When It Comes to Credit Carnage, It's the Financing, Stupid!

While the focus, when it comes to a lack of liquidity in the bond market, has often been placed squarely on the shrinking amount of bonds on dealer-bank balance sheets, a further change to the banking business is arguably exacerbating the recent downward spiral in debt. That change is the shrinking of the repo business, which involves banks lending their balance sheets to clients and is often described as the great lubricator for financial markets.

The business has been shrinking in recent years. A huge regulatory overhaul has made repo more expensive in the face of various new mandates, including the leverage ratio and the net stable funding ratio, encouraging banks to pull back on their repo business and helping to push repo rates higher.