The mispricing of U.S. Treasury bonds: a case study

This article documents an apparent pricing anomaly involving9? percent, 30-year Treasury bonds during the months of Mayand June 1986. During this period, the price of the 9?s rosesharply relative to the prices of other long-term Treasury bondsand created a potential arbitrage opportunity. In addition,owners of the 9? bonds were able to borrow at a zero interestrate by pledging their bonds. Detailed examination reveals thatthis relative pricing anomaly cannot be attributed to changesin the level or term structure of interest rates or to differencesbetween the bonds with respect to liquidity, taxation, or duration.     

The U.S. Treasury yield curve: 1961 to the present

The discount function, which determines the value of all future nominal payments, is the most basic building block of finance and is usually inferred from the Treasury yield curve. It is therefore surprising that researchers and practitioners do not have available to them a long history of high-frequency yield curve estimates. This paper fills that void by making public the Treasury yield curve estimates of the Federal Reserve Board at a daily frequency from 1961 to the present. We use a well-known and simple smoothing method that is shown to fit the data very well. The resulting estimates can be used to compute yields or forward rates for any horizon. We hope that the data, which are posted on the website http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2006 and which will be updated quarterly, will provide a benchmark yield curve that will be useful to applied economists.     

Foreign holdings of U.S. Treasuries and U.S. Treasury yields

Foreign official holdings of U.S. Treasuries increased from $400 billion in January 1994 to about $3 trillion in June 2010. Most of this growth is accounted for by a handful of emerging market economies that have been running large current account surpluses. These countries are channeling their savings through the official sector, which is then acquiring foreign exchange reserves. Any shift in policy to reduce their current account surpluses or dampen the rate of reserves accumulation would likely slow the pace of foreign official purchases of U.S. Treasuries. Would such a slowing of foreign official purchases of Treasury notes and bonds affect long-term Treasury yields? Most likely yes, and the effects appear to be large. By our estimates, if foreign official inflows into U.S. Treasuries were to decrease in a given month by $100 billion, 5-year Treasury rates would rise by about 40–60 basis points in the short run. But once we allow foreign private investors to react to the yield change induced by the shock to foreign official inflows, the long-run effect is about 20 basis points.     

Modeling trade duration in U.S. Treasury markets

This paper models the trading intensity of the US Treasury bond market, which has a unique expandable limit order book that distinguishes it from other asset markets. The results indicate that trade duration exhibits significant clustering and that the time taken to expand the tradable volume, known as ‘workup’, significantly decreases the time between the initiation of consecutive trades. Finally, we find that trade duration falls in the presence of scheduled news releases, but the size of the surprise in that news release is not found to be important.     

The Price of Future Liquidity: Time-Varying Liquidity in the U.S. Treasury Market

This paper examines the price differences between very liquid on-the-run U.S. Treasury securities and less liquid off-the-run securities over the on/off cycle. Comparing pairs of securities in time-series regressions allows us to disregard any fixed cross-sectional differences between securities. Also, since the liquidity of Treasury notes varies predictably over time, we can distinguish between current and future liquidity.We compare a variety of (microstructure-based) direct measures of liquidity to compare their effects on prices.We show that the liquidity premium depends primarily on the amount of remaining future liquidity.     

美国国债收益率曲线倒挂与经济前景展

美国债收益率曲线自2018年底走平到目前出现的倒挂现象引发了市场和政策当局 的广泛关注。本文首先从收益率曲线的基本概念出发,回顾了历史上美国债券收益率曲线和经 济衰退之间的关系。研究发现,美国国债收益率曲线倒挂是预测美国经济衰退的一个较为可 靠的先行指标。然而,由于危机以来美联储货币政策操作模式已发生显著变化,此次收益率曲 线倒挂尽管仍可作为预测美国经济衰退的重要参考指标,但在可靠程度上可能会面临较大不 确定性。同时,又因美国目前的经济基本面总体向好,因此短期内发生经济衰退的可能性并不 大。最后,由于目前特朗普政府政策对美联储货币政策立场存在倒逼机制,因此未来政府政策 的不确定性或将成为左右美国经济走向的关键因素。     

Price discovery in the round-the-clock U.S. Treasury market

We evaluate the efficacy of price discovery in the round-the-clock U.S. Treasury market. Using a comprehensive intraday database, we explore informational role of trades over the 24-hour day. We find that information asymmetry is generally highest in the preopen period and lowest in the postclose period. Information asymmetry in the overnight period is comparable to that in the regular trading period. However, on days with macroeconomic announcements, information asymmetry peaks shortly after the news release at 8:30. Moreover, information asymmetry is higher on Monday morning and higher immediately before than after the open of U.S. Treasury futures trading. Although volume is low after hours and trading cost is relatively high, overnight trading generates significant price discovery. Results suggest that overnight trading activity is an important part of the Treasury price discovery process.     

中国高额持有美国国债的风险与对策

美国国债曾是公认的最安全的投资品。2001年以来,中国持有的美国国债随外汇储备的快速增长而增加;美国国债规模也随美国"双赤字"的扩大而膨胀。美国的政治生态及美元的霸权特性使得美国的"双赤字"难于控制,美国国债的潜在风险日益显现。中国主要面临退出困难及债权资产实际价值可能大幅缩水的困扰。建议中国利用最大债主的地位制约美国以维护自身权益;同时控制外汇储备增量优化外汇储备结构以掌握风险控制的主动权。     

Strategic Behavior and Underpricing in Uniform Price Auctions: Evidence from Finnish Treasury Auctions

We contribute to the debate on the optimal design of multiunit auctions by developing and testing robust implications of the leading theory of uniform price auctions on the bid distributions submitted by individual bidders. The theory, which emphasizes market power, has little support in a data set of Finnish Treasury auctions. A reason may be that the Treasury acts strategically by determining supply after observing bids, apparently treating the auctions as a repeated game between itself and primary dealers. Bidder behavior and underpricing react to the volatility of bond returns in a way that suggests bidders adjust for the winner's curse.     

Estimating yield curves of the U.S. Treasury securities: An interpolation approach

Following the approach of interpolation, this paper proposes the multiple exponential decay model to fit yield curves for both the U.S. TIPS market and the conventional Treasury security market. Several estimation methods, including the unconstrained/constrained nonlinear minimization, quadratic programming, and the iterative linear least squares, are applied to estimate the unknown parameters according to different curve‐fitting purposes. Comparisons between the proposed model and the alternatives show that the multiple exponential decay successfully (1) adapts to a variety of shapes associated with yield curves, (2) (partially) keeps in line with the economic interpretations of Nelson–Siegel summarized by Diebold and Li ( 2006 ), and (3) dominates the competing models in curve‐fitting performance measured by mean fitted‐price errors over the sample period. In addition, the exact specification of a nonparametric interpolation model is pinned down by applying three statistical tools, which enable us to jointly take into account validity, optimality, and parsimoniousness of the proposed model.     

Information in the U.S. Treasury Term Structure of Interest Rates

We provide evidence of a significant change in the information content of the U.S. Treasury term structure of interest rates over the last 20 years. We apply a regression approach to measure the information in forward interest rates and introduce both a curve fitting method and an alternative data source. We find more information in the recent U.S. Treasury term structure about future interest rates than about expected holding period returns. These results document a significant departure from prior empirical findings.     

Price Formation and Liquidity in the U.S. Treasury Market: The Response to Public Information

The arrival of public information in the U.S. Treasury market sets off a two-stage adjustment process for prices, trading volume, and bid-ask spreads. In a brief first stage, the release of a major macroeconomic announcement induces a sharp and nearly instantaneous price change with a reduction in trading volume, demonstrating that price reactions to public information do not require trading. The spread widens dramatically at announcement, evidently driven by inventory control concerns. In a prolonged second stage, trading volume surges, price volatility persists, and spreads remain moderately wide as investors trade to reconcile residual differences in their private views.     

对凭证式国债质押贷款业务发展的思考

<凭证式国债质押贷款办法>问世多年,相关业务却迟迟得不到有效推动.究竟是市场上的确没有需求,还是贷款品种设计存在问题?究竟是社会对该项业务的宣传与认识不到位,还是相关制度、办法存在操作性障碍?笔者结合上海的实际情况,就此进行了调查研究,并提出建设性意见.     

美国收益债券发行与流通管理机制及启示

目前与我国专项债券相像并具有借鉴意义的国际经验主要是美国的收益债券.本文梳理了美国收益债券的发行、交易、风险防控和监督管理等主要机制,发现美国各州政府举债管理方式虽然不一,但通过立法和建立全国统一的市政债券市场信息平台直接规范了收益债券相关主体的权利、责任和义务,间接实现了对地方政府发行人的规范、约束和管理,从而形成庞大、规范、运行有效的市场.本文通过总结我国地方政府专项债券与美国市政收益债券的相同点和不同点,结合我国国情提出要进一步完善专项债券制度建设、加强信息平台建设、丰富投资者结构等建议.     

Liquidity,Reconstitution, and the Value of U.S. Treasury Strips

An apparent pricing anomaly exists in the market for U.S. Treasury strips: zero-coupon strips created from principal payments typically trade at significantly higher prices than otherwise identical zero-coupon strips created from coupon payments. In addition to documenting this phenomenon, this study demonstrates that differences in liquidity and differences in reconstitution characteristics explain much of this price variation.     

From pit to electronic trading: Impact on price volatility of U.S. Treasury futures

This paper investigates the dynamics of price volatility and trading volume of 10-year U.S. Treasury note futures within the context of transition from pit to electronic trading. The analysis is conducted over four discernible phases of futures trading evolution: the pit-only phase, the leap to electronic trading, and the electronic trading dominant phase, which is divided further into two periods, the before and after the financial crisis of 2007/2009. Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity with in-mean conditional variance and generalized error distribution parameterization (GARCH-M-GED) tests are conducted to examine the conditional volatility of total returns index as a function of trading volume. The empirical results show a consistently negative relationship between the trading volume and price volatility for all four analyzed phases. They also show decreasing leptokurtosis (except for the direct effects of the recent crisis), continuously high persistency in volatility, as well as a weakening impact of unexpected ARCH-type shocks during the most recent analyzed period. Overall, the shift to electronic trading entails a substantial increase in trading volume, but not in price volatility of Treasury futures.     

Liquidity,Maturity, and the Yields on U.S. Treasury Securities

The effects of asset liquidity on expected returns for assets with infinite maturities (stocks) are examined for bonds (Treasury notes and bills with matched maturities of less than 6 months). The yield to maturity is higher on notes, which have lower liquidity. The yield differential between notes and bills is a decreasing and convex function of the time to maturity. The results provide a robust confirmation of the liquidity effect in asset pricing.     

Return and Maturity Relationships for Treasury Auctions: Evidence from Turkey

The relationship between the interest rate and the maturity of newly issued bonds provides information on the debt dynamics of an economy as well as on the sustainability of its debt. Such information is crucial especially for countries that have debt‐rollover concerns due to financial stress and/or macroeconomic instability. This study investigates the relationship between treasury auction maturity, which also dictates the debt maturity, and auction interest rates. When the Turkish treasury auction data from 1988 to 2004 are analysed, a reciprocal linkage between auction interest rates and maturities can be observed, especially for the 1995–2000 period, when there were chronic high inflation, high political uncertainty, high public deficits and unsuccessful attempts at stabilisation. This suggests that under an adverse shock, the Treasury decreases the auction maturity in order not to increase interest rates too much. A change in this reciprocal relationship is also reported for the post‐2001 era, which is characterised by decreasing inflation, higher political stability, lower public deficits and successful stabilisation attempts.     

地方政府自主发债的违约风险控制——美国的经验与启示

地方政府债券是地方政府发挥财政功能、推动公共建设的重要融资渠道,地方债券风险防控是维护地方财政可持续发展的关键所在.在分析、借鉴美国市政债券管理经验的基础上,认为我国地方债券存在着总体规模较大、发债期限错配、市场流动性不足、辅助制度不完善等四大风险;当前促进我国地方政府债券发展,需要从控制发债规模、调整期限结构,丰富投资者结构、避免风险集中,把控三大环节、健全运作机制,明确监管主体、加强监管力度等四个方面,建立规范有效的风险防范和分散制度.