Liquidity and the Trump Trade

The United States Treasury department has floated a new idea to improve liquidity in the market for treasury bonds, which has been a concern ever since the Volcker Rule came into place.

The basic problem with liquidity in the bond market is that there are a large number of similar instruments trading, which leads to a fragmented market. This is a consequence of the issuer (the US Treasury in this case) issuing a new bond every time they wish to borrow more money, and with durations being long, many bonds are in the market at the same time.

The proposed solution, which commentators have dubbed the “Trump Trade” (thanks to the Republican Presidential candidate’s penchant for restructuring debt of his companies), involves the treasury buying back bonds before they have run their full course. These bonds bought back will be paid for by newly issued 10-year bonds.

The idea here is that periodic retirement of old illiquid bonds and their replacement by a new “consolidated” bond can help aggregate the market and boost liquidity. This is not all. As the FT ($) reports,

The US Treasury would then buy older, less liquid and therefore cheaper debt across the market, which could in theory then be reissued at a lower yield. In recent months, yields on older issues have risen more than those for recently sold debt, suggesting a deterioration in liquidity.

This implies that because these “off the run” treasuries are less liquid, they are necessarily cheaper, and this “Trump Trade” is thus a win. This, however, is not necessarily the case. Illiquidity need not always imply lower price – it is more likely that it leads to wider spreads.

Trading an illiquid instrument implies that you need to pay a higher transaction cost. The “illiquidity discount” that many bonds see is because people are loathe to holding them (given the transaction cost), and thus less people are willing to buy them.

When the treasury wants to buy back such instruments, however, it is suddenly a seller’s market – since a large number of bonds need to be bought back to take it off the market, sellers can command a higher spread over the “mid price”.

Matt Levine of Bloomberg View has a nice take on the “IPO pop” which I’ve written about on this blog several times (here, here, here and here). He sees it as the “market impact cost” of trying to sell a large number of securities on the market at a particular instant.

Instead the typical trade of selling, say, $1 million of a bond with $1 billion outstanding, and paying around 0.3 percent ($3,000) for liquidity, you want to sell, say, $1 billion worth of a bond with zero bonds outstanding. That is: You want to issue a brand-new bond, and sell all of it in one day. What sort of bid-ask spread should you pay? First principles would tell you that if selling a few bonds from a large bond issue costs 0.3 percent, then selling 100 or 1,000 times as many bonds — especially brand-new bonds — should cost … I mean, not 100 or maybe even 10 times as much, but more, anyway. No?

Taking an off-the-run bond off the market is reverse of this trade – instead of selling, you are buying a large number of bonds at the same time. And that results in a market impact cost, and you need to pay a significant bid-ask spread. So rather than buying the illiquid bond for cheap, the US Treasury will actually have to pay a premium to retire such bonds.

In other words, the Trump Trade is unlikely to really work out too well – the transaction costs of the scheme are going to defeat it. Instead, I second John Cochrane’s idea of issuing perpetual bonds and then buying them back periodically.

These securities pay $1 coupon forever. Buy these back, not on a regular schedule, but when (!) the day of surpluses comes that the government wants to pay down the debt. Then there is one issue, with market depth in the trillions, and the whole on the run vs. off the run phenomenon disappears.

People don’t worry enough about liquidity when they are trying to solve other liquidity worries, it seems!

Issuing in stages

I apologise for this morning’s post on IPOs. It was one of those posts I’d thought up in my head a long time ago, and got down to writing only today, because of which I wasn’t able to get the flow in writing.

So after I’d written that, I started thinking – so if IPO managers turn out to be devious/incompetent, like LinkedIn’s bankers have, how can a company really trust them to raise the amount of money they want? What is the guarantee that the banker will price the company at the appropriate price?

One way of doing that is to get the views of a larger section of people before the IPO price is set. How would you achieve that? By having a little IPO. Let me explain.

You want to raise money for expansion, or whatever, but you don’t need all the money now. However, you are also concerned about dilution of your stake, so would like to price the IPO appropriately. So why don’t you take advantage of the fact that you don’t need all the money now, and do it in stages?

You do a small IPO up front, with the sole purpose of getting listed on the country’s big exchanges. After that the discovery of the value of your company will fall into the hands of a larger set of people – all the stock market participants. And now that the market’s willingness to pay is established, you can do a follow on offer in due course of time, and raise the money you want.

However, I don’t know any company that has followed this route, so I don’t know if there’s any flaw with this plan. I know that if you do a small IPO you can’t get the big bankers to carry you, but knowing that some big bankers don’t really take care of you (for whatever reason) it’s not unreasonable to ditch them and go with smaller guys.

What do you think of this plan?

Budget Analysis

So I finally finished going through today’s Mint and noticed that most of it was filled with analysis of the budget. I tried reading most of them, and didn’t manage to finish any of them (save Anil Padmanabhan’s I think). Most of them were full of globe, each had an idea that could have been expressed in a few tweets, rather than a full column.

Thinking about it, I guess I was expecting too much. After all, if you are calling captains of the industry and sundry bankers and consultants to write about the budget, I don’t think you can expect them to come out with much honest analysis. Think about their incentives.

As for corporate guys, you will expect them to make the usual noises and perhaps be partisan in their judgment. You can expect them to crib about those parts of the budget that shortchanged their company or industry or sector or whatever. But you don’t need them in an op-ed to tell you that – it is obvious to you if you read the highlights, or some rudimentary analysis that the paper anyway provides.

However, these guys won’t want to rub the ruling party the wrong way, so they fill up the rest of their essays with some globe about how it is a “progressive” budget or a “pro-poor” budget or some such shyte. So far so good.

The think tank guys are probably better. At least they don’t have any constituency to pander to, and they can give a good critical analysis. However, as academics (and most likely, not being bloggers) what they write is usually not very easy to read, and so what they say (which might actually contain something useful) can be lost to the reader.

The worst of all are the fat-cat consultants and bankers. The reason they write is primarily to gain visibility for themselves and for their firm, and given how lucrative government business is for these guys (look at the ridiculously low fees these guys charge for government IPOs, and you’ll know) they have absolutely no incentive to tell something useful, or honest. Again these guys aren’t used to writing for a general audience. So you can expect more globe.

All that I needed to learn about the budget I learnt by way of a brief unopinionated summary sent in an internal email at work yesterday (it took me 2 mins to read it on my blackberry). And also Anil Padmanabhan’s cover page article in today’s Mint.

update:

I must mention I wrote this post after I’d read the main segment of today’s Mint. Starting to read the “opinion” supplement now, and it looks more promising

Successful IPOs

Check out this article in the Wall Street Journal. Read the headline. Does this sound right to you?

MakeMyTrip Opens Up 57% Post-IPO; May Be Year’s Best Deal

It doesn’t, to me. How in the world is the IPO successful if it has opened 57% higher in the first hour (it ended the first day 90% higher than the IPO price)? To rephrase, from whose point of view has the IPO been the “best deal”?

What this headline tells me is that makemytrip has been well and truly shafted. If the stock has nearly doubled on the first day, all it means is that MMYT raised just about half the cash from the IPO as it could have raised. If not anything else, the IPO has been a spectacular failure from the company’s point of view.

The US has a screwed up system for IPOs. Unlike in India where there is a 100% book-building process where there is effectively an auction to determine the IPO price (though within a band) in the US it is all the responsibility of the bank in charge of the IPO to distribute stock (as far as I understand). Which is why working in Equity Capital Markets groups in investment banks is so much more work there than it is here – you need to go around to potential investors hawking the stock and convincing them to invest, etc.

Now, the bank usually gets paid a percentage of the total money raised in the IPO so it is in their incentive to set the price as high as they can (and the fact that they are underwriting means they can’t get too greedy and set a price no one will buy at). Or so it is designed.

The problem arises because the firm that is IPOing is not the only client of the bank. Potential investors in the IPO are most likely to be clients of other divisions of the bank (say, sales and trading). By giving these investors a “good price” on the IPO (i.e. by setting the IPO price too low), the bank hopes to make up for the commission it loses by way of business that the investors give to other divisions of the bank. If most of the IPO buyers are clients of the bank’s sales and trading division (it’s almost always the case) then what all these clients together gain by a low IPO price far outweighs the bank’s lost commission.

It is probably because of this nexus that Google decided to not raise money in a conventional way but instead go through an auction (it made big news back then, but then that’s how things always happen in India so we have a reason to be proud). Unfortunately they were able to do it only because they are google and other companies have failed to successfully raise money by that process.

The nexus between investment banks and investors in IPOs remains and unless there are enough companies that want to do a Google, it won’t be a profitable option to IPO in the US. Which makes it even more intriguing that MMYT chose to raise funds in the US and not here in India.