Nordea fremlægger en interessant teori i en analyse over cash-balancen og likviditeten i USA. Teorien går på, at finansminister Mnuchin vil tvinge centralbanken til at genoptage QE-programmet og generelt stimulere likviditeten op til valget i efteråret.
Uddrag fra Nordea:
Will Mnuchin’s liquidity shenanigans help Trump get re-elected?
On the topic of dollar liquidity, we have been – and remain – in the camp of smooth sailing until Easter as a result of UST tax refunds and Fed’s 60bn/month POMOs. However, recent reports that the US Treasury is considering higher daily cash balances according to Treasury secretary Mnuchin are interesting. The UST’s crisis account is currently brimming with dollars (~412bn) – which means these dollars aren’t available to the US banking system (a form of Quantitative Tightening).
Chart 2: Seasonal pattern suggests ~200bn of liquidity provisions by the UST in February
The seasonal pattern suggests a massive draw-down in February due to tax refunds, which will add liquidity to the system – this added ~200bn in 2019. However, if the Treasury were to seek even higher cash balances on average it would tighten the liquidity available to the banking sector at some juncture. The USTs build-up of its crisis account in September definitely contributed to the repo market havoc at the time and forced the Fed to start repo operations and to buy T-bills.
It may be that Mnuchin (and/or Trump) plans to try bringing about new money market havoc this year, perhaps in order to get Powell’s Fed to implement even more POMO/QE and liquidity support ahead of the 2020 election. If Mnuchin were to seek a cash balance of 650bn on average (just a random number pulled out from our tin foil hats), it could force the Fed to do ~250bn more bill purchases… The next refunding documents which may give more clues are scheduled for February 3.
