MBS MID-DAY: Back Near Unchanged Levels After Morning Volatility

Here's a two-part chart that does a nice job of framing today's activity in both a longer and shorter term perspective. 

As you can see, we definitely had some bond-market-specific weakness this morning.  Unfortunately for the sake of accurate analysis, the weakness occurred in close proximity to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) data.  This logically resulted in media outlets pinning the weakness on CPI, but the two were completely unrelated.

The factual culprit for this morning's weakness was a big corporate bond offering from Verizon.  They did the same thing last fall and bond markets took a big, mysterious hit then too (though the past example was a much bigger deal than today's).  Here's the coverage from last year's.

The nice thing about weakness induced by corporate bond offerings is that it's the sort of thing Treasuries/MBS can get over fairly quickly.  Indeed we find trading levels to have stabilized shortly thereafter and volatility has been decreasing ever since.