Telling Stories About TIPS

It always bugs me a bit when a market event that happens for one cause is attributed to another cause merely to advance an easy narrative. The awful 5y TIPS auction Thursday and subsequent flush of TIPS breakevens is being attributed to a “fading of inflation concerns.” There may be some fading of inflation concerns, although as I demonstrated in my last article expectations for core inflation haven’t been fading.

But the main reasons the auction failed were far simpler. Prime among these is that the 5-year TIPS have always had more problems being sold, because people who want inflation protection tend to primarily want long inflation protection. In the last couple of years, I’ve had discussions with many institutional investors who expressed interest when I discussed a 50-year inflation-linked bond. But the 5y TIPS are mainly of interest to (a) indexers and (b) foreign central banks.

As such, they are prone to occasional disasters when the central banks don’t show up, dealer risk-taking appetite is low, and market momentum is such that dealers don’t feel like warehousing the auction risk until the indexes are rebalanced at month-end and the indexers come for the paper. This isn’t to say that I expected this to be a bad auction, because the last few auctions of all kinds have been pretty normal (that is, more like normal Treasury auctions than like TIPS auctions of old). But it’s not surprising to me that it happened. And it has nothing to do with inflation fears fading, except that some buyers perhaps figured they could buy at better levels later because of the market narrative about inflation fears fading.

And Friday, we saw a big bounce-back in breakevens. What does that do to the narrative?

Disclosure: As an aside, our Fisher model identified TIPS as exceptionally cheap compared with nominal bonds after the auction and went fully long breakevens on the close.