Streetwise Professor

At the outset of the Financial Crisis in September, 2008, Putin touted that Russia would be an “island of stability.” We know how that worked out. Russia experienced the most severe decline of any G-20 economy in large part due to a steep fall in the price of oil.

Today Putin said that Russia was preparing for a “catastrophic” fall in the oil price, but no worries!, everything is under control:

President Vladimir Putin said Russia’s economy, battered by sanctions and a collapsing currency, faces a potential “catastrophic” slump in oil prices.

Such a scenario is “entirely possible, and we admit it,” Putin told the state-run Tass news service before attending this weekend’s Group of 20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, according to a transcript e-mailed by the Kremlin today. Russia’s reserves, at more than $400 billion, would allow the country to weather such a turn of events, he said.

. . . .

With $421 billion in international reserves, Russia has a “big enough” buffer to meet all social commitments and maintain budgetary and economy stability, Putin said. The value of the stockpile last week extended its slide to the longest since 2008 as the monetary authority attempted to smooth the ruble’s decline.

“A country like ours finds the situation easier to cope with,” Putin said. “Why? Because we are producers of oil and gas and we handle our gold and currency reserves and government reserves sparingly.”

Read that again: “A country like ours finds the situation easier to cope with. Why? Because we are producers of oil and gas.” The prices of which are highly sensitive to global economic conditions. And how does being a producer of oil and gas make a catastrophic decline in the price of oil “easier to cope with”? Really. I’d like to know.

As for being a producer of oil and gas, this is true. And that’s the problem: Russia is not a producer of much else. A nicely illustrative factoid: Apple’s market cap exceeds that of the entire Russian stock market (which is dominated by natural resource firms, of course).

Putin mentions meeting social commitments. What about military spending? What about the cost of foreign adventures? Which do you think is going to get whacked first if oil prices decline further, or even stay at current levels?

Given Putin’s track record as a prognosticator of economic crisis, and Russia’s economic resilience, and his interesting theoretical perspectives, his calming words should make Russians think about panicking. Like now.

For someone who has, at times, shot off his mouth (“you don’t say!” I can hear you saying), I am agape in amazement at MIT’s Jonathan Gruber’s lack of a filter between his brain and his trap. But this is a good thing, for we learn a lot when he unburdens himself.

He first came to the attention of most of us when he was caught on video saying that Obamacare had been deliberately written to limit subsidies to those buying insurance through a state-run exchange. This became an issue because few states set up exchanges, and people have been receiving subsidies through Federal exchanges. This is the reason for a legal challenge to Obamacare that has reached the Supreme Court.

The legal embarrassment this caused led Gruber to claim, subsequently, that the letter of the law regarding state exchanges was a typo, and that his statement had been a “speak-o.”

The latest episode in the Gruber Gone Wild video collection is his performance at a conference at U Penn, where he said that key elements of the ACA had been written in a misleading way to conceal deliberately their true intent and effect. Gruber said that the law was written in a “tortured” way to ensure that CBO would not score it as taxes, and to hide the fact that the healthy would be subsidizing the sick. If these things had been transparent, the bill never would have passed. But fortunately, sayeth Gruber, American voters are too stupid to see through this.

How Leninist of him. The ends justify the means. Who-whom (the Smart People giving it to the Great Unwashed, but only for their own good).

Gruber again sends his regrets for his incautious language. No apology needed. His ex post honesty is welcome, if his (and the drafters’) contemporaneous dishonesty is not.

And there’s apparently a third video, in which Gruber again insults American voters.

Quite the franchise he’s got here.

Gruber’s revelations makes it clear that Obamacare was a fraud, passed (by the thinnest of margins) using utterly dishonest means.

Hopefully, SCOTUS is paying attention and will consign the whole thing to the ash heap of history.

But of course the New York Times fawned over Gruber for his role in driving forward Obamacare. Another revealing thing, that. The NYT uses unethical and shoddy journalistic practices to heap outrageous slurs on academics who dare take positions that contravene its agenda, but gives journalistic tongue baths (I cleaned that way up-way up) to those who say anything-anything-that advances the progressive cause.

Update. The videos are from the collection of one Rich Weinstein, an investment advisor infuriated at paying higher premiums under Obamacare, who decided to investigate what happened. The good Mr. Weinstein says that there are many more videos in his collection. Great! Drip. Drip. Drip.

The recent decline in oil prices, and the failure of Saudi Arabia to cut output has led to many to conclude that the Saudis are trying to drive down prices in order to drive out shale production. I am extremely skeptical, because this would be crazy. It would only make sense if the Saudis are trying to convince shale producers that they are in fact crazy.

The alleged Saudi strategy is a variety of predatory pricing, and such strategies have major problems. Most notably, in the case of shale, driving down prices today would not eliminate any oil that’s in the ground. It would not eliminate drillers’ knowledge about the oil and how to get it out. Perhaps low prices will induce shale producers to delay drilling, and idle some rigs. But as soon as the Saudis cut output in order to cause prices to rise, the shale producers can restart their drilling programs, and under the theory that shale production is keeping prices lower than the Saudis like, this restart will keep prices rising to the level that the Saudis are targeting.

If the Saudis keep prices low for a considerable period of time, some resources (notably labor) may exit the US shale sector, and it may take some time to ramp up production again. But even so, the period of time during which the Saudis can suppress US shale production is limited. The oil ain’t going anywhere, and US producers will bring it out of the ground when the price is right. The Saudis can’t do anything about the fact that the right price for US shale producers is lower than the price they would like.

In brief, predatory pricing requires the predator (KSA in this instance) to suffer losses during the period when it is waging a price war: price wars are costly. But since the price war does not destroy competitive capacity, but just idles it (if that), there is only a very limited period-and perhaps no period at all-during which the predator can sell at higher prices to recoup these costs. This is why predation is usually a losing strategy.

This isn’t a new story, either the predatory pricing argument or the economic retort. Standard Oil was widely believed (based on the tendentious writings of Ida Tarbell, in particular) to have engaged in predation. But John McGee showed more than 50 years ago that this was a fairy tale that did not correspond with the facts.

The analysis above is based on the assumption that everyone is rational and everyone knows everyone is rational. In the 80s, game theorists altered these assumptions and showed that when there is a positive probability that a large firm (e.g., KSA) is irrational and likes to engage in price wars for the fun of it, predation can become a rational strategy by a non-crazy firm. A rational firm can get a reputation for being crazy by preying on competitors. Not wanting to fight crazy, competitors exit or don’t enter.

This theory, like a lot of game theory is quite elegant. And like a lot of game theory, it doesn’t appear to describe anything in that actually happens in reality. Price predators have been very rarely observed in the wild, and arguably they are like the monsters at the edge of pre-Columbian maps.

I am therefore very skeptical that the Saudis are crazy, or acting crazy. This is particularly true given that there is a rational explanation. Given the Saudi market share, and the elasticity of demand for oil, the demand for Saudi oil is elastic. Given that marginal cost is likely very inelastic, it may not reduce output much at all even in the face of a demand decline. Indeed, US shale supply has likely increased the elasticity of the Saudi net demand curve.

I’d also note that there have been stories recently about how some countries, including India and Indonesia, are using the current low prices as an opportunity to cut subsidies. Subsidies have made demand more inelastic (because subsidized consumers get the price signal): reducing or eliminating these subsidies will make demand more elastic.

Greater net demand elasticity, due to greater elasticity of US supply, reduced subsidies, or both, reduces the Saudi incentive to cut output.

Recall that during the financial crisis, even though prices fell about 70 percent from peak to trough, world oil output fell only about 3 percent from its high in July, 2008 to its low in March, 2009. Saudi output fell somewhat more, about 12 percent, but given that the current demand decline is far smaller than observed at the depths of the crisis, and that (as just noted) fundamental conditions have changed so as to reduce Saudi incentive to cut output, the lack of output cuts in the current weak market doesn’t require an explanation based on predatory pricing strategies.

In sum, it is highly likely that the Saudis are not crazy, and aren’t acting crazy, but are instead responding rationally to existing market conditions. Predatory pricing stories should always be viewed with suspicion, because they are seldom ever true. That’s almost certainly the case here too.

As many (but not all) banks reduce their paper and physical commodity market activities, it is often suggested that commodity trading firms like Glencore, Vitol, Trafigura and Mercuria will step into the breach, and become swap dealers offering customized risk management structures to clients (and loans to customers to boot). Mercuria CEO Marco Dunand says his company is exploring that:

Last month Swiss trading house Mercuria completed the purchase of U.S. bank JPMorgan’s physical commodities unit. It now wants to expand its provision of hedging services to external customers.

“There’s the desire for the company to enter a bit more into the space of customer service – trying to see whether we can offer some solutions to clients, primarily in Europe,” Dunand told the annual Reuters Commodities Summit.

Others, including Trafigura’s Pierre Lorinet, expressed skepticism.

When asked about this over the past several months, I have been firmly in the skeptic camp. It all comes down to balance sheet.

Yes, commodity traders utilize paper markets extensively, but as hedgers to reduce risks. This allows them to deploy their capital, and leverage it, so that they can carry out their core transformation activities: logistics, storage, processing, and blending. They are really buy-side firms, with relatively thin capital bases.

Derivatives market making, particularly in long tenor deals, or structured ones, is a very capital intensive activity. Indeed, one of the reasons that some banks are cutting back  is that particularly in the existing regulatory environment, the capital commitments for this business make it difficult to operate profitably. If Barclays can’t make money, how can Mercuria?

I can see joint efforts between banks and commodity traders in offering such products, in the same way that banks and traders collaborate to provide commodity prepays. But in those deals, the risk participation of the traders is usually 10 percent or less. Maybe something similar will evolve with commodity derivatives, where the trader faces the customer but most of the risk-and the capital to bear it-resides on bank balance sheets. Perhaps clever bankers will be able to find ways to engage in capital arbitrage in these kinds of deals, but I doubt it.

There is another big impediment: Frankendodd and its European equivalents. Under Dodd-Frank, becoming a swaps market maker brings with it a variety of burdens, including reporting requirements, and most notably capital and collateral requirements. Capital requirements are an anathema to trading firms, precisely because they are typically very capital light. They are also not keen in tying up working capital in margins. One of the factors that drove “futurization” in energy derivatives is that due to the swapaphobia of Congress, swaps were subject to more onerous treatment than swaps: to avoid becoming swap dealers energy market participants eagerly stopped using swaps and switched to economically equivalent futures instead.

The trading arms of two oil majors-BP and Shell-have become swap dealers and will offer risk management products to customers: they were so big, that it was likely infeasible to escape the swap dealer designation. Cargill has become a swap dealer as well, and will make markets. But these are large, asset-heavy firms with the balance sheets to carry these sorts of activities. Although I could see Glencore making a similar choice, I can’t see the rest of the big traders doing the same.

Banks and commodity trading firms are fundamentally different. They are both intermediaries that engage in various transformations, but the transformations that banks and traders perform are quite different. Banks are in the business of bearing credit risk and intermediating market price risks (e.g., by hedging in listed markets exposures they assume through OTC transactions). Traders are in the business of transforming physical commodities. Traders are natural customers of banks, not competitors in credit and risk intermediation. These different functions mean that banks and traders have different capital structures. This further means that it commodity traders cannot readily step into functions that banks exit or cut back.

So methinks banks will remain banks, and traders will remain traders.

I admire  Jeffrey Sprecher. ICE has been an amazing success story, and a lot of that has to do with his rather unique combination of vision and ability to execute.

But he is not above talking his book, and he delivered some self-serving, and in fact anti-competition, remarks in ICE’s earnings call held earlier today:

The head of Intercontinental Exchange, the world’s second-largest exchange group by market value, launched an unusually explicit criticism of its bigger competitor’s business strategy as he touted growth in his flagship oil contract.

Commercial customers such as refineries and airlines propelled this growth “as we see our competitors adopting incentives that attract the type of algorithm . . . trading that typically drives commercial users away,” Mr Sprecher said.

Mr Sprecher said “payment for order flow schemes” such as CME’s expanded the market by “attracting traders that really don’t want to hold the risk of your products but just want . . . to get paid to be there.”

If Mr. Sprecher actually believes that, he should be glad that CME (to speak of competitors plural is rather amusing) is implementing a program that per his telling drives away the paying customers, the commercial users.  That’s doubly true since those commercial users would presumably go to ICE. How is CME supposed to make money giving away trading incentives to traders whose presence those who repel those who pay full fare? If that’s what CME is doing, Mr. Sprecher should remember the old adage about not intervening when your enemy is intent on committing a blunder.

Sprecher was touting the fact that ICE’s Brent contract had now surpassed the older CME WTI contract in open interest. Well, this is good for ICE, certainly, but Sprecher and his exchange really have had very little to do with it: this is further proof that it’s usually better to be lucky, than good. Brent’s relative rise is the result of structural factors, most notably the prolonged logistical bottleneck that isolated WTI from waterborne crudes: that bottleneck is largely gone, replaced instead by a regulatory bottleneck, the US export ban.

ICE should not gloat for too long, though, because it is quite likely that the export ban will go, one way or another. What’s more, the resource base supporting the Brent contract is dwindling, and rapidly, whereas the Midcontinent of the US is experiencing a crisis of abundance, if it is experiencing a crisis at all. Logistical bottlenecks created by such crises tend to be transitory, and even regulatory bottlenecks can be overcome. In a few years, WTI will be deeply connected with the waterborne market, albeit in a non-traditional direction. And Brent will be at the mercy of inexorably declining production, and the ability of Platts and an often fractious community of producers and traders to figure out a contractual fix. (Adding Urals to the Brent basket? Really?) So Brent is riding high now, but over the medium to long term, CME will be one breaking out the shades, because WTI will have the brighter future.

As for incentives offered by upstart markets to unseat incumbents, as CME is attempting to do to ICE in Brent, this is a classic competitive tactic, and almost necessary in futures markets. The network effect of order flow means that (as I say in Gregory Meyer’s FT piece) bigger incumbent contracts have a big competitive advantage. The only way that  a competing contract can possibly build order flow and liquidity is to offer incentives, both to market makers (including HFT and algo traders!) who supply liquidity and to the hedgers and speculators that consume liquidity. (I wrote about this last year. Amusingly, I had forgotten about that post until Greg reminded me of it:-P)

Even that is a dicey proposition. Many have tried, and most have failed. But sometimes the upstart the succeeds, and at other times has forced the incumbent to meet the incentives to keep market share, and that can be expensive for the incumbent. That’s probably what Sprecher really doesn’t like. It’s not that incentives don’t work (as the criticism quoted above suggests): it’s that they just might. And if CME’s incentives work it could be an costly proposition for ICE to respond in kind.

In other words, Sprecher is really criticizing a reasonable competitive tactic, because like any dominant incumbent, he doesn’t like competition. That’s his job, but that kind of criticism cuts no ice with me. Or ICE, either, as much as I admire its achievement.

Matt Levine graciously led his daily linkwrap with a response to my post on his copper column:

It’s not that hard to manipulate copper.

Craig Pirrong, who knows a lot more about commodities markets than I do [aw, shucks], objects to my take on copper. My view is sort of efficient-markets-y: If one person buys up all the copper in the LME warehouses and then tries to raise the price, the much much greater supply of copper that’s not in those warehouses will flow into the warehouses and limit his ability to do that. And I still think that’s broadly true, but broadly true may not be the point. Pirrong quite rightly points out that there’s lots of friction along the way, and the frictions may matter more than the limits in actual fact.

. . . .

So there are limits to cornering, but they may not be binding on an actual economic actor: You can’t push prices up very much, or forvery long, but you may be able to push them up high enough and for long enough to make yourself a lot of money.

I agree fully there are limits to cornering. The supply curve isn’t completely inelastic. People can divert supplies (at some cost) into deliverable position. The cornerer presents the shorts with the choice: pay me to get out of your positions, or incur the cost of making delivery. Since those delivery costs are finite, the amount the cornerer can extract is limited too.

I agree as well that corners typically elevate prices temporarily: after all, the manipulator needs to liquidate his positions in order to cash out, and as soon as that happens price relationships snap back. But that temporary period can last for some time. Weeks, sometimes more.

What’s more, when the temporary price distortions happen matters a lot. Some squeezes occur at the very end of a contract. This is what happened in Indiana Farm Bureau in 1973. A more recent example is the expiry of the October, 2008 crude oil contract, in which prices spiked hugely in the last few minutes of trading.

The economic harm of these last minute squeezes isn’t that large. There are few players in the market, most hedgers have rolled or offset, and the time frame of the price distortion is too short to cause inefficient movements of the commodity.

But other corners are more protracted, and occur at precisely the wrong time.

Specifically, some corners start to distort prices well before expiration, and precisely when hedgers are looking to roll or offset. Short, out-of-position hedgers looking to roll or offset try to buy either spreads or outrights. The large long planning to corner the market doesn’t liquidate. So the hedgers bid up the expiring contract. Long still doesn’t budge. So the shorts bid it up some more. Eventually, the large long relents and sells when prices and spreads get substantially out of line, and the hedgers exit their positions but at a painfully artificial price. I have documented price distortions in some episodes of 10 percent or more. That’s a big deal, especially when one considers the very thin margins on which commodity trading is done. Combine that price distortion with the fact that a large number of shorts pay that distorted price to get out of their positions, and the dollar damages can be large. Depending on the size of the contract, and the magnitude of the distortion, nine or ten figures large.  (I analyze the liquidation/roll process theoretically in a paper titled “Squeeze Play” that appeared in the Journal of Alternative Investments a few years ago.)

But this is all paper trading, right, so real reapers of wheat and miners of copper aren’t damaged, right? Well, for the bigger, more protracted squeezes that’s not right.

Most hedgers are “out-of-position” they are using a futures contract to hedge something that isn’t deliverable. For example, shippers of Brazilian beans or holders of soybean inventories in Iowa use CBT soybean futures as a hedge. They are therefore long the basis. Corners distort the basis: the futures price rises to reflect the frictions and bottlenecks and technical features of the delivery mechanism, but the prices of the vastly larger quantities of the physical traded and held elsewhere may rise little, if at all. So the out-of-position hedgers don’t gain on their inventories, but they pay an inflated price to exit their futures.

This is why corners are a bad thing. They undermine  the most vital function of futures markets: hedging/risk transfer. Hedgers pay the biggest price for corners precisely because the delivery market is only a small sliver of the world market for a commodity, and because the network effects of liquidity cause all hedging activity to tip to a single market (with a very few exceptions). Thus, the very inside baseball details of the delivery process in a specific, localized market have global consequences. That’s why temporary and not very big and localized are not much comfort when it comes to the price distortions associated with market power manipulations.

Gunvor announced plans to sell assets in Russia:

Oil trading house Gunvor is seeking to cut exposure to Russia by selling assets in the country which had long been one the main generators of its growth and profit before the United States imposed sanctions on its co-founder.

. . . .

Now the company, led by the veteran Swedish oil trader, is looking to rebalance its asset portfolio and divest a significant part of business in Russia to acquire new assets in Europe, the United States, Asia and South America.

“Since a significant portion of our investments are in Russia, over time Gunvor will be looking to sell selectively part of those assets. We do not expect this will have any impact on our existing trading activities in Russia,” the company said on Sunday.

I am somewhat amused by the statement that the company “expect this will have any impact on our existing trading activities in Russia,” because it is well known that it has been cutting back on these activities for some time.

Some obvious explanations include a genuine desire to rebalance its asset portfolio, a need for cash due to persistent suspicions about the company leading to constraints on its ability to access the credit markets, and a desire to put paid to those suspicions by cutting back exposure to Russia.

Knowing the way Russia works, I would advance another hypothesis for Gunvor’s actions. It has been told to sell out, because someone covets those assets, and because after Timchenko’s departure (and Putin’s being cashed out?) the company has lost its krysha. Russia is the country of “nice little port you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it. Or to you.” When you have something that somebody important wants, you’d better say da! and accept the price offered without complaint. Just ask Vladimir Yevtushenkov.

One of the assets that Gunvor is selling is its stake in the port in Novorossiisk. Wouldn’t you know who expressed an interest in acquiring a stake in the the port there? Yeah. Igor. And Rosneft has oil trading ambitions, and the Ust-Luga port on the Baltic could fit quite nicely into that.

So keep an eye on who buys. Given that this is hardly a peachy time to sell assets in Russia, given the country’s growing economic isolation and the fear of further sanctions, Gunvor’s announcement is quite telling. The buyer is likely to be Russian, and the set of possible buyers is quite limited, which means that Gunvor is not likely to get top dollar for these assets. If Rosneft or another national champion with close connections to Putin ends up being the buyer, my suspicions that Gunvor was pushed out of Russia will be largely confirmed.

Someone at Gunvor told the FT that Russia was “Gunvor’s heritage, not its future.” That’s definitely true. The only question is why. I strongly suspect this is not totally voluntary, and to the extent that it is, it reflects Gunvor’s judgment that the legal and economic and political risks of operating in Russia are no longer worth the candle.

From day 1 of the Ebola episode in Dallas, the administration has been adamantly opposed to travel bans and quarantines, especially of health care workers who have been to West Africa. When New York and New Jersey implemented quarantines, the administration leaned on governors Cuomo and Christie very hard: Cuomo relented considerably. The administration argues that imposing restrictions on returnees from the Ebola-stricken region will impede efforts to control the outbreak there.

I’ve expressed skepticism about those arguments, but if you don’t give me any credence, what about the US Army?:

The U.S. general appointed to oversee America’s fight against Ebola in West Africa has been quarantined in Italy with at least 10 other Americans upon returning from the disease-stricken continent.

Major General Darryl A. Williams, who was appointed head of the U.S. command center in Liberia that coordinates the response to Ebola, was isolated along with several other Americans over the weekend, CNN reports.

The General’s “plane was met on the ground by Italian authorities ‘in full CDC gear,’” a U.S. official was quoted as telling CNN.

Williams and the others will now be monitored for 21 days at a U.S. military compound in Italy, according to the report.

To steal a phrase, the US military is pretty much the ultimate reality-based community–except when political pressure gets too hard to bear. But in most matters of life and death involving its areas of competence, the military doesn’t bend to political fashions, especially progressive ones. It balances risk and reward, based on its best understanding of the facts (which is often imperfect, admittedly) and decides accordingly.

So for the Army to decide, in the face of the obvious potential for fierce disagreement with the administration, that quarantine is the right thing to do, you can be pretty sure that decision is the result of a sober appraisal of the situation. Indeed, the willingness to buck administration preferences gives you an indication of the strength of the Army’s convictions.

The US military has always been more serious and squared away and apolitical with regards to biological and chemical threats. It should be assigned primary responsibility in dealing with the situation in the US too, but turf wars have ruled that out. (Hot Zone describes the turf fights between CDC and the Army during the Clinton administration during an episode involving infected monkeys in Virginia.)

The Army action is basically calling bull on the administration’s frantic anti-quarantine position. Between Dr. Barry and the US Army, I know whom I trust more.

That said, there are smart ways of doing a quarantine, and dumb ways. The measures initially adopted by New York and New Jersey seem to be  ham-fisted. The quarantined nurse in NJ has something of a legitimate beef (mixing meat metaphors!), although her claims that quarantines are totally unnecessary for returning health care workers comes off as entitled and clueless, especially given the infections of health care workers here in the US and Europe, and the large numbers of deaths among such workers in Africa. One would think that someone who is  selfless enough to risk contracting the disease in Africa would be willing to take prudent precautions to prevent it from spreading at home.

The Army way seems to be the right way. A special facility, outside the US, where those working in the afflicted region are quarantined  in a comfortable, secure facility before returning to the US.

@libertylynx pointed out to me that quarantine can be a financial burden and family hardship on aid workers, many of whom are missionaries without substantial financial resources. That problem is easily solved, as it involves only money, and not a lot at that. There is a way of balancing the need to attract people to West Africa to fight the disease, and limiting the possibility that they can spread the virus back to the states on their return.

Put differently, the cost of compensating the workers for the burdens of a quarantine pales in comparison with the cost of dealing with an outbreak in the US. Even if the probability that  returnee would spread the virus is small, given the huge cost of a US outbreak and the huge benefit of attracting workers to fight the disease the affected region, it is cheap at twice the price (or much more) to compensate them for the time and hardship a quarantine imposes. Pace Adam Smith: compensating differentials in action.

That said, the Army’s action speaks many volumes. It is saying that from a medical perspective, quarantine is a prudent measure. If the administration is concerned about deterring the travel of needed workers to Africa, the costs of that prudence can be easily paid. Rather than stubbornly fighting quarantines and travel bans, the administration should focus its efforts on designing and getting passed financial compensation measures that balance risk and reward.

Bloomberg’s Matt Levine is usually very insightful about markets, and about financial skullduggery. Alas, in his article on developments in the copper market, Matt is passing off a bad penny.

The basic facts are these. A single firm, reportedly well-known (and arguably infamous) metals trading fund Red Kite, has accumulated upwards of 50 percent (and at times as much as 90 percent) of copper in LME warehouses that is deliverable against LME futures contracts. Such an accumulation can facilitate a corner of the market, or could be a symptom of a corner: a large long takes delivery of virtually the entire deliverable stock (and perhaps all of it) to execute a corner. So the developments in LME copper bear the hallmarks of a squeeze, or an impending one.

What’s more, the price relationships in the market are consistent with a squeeze: the market is in backwardation. I have not had time to determine whether the backwardation is large, controlling for stocks (as would occur during a corner), but the sharp spike in backwardation in recent days is symptomatic of a corner, or fears of a corner.

Put simply, there is smoke here. But Matt Levine seems intent on denying that. Weirdly, he focuses on the allegations involving Goldman’s actions in aluminum:

Loosely speaking, the problem of aluminum was that it was in deep contango: Prices for immediate delivery were low, prices for future delivery were high, and so buying aluminum and chucking it in a warehouse to deliver later was profitable. So people did, and the warehouses got pretty jammed up, and other people who wanted aluminum for immediate use found it all a bit unsporting.

. . . .

The LME warehouse system is an interesting abstract representation of a commodity market, but you can get into trouble if you confuse it with the actual commodity market. One example of the trouble: Goldman and its cronies were accused of manipulating aluminum prices up by putting too much aluminum in LME warehouses.

Well, yes. But the point is that there are many different kinds of manipulation. Many, many different kinds. An Appeals Court in the US opined in the Cargill case that they number of ways of manipulating was limited only by the imagination of man. Too true. The facts in aluminum and the facts in copper are totally different, and the alleged forms of manipulation are totally different, so the events in aluminum are a red herring (although it is copper that is the red metal)

Levine also makes a big, big deal out of the fact that the amount of copper in LME warehouses is trivial compared to the amount of copper produced in the world, let alone the amount of copper that remains in the earth’s crust. This matters hardly at all.

What matters is the steepness of the supply curve into warehouses. If that supply curve is upward sloping, a firm with a big enough futures position can corner the market, and distort prices, even if the amount of copper actually in the warehouses, or attracted to the warehouses by a cornerer’s artificial demand, is small relative to the size of the world copper market.

Case in point. In December 1995 Hamanaka/Sumitomo cornered the LME copper contract holding a position in LME warrants that was substantially smaller than what one firm now owns. Hamanaka’s/Sumitomo’s physical and futures positions were small relative to the size of the world copper market, measured by production and consumption. But they still had market power in the relevant market because it was uneconomic to attract additional copper into LME warehouses.

Another example. Ferruzzi cornered the CBT soybean contract in July, 1989, owning a mere 8 million bushels of beans in Chicago and Toledo. But since it was uneconomic to move additional supplies into those delivery points, it was profitable for, and possible for, Ferruzzi to corner the expiring contract.

World supply may have an effect on the slope of the supply curve into warehouses, but that slope can be positive (thereby creating the conditions necessary to corner) even if the share of metal in warehouses is small. The slope of the supply curve depends on the bottlenecks associated with getting metal into warehouses, and the costs of diverting metal that should go to consumers into warehouses. These bottlenecks and costs can be acute, even if the amount of warehoused metal is small. Diverting copper that should go to a fabricator or wire mill to an LME warehouse is inefficient, i.e., costly. It only happens, therefore, if the price is distorted sufficiently to offset this higher cost.

Levine ends his post thus:

One example of the trouble: Goldman and its cronies were accused of manipulating aluminum prices up by putting too much aluminum in LME warehouses.The worries about copper — that it could be cornered, pushing prices up — stem from there being too little copper in those warehouses. Both of those things can’t be true.

Yes they can, actually. Different commodities at different times with different fundamental conditions are vulnerable to different kinds of manipulation. It is perfectly possible for it to be true that aluminum was vulnerable to a manipulative scheme that exploited the bottlenecks of taking the white metal out of warehouses starting some years ago, and that copper is vulnerable to a manipulative scheme that exploits the bottlenecks of getting the red metal into warehouses now. No logical or factual contradiction whatsoever.

I know you are better than this, Matt. Don’t let your justifiable skepticism of allegations of manipulation make you a poster child for the Gresham’s Law of Internet Commentary.

Due to the five year gap in 30 year bond issuance, in mid-September the CME revised the deliverable basket for the June 2015 T-bond contract. It deleted the 6.25 of May, 2015 because its delivery value would have been so far below the values of the other bonds in the deliverable set. This would have made the contract more susceptible to a squeeze because only that bond would effectively be available for delivery due to the way the contract works.

The CME issued a memo on the subject.

Somebody obviously didn’t get it:

It looks like a Treasury futures trader failed to do his or her homework.

The price of 30-year Treasury futures expiring in June traded for less than 145 for about two hours yesterday before shooting up to more than 150. The 7.3 percent surge in their price yesterday, on the first day these particular contracts were traded, was unprecedented for 30-year Treasury futures, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Volume amounted to 1,639 contracts with a notional value of $164 million.

What sets these futures apart from others is they’re the first ones where the U.S. government’s decision to stop issuing 30-year bonds from 2001 to 2006 must be accounted for when valuing the derivatives. The size and speed of yesterday’s jump indicates the initial traders of the contracts hadn’t factored in the unusual rules governing these particular products, said Craig Pirrong, a finance professor at the University of Houston.

“That is humongous,” said Pirrong, referring to the 7.3 percent jump. “We’re talking about a move you might see over weeks or a month occur in a day.” Pirrong said he suspected it was an algorithmic trader using an outdated model. “I would not want to be that guy,” the professor said.

Here’s a quick and dirty explanation. Multiple bonds are eligible for delivery. Since they have different coupons and maturities, their prices can differ substantially. For instance, the 3.5 percent of Feb 39 sells for about $110, and the 6.25 of 2030 sells for about $146. If both bonds were deliverable at par, no one would ever deliver the 6.25 of 2030, and it would not contribute in any real way to deliverable supply. Therefore, the CME effectively handicaps the delivery race by assigning conversion factors to each bond. The conversion factor is essentially the bond’s price on the delivery date assuming it yields 6 percent to maturity. If all bonds yield 6 percent, their delivery values would be equal, and the deliverable supply would be the total amount of deliverable bonds outstanding. This would make it almost impossible to squeeze the market.

Since bonds differ in duration, and actual yields differ from 6 percent, the conversion factors narrow but do not eliminate disparities in the delivery values of bonds. One bond will be cheapest-to-deliver. Roughly speaking, the CTD bond will be the one with the lowest ratio of price to conversion factor.

That’s where the problem comes in. For the June contract, if the 6.25 of 2030 was eligible to deliver, its converted price would be around $142. Due to the issuance/maturity gap, the converted prices of all the other bonds is substantially higher, ranging between $154 and $159.

This is due a duration effect. When yields are below 6 percent, and they are now way below, at less than 3 percent, low duration bonds become CTD: the prices of low duration bonds rise less (in percentage terms) for a given decline in yields than the prices of high duration bonds, so they become relatively cheaper. The 6.25 of 2030 has a substantially lower duration than the other bonds in the deliverable basket because of its lower maturity (more than 5 years) and higher coupon. So it would have been cheapest to deliver by a huge margin had CME allowed it to remain in the basket. This would have shrunk the deliverable supply to the amount outstanding of that bond, making a squeeze more likely, and more profitable. (And squeezes in Treasuries do occur. They were rife in the mid-to-late-80s, and there was a squeeze of the Ten Year in June of 2005. The 2005 squeeze, which was pretty gross, occurred when there was less than a $1 difference in delivery values between the CTD and the next-cheapest. The squeezer distorted prices by about 15/32s.)

The futures contract prices the CTD bond. So if someone-or someone’s algo-believed that the 6.25 of 2030 was in the deliverable basket, they would have calculated the no-arb price as being around $142. But that bond isn’t in the basket, so the no-arb value of the contract is above $150. Apparently the guy* who didn’t get the memo merrily offered the June future at $142 in the mistaken belief that was near fair value.

Ruh-roh.

After selling quite a few contracts, the memo non-reader wised up, and the price jumped up to over $150, which reflected the real deliverable basket, not the imaginary one.

This price move was “humongous” given that implied vol is around 6 percent. That’s an annualized number, meaning that the move on a single day was more than a one-sigma annual move. I was being very cautious by saying this magnitude move would be expected to occur over weeks or months. But that’s what happens when the reporter catches me in the gym rather than at my computer.

This wasn’t a fat-finger error. This was a fat-head error. It cost somebody a good deal of money, and made some others very happy.

So word up, traders (and programmers): always read the memos from your friendly local exchange.

*Or gal, as Mary Childs pointed out on Twitter.