A Perspective Behind The FED's Plan To Lower Mortgage Rates, aka The MBS Bailout

In his most recent post, Brad Setser doesn't specifically address the FED's recent action in the Agency MBS market (remember the FED's $500b MBS purchase program?), but he does provide some great analysis of the numbers that are behind the FED's move.

From one of my new favorites, Brad's Follow The Money blog:

This is what a crisis looks like in the balance of payments data, 12/15/08

[Agency - Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie Mae]

"So much for talk that central banks are always a stabilizing presence the market. They clearly have destabilized the Agency market. The fall in demand for Agencies over the past three months — and most Agency demand has come from central banks until recently — has been sharper than than the fall in demand for US corporate bonds (think securitized subprime mortgages, the category “corporate bonds” in the BoP data includes asset-backed securities) after the crisis of last August."

"The Agency market is a rather important market. Increased lending by the Agencies offset the fall in demand for “private” mortgage-backed securities after the crisis last August. More recently, the absence of a “central bank bid” has kept
Agency spreads wide even after the US Treasury bailout of Freddie and Fannie. And that in turn has pushed the US to adopt other measures to bring down long-term mortgage rates. The Fed and the Treasury are literally now buying the Agencies that foreign central banks are selling. Action, reaction …"

Earlier in the same post, Brad points out "[foreign investors added] $400 billion in demand for safe dollar denominated assets [T-bills, T-bonds]. If that kind of monthly inflow is annualized it is a shockingly large number. It allowed foreigners to reduce their holdings of Agencies by close to $75 billion (including a $25 billion fall in short-term Agencies), their holdings of long-term corporate bonds by $13 billion and their holdings of US equities by $6 billion without causing any strain on the dollar."

According to Brad, that's $75b just in October. I'm sure numbers like these make the FED and Treasury nervous.