Courtesy of ZeroHedge. View original post here.
It seems that it is not just the Europeans that are USD cash starved heading into year-end as the Swiss and Japanese gorged themselves on two-week maturity FX swap lines during the last week. The total outstanding under the Federal Reserve’s USDollar Liquidity Swap Operations jumped from $62.599bn to $99.823bn – or more than 59% during the week ending 12/28. Admittedly, the size of the additional Swiss draw-down, $320mm more compared to $75mm the previous week, is a drop in the bucket compared to the ECB’s additional $33bn this week. However, the more-than-$9bn additional draw-down by the Bank of Japan perhaps helps explain why USD-JPY cross-currency basis swaps eased so much this week (as the desperate need for USD through this counterparty-risk-exposed form of funding reduced by around 12bps or more than 25%). Perhaps it is time to take a closer look at some of the Japanese banks as while the stigma of borrowing from these lines is talked down, clearly there are funding/liquidity needs that are rising dramatically.
From the Fed’s website, the scale of the jump in the swap lines is evident for Europe and Japan.
While the velocity of the initial moves is not quite as historic as the Lehman moments, it is starting to gather pace – now above the pre-2008-crisis starting levels.
And the rise (an improvement) in the USD-JPY basis swap up to the 12/28 break is very notable as banks preferred to spend a little extra (58bps for 15-days versus 32bps for 3-months) and avoid the longer-term currency exposure (and counterparty risk) of the basis swap in favor of the Fed’s visible hand.
