por admin » Mar Ago 09, 2016 12:55 pm
Growing Stress in Dollar Funding Could Fuel Another Greenback Rally
Japanese 10,000 yen and US 10 dollar bank notes are seen in Tokyo, Japan, 06 June 2016. ENLARGE
Japanese 10,000 yen and US 10 dollar bank notes are seen in Tokyo, Japan, 06 June 2016. Photo: European Pressphoto Agency
By
Mike Bird
Aug 9, 2016 8:44 am ET
The desperate hunt for yield income has taken many international investors to the U.S, where — compared to Japan or the eurozone — government bonds offer an appetizing return.
To get hold of those bonds, investors need dollars. So why is the U.S. currency, as measured by the WSJ Dollar Index, weaker than it was at the start of the year?
So far, one answer is that overseas buyers have hedged their dollar investments, so as not to face fluctuating returns when interest payments are converted back into their home currencies. The hedges balance out the upward pressure on the dollar.
But the hedges aren’t free, and they’re getting more expensive by the day. In the last month, the cost of using cross-currency basis swaps, one kind of hedge, to borrow in dollars has reached its most expensive level in at least five years for British, European and Japanese banks, signalling a strong demand for the greenback.
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In fact, it’s now so expensive that a Japanese bank buying Treasurys makes practically no yield income at all, after the cost of the swap is accounted for.
If foreign investors get tired of paying the high swap prices, the dollar could be in for a rise.
“European or Japan-based investors may change behavior. Instead of channeling FX-hedged flows into the US bond market, U.S. bond purchases by these investors will now only make sense when FX-unhedged”, said a research note from Morgan Stanley analysts on Monday. “Inflows are now likely to create dollar strength,” the note added.
In short, if cross-currency swaps are now so pricey that investors can’t make a return buying Treasurys, they may have to buy them without hedging out so much of the exchange-rate risk. When a foreign buyer hedges its dollar exposure, it puts no direct pressure on the greenback, but that’s not true when it’s unhedged.
The alternative is not buying the bonds at all, which wouldn’t put pressure on the dollar — but might drive up U.S. bond yields.
“All else equal, (the rising cost of hedging) may reduce this foreign demand and lead to higher yields required to offset the increased hedging costs,” said Jeffrey Rosenberg, chief investment strategist for fixed income at Blackrock, in a report last week.
Compared with the rest of the developed world, yields in the U.S. are already considerably more attractive. A 10-year U.S. government bond offers its buyers a 1.61% yield. It’s minus 0.04% in Germany or minus 0.05% in Japan. That drives what Citi researchers called “an insatiable thirst for dollars” in a research note last week.
According to the Japanese Ministry of Finance, major Japanese investors have bought more than ¥32 trillion ($313 billion) in foreign long-term bonds per month on average this year. That’s doubled since 2013.
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But because the buyers don’t want the risk of sharp moves in the dollar disrupting their returns, they hedge their exposure, often with cross-currency basis swaps.
Here’s how they work:
Let’s say a Japanese investor has yen and wants to buy a 10-year U.S. bond. He could just buy dollars in the foreign-exchange market, but then when bond matures in 10 years he has to convert dollars back into yen–and who knows what the exchange rate will be then. Same goes for all the interest payments received over the years.
In a cross-currency basis swap, he instead gives his yen to a bank in exchange for dollars, and agrees to give the same quantity of dollars back at the end of 10 years for his original yen. In the interim, he pays the bank a short-term interest rate in dollars (because he has borrowed dollars from the bank), and the bank pays him a short-term interest rate in yen (because it has borrowed yen from him).
The investor can use the interest payments from the bond to make his dollar payments to the bank, and then the principal payment for the final dollar exchange. He always receives yen, which is what he wants.
In the real world, there’s a wrinkle. The swap requires two players on opposite sides, and if there are many more people keen to be on one side, the other side can charge extra.
That’s what’s happening right now. There’s so much demand for dollars that the dollar side can charge a lot extra.
This increased strain in dollar funding is visible in Libor rates, too. At 0.79%, the measure of interbank dollar lending rates is at its steepest in seven years. In contrast, Libor for the yen, euro and British pound have all dropped this year.
So far, hedges have helped keep relentless demand from driving up the dollar dramatically. The WSJ Dollar Index, which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies, rose by a quarter from mid-2014 to March 2015. Since then, it’s had no obvious upward or downward trend.
But if hedges get too pricey, that may not last.