in early October, I noted that repo fails had jumped above $250 billion (combined “to receive” and “to deliver”) for three weeks straight. That wasn’t an auspicious result, as sustained collateral problems like that don’t correlate to happy things. It all began the week of September 5, in what seemed like a minor one-day nuisance over the 4-week bill yield.

October was something of a lull in repo and other things, too. Nothing ever goes in a straight line, of course, so it wasn’t surprising to find by mid-November a resumption of concerns based so much in repo. The week of Thanksgiving, fails totaled again more than $400 billion, similar in scale to that week of September 5. Then they spiked by 50% more to $600 billion the week after.

FRBNY records $523 billion in repo fails now for the first week of December. That’s three straight more than $400 billion, two in a row better than half a trillion. The 8-week average is even just shy of $350 billion. You can get rich being a collateral owner under these terms, raising the question where are they all?

While these are good charts, important charts, neither is our Chart of the Week. What we are looking for in this context of really another burgeoning “dollar shortage” episode is, as always, escalation.

I’m going to go out on a limb and claim there is something seriously wrong in repo. All jokes aside, I know it sounds like a broken record but the dimension that matters is not intermittent collateral problems so much as the greater intensity to them and in a condensing timeframe. Escalation is a description you really don’t want to fit the circumstances.

Just as raging wildfires have a horrific tendency to jump fire-lines and even whole valleys given enough energy, funding issues can jump markets. The global “dollar” market is not a monolithic whole and never has been. It may be (very likely is) more fragmented today than at any point in the past owing to persistent balance sheet capacity problems (therefore the breakdown of covered interest parity that used to keep various funding markets working together in what sure seemed like a seamless whole). It would be a clear point of magnification, then, to find serious problems in one part of the eurodollar system spilling over into another one.