MBS MID-DAY: Worst Day for Bonds Since 2013!

By: Matthew Graham •

The headline is no joke.  In terms of the change from the previous close, bond market have lost more ground today than any other day since mid 2013.  The following chart shows those day-over-day changes.  Of course we haven't hit the close for today yet, but if we were to end at current levels, we'd just narrowly edge out August 25th for the worst day in more than 2 years:

Days like today give me occasion to remind those of you who aren't MBS Live members that I can't be 2 places at once when things get this crazy.  There have been 5 separate alerts on MBS Live so far this morning, each increasing the severity of the reprice risk warning.  There are almost never 5 alerts.  It's only happened a few times ever.

All that to say I'm sorry for the lack of more detailed analysis.  The dialogue has largely transpired in the chat channel on MBS Live.  Today is the kind of day where the membership can pay for itself many times over (the first alert was out before 9am and the Draghi and Yellen press conferences are streamed live on the dashboard while the community discusses the implications).

Speaking of that, today is almost all about Draghi.  That's unfortunate because your average quasi-financially savvy colleague and even the average member of the media will see that Yellen spoke at congress combined with the bond market sell-off, and conclude that it was Yellen's fault.  In fact, she merely got out of the way of the freight train that Draghi set in motion.  I'll go into more detail in the recap or in tomorrow morning's day ahead.

MBS Pricing Snapshot
Pricing shown below is delayed, please note the timestamp at the bottom. Real time pricing is available via MBS Live.
MBS
FNMA 3.0
99-20 : -0-31
FNMA 3.5
102-30 : -0-25
FNMA 4.0
105-21 : -0-17
Treasuries
2 YR
0.9900 : +0.0520
10 YR
2.3330 : +0.1550
30 YR
3.0750 : +0.1680
Pricing as of 12/3/15 1:45PMEST
Morning Reprice Alerts and Updates
A recap of Alerts and Updates provided to MBS Live subscribers.
1:20PM  :  ALERT ISSUED: Negative Reprices Now Guaranteed; Many Lenders Back for 2nds
11:44AM  :  ALERT ISSUED: All Lenders Now At Some Risk of Negative Reprices
11:04AM  :  ALERT ISSUED: Additional Negative Reprice Risk
9:42AM  :  ALERT ISSUED: Negative Reprices Can't be Ruled Out
8:56AM  :  ALERT ISSUED: Bonds Under Pressure as Draghi Disappoints
Live Chat Featured Comments
A recap of featured comments from the Live Discussion on the MBS Live Dashboard.
Paul Martin  :  "Yellen is wrong on the growth. 100k is the amount to maintain 5.00% unemployment with the trend in lower participation rate (62.90% current and falling). IF you want to reverse this trend and move participation to just 63.7% over 24 months, you need 237k job growth per month. So yeah...if you want to maintain the crappy trends with less of the population working, then she is correct...but what happened to the mandate for "full employment"...unemployment rate is only half the equation for GDP growth and you need GDP growth for inflation. Go to https://www.frbatlanta.org/chcs/calculator.aspx?panel=1 to play with the calculator."
Matthew Graham  :  "I'm not seeing anything that supports a sustainable push toward higher rates. Basically, something would have to happen that reverses the trend of income/wealth inequality if the lower half of society is to contribute enough to justify higher rates. More likely than not, we'll be spending 2016 coming to terms with the fact that maturing societies may indeed be destined to a Japan-like fate."
Matthew Graham  :  "days like today make me wonder why anyone would ever give up MBS Live to save 38/mo."