Fed Says Basis Trade ‘Significantly’ Smaller Than Estimated
- Researchers use TRACE data for new basis-trade proxy
- As of January, the ‘lower bound’ estimate was $317 billion
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Federal Reserve researchers say the amount of money in the Treasury basis trade, a bond-market strategy that has drawn the scrutiny of regulators, could be as little as a third of commonly used estimates.
The researchers used a new approach to estimate that a minimum of $317 billion of securities were related to basis trades as of January. The traditional proxy — short positions in Treasury futures held by leveraged funds as measured by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — yielded an estimate of $991 billion, according to the March 8 report.