Forget oil--mostly. There's a new bad boy in town over the weekend, and he's making just the sort of mess that Treasuries and MBS like to see. To be fair, Treasuries like it much more than MBS, but both improved handily from what were already their best levels of the year last week.
So who's the bad boy? In not so many words: bank stocks. It was hard to get away from the topic in today's financial news. It's more than just the disaster du jour though. On a more specific note, Deutsche Bank was under the gun today, with analysts and journalists pointing out things like: "The cost of protecting the company’s subordinated debt from default for five years using credit-default swaps has more than doubled since the end of 2015, rising to 438 basis points, a four-year high, from 187."
European bank stocks plummeted in the overnight session, and the momentum continued all the way through the close of the CME pit this afternoon (futures/options). Domestic stock markets bounced back, but not enough to get anywhere close to positive territory on the day, let alone to avoid breaking some significant technical floors.
If you didn't want to forget oil, that's fine, but today, it was more about the fall-out from the run of super low prices. Chesapeake Energy was in and out of the spotlight several times today over bankruptcy rumors. Those were ultimately denied, but it does look like a restructuring is in the cards. Either way, there was no shortage of bad news for big companies today, and bonds were there to pick up the pieces (and to infer that they'll continue to see more of the same, perhaps).
MBS | FNMA 3.5 104-30 : +0-07 | ||
Treasuries | 10 YR 1.7480 : -0.1000 | ||
Pricing as of 2/8/16 5:42PMEST |