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Today we're talking about an announcement from the U.S. Treasury Department that has generated a surprising amount of noise in the financial markets.
The two words getting attention are Treasury buybacks.
Treasury announced today, August 19, that beginning September 9 it will increase, by at least double, the size of its liquidity support buyback operations for longer-dated Treasury securities. Specifically, the maximum size for operations in the 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year sectors will increase from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation.
It might be coincidence, but this happened on the same day that US debt topped $40T. The country’s “total public debt outstanding” officially hit $40.047 trillion on Tuesday, the Treasury Department reported Wednesday, ticking up from $39.987 trillion a day earlier.
Immediately, people started describing this as quantitative easing, QE light, yield curve control, and even a new version of Operation Twist.
I think we need to separate the mechanics from the headlines.
A Treasury buyback is not the same thing as Federal Reserve quantitative easing. The Treasury is already issuing enormous quantities of debt. In a buyback operation, Treasury can issue securities in one part of the market and use some of those proceeds to repurchase securities that are already outstanding.
The important distinction is which securities they are buying.
The liquidity support program primarily targets what are called off-the-run Treasury securities.
When Treasury issues a new 10-year note, for example, that newly issued security becomes the on-the-run Treasury. It tends to trade very actively. The older 10-year securities that were issued previously become off-the-run securities.
They're still Treasury obligations. Their credit quality hasn't changed. But they don't necessarily trade with the same liquidity. That becomes important during periods of market stress. If a large investor needs to sell a significant quantity of an older Treasury security, there may not be as deep a pool of buyers as there is for the newest issue.
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