The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis (BUSINESS BOOKS)

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Protect yourself from the next financial meltdown with this game-changing primer on financial markets, the economy—and the meteoric rise of carry. We are now in the midst of a perpetually moral hazard cycle in that carry traders, having their loses truncated, and walked out of the risk-of-ruin scenario relatively unscathed, they have incentive in ever increasing their prior behavior before, knowing the central banks will rescue them once again when the time comes. In my own career I’ve come across it many times. As an inexperienced investment bank trader I was admonished by a senior trader for being ‘short naked gamma’: selling options in the market without the safety net of delta hedging, an especially dangerous variation of the carry trade. A few years later in 2008 I was managing a hedge fund carry strategy which lost a third of it’s notional capital in a matter of weeks. Thankfully, we had reduced it’s risk allocation for unrelated reasons, saving our clients hundreds of millions of dollars. I still trade carry today, although only as a minor component in a diversified portfolio of strategies. This fact leads to a pernicious feature of carry. Leverage increases the risk of ruin, and carry involves leverage. Carry drawdowns are therefore likely to involve the risk of some participants facing ruin. This means the aggregate growth of carry is likely to represent a systemic risk to the financial system. It is therefore no accident that the increased involvement of central banks as lenders of last resort has coincided with the growth of carry. They are intimately linked (p. 72, LL&C)” The ways that carry, volatility selling, leverage, liquidity, and profitability affect the business cycle

However the world has changed. Currently the US dollar has an interest rate more than 2% higher than that of the Euro. A carry trade where US dollar deposits are funded by Euro loans would not necessarily do badly in a global market crash. When the music stops, in terms of liquidity things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing. Simply put, carry trading is now the primary determinant of the global business cycle—a pattern of long, steady but unspectacular expansions punctuated by catastrophic crises. The book only briefly mentions the accumulation of moral hazard. However, in my opinion, this is where the main problem lies. In the institutions that run the society, the proportion of idiots has been steadily increasing for many decades. It is now close to 100%.The book defines carry trade as risk bets where investors win if nothing happens. Examples of such bets are currency carry trades, as well as the sale of naked put options. After defining the core concept, the book details the history of financial markets since the 1990s, when the volatility suppression regime emerged. Also, in the end, you will find a cursory prediction of what such a regime can lead to. The financial shelves are filled with books that explain how popular carry trading has become in recent years. But none has revealed just how significant a role it plays in the global economy--until now. Both the extremely high level of the equity market, which cur­rently matches the previous peaks of 1929 and 2000, 18 and the low level of volatility over the past decade, indicate that we face a high risk of a major bear market. The Rise of Carry provides a timely des­cription of how this situation has arisen and an urgent warning of dangers ahead. This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume V, Number 2 (Summer 2021): 46–59. This is a very ambitious book, and in places its ambition causes it to overreach. Carry is a fundamental part of the markets, and to some degree in the economy as a whole. But linking it to human evolution as the authors do in the final chapters, seems rather tenuous to me. Nevertheless, this is an important book. Carry is important, and is not going away. It will always be an attractive strategy.

Fighting the crisis means increasing the chances of higher inflation. Since crisis risk in more salient and more immediate, it will always get priority. The logical conclusion is that inflation will not return to 2% for a sustained period. However these issues are all fairly well documented and have been mainstream consciousness for quite a long time. So the book hardly broke any new ground here. But at least they are coherently articulated with no obvious logical fallacies.

At first glance an unhedged short volatility position has no effect on the market. But it is very likely that an unhedged trader has sold their options to a market maker, who will usually be delta hedged (unless they are young and callow). The market maker is long volatility, and hedges by selling as the market rises, and buying on dips. They will reduce the volatility of the market. The financial crash in February-March does not need coronavirus to explain it. It was predictable based on an understanding of the carry regime. But unlike in previous carry crashes, extreme central bank (and government) action has seemed able to rescue the financial markets but this time not necessarily the economy. The carry regime tends to increase inequality and the much more extreme situation we find ourselves in now raises a question mark as to its sustainability. What comes next is uncertain but there are pointers that can provide strong clues to the bigger picture. For most of the twentieth century, the neoclassical synthesis in economics was generally believed to provide a solid basis for public policy. There were, nonetheless, significant dissenters. Hyman Minsky, for instance, wrote that “modern orthodox economics is not and cannot be a basis for a serious approach to economic policy.” 1 In the wake of the financial crisis and the great recession of 2008, such questioning became even more vociferous, and criticisms like Min­sky’s are now increasingly accepted. Financial instability has thus risen as the carry trade has grown. The Rise of Carry does not estimate the size of the market, for which reliable data do not seem to be available, but the authors argue convincingly that it is very large and has expanded greatly in recent years. They also point to the risk that volatility in different financial assets may be contagious: “There is also evidence of a growing correlation between currency and equity market carry, suggesting that a single global volatility risk factor may be a driver of all forms of carry in the future. If this is true, future carry crashes may impact on all asset classes at the same time.” 7 The financial shelves are filled with books that explain how popular carry trading has become in recent years. But none has revealed just how significant a role it plays in the global economy - until now.

The significant rise of income inequality is impacting and changing political landscapes worldwide. Central banks, legislators, and thought leaders are struggling on deciphering all the causes of income inequality and to come up with solutions for this globally intensifying problem. Now, if you believe everything that was previously said, and thereby having established a coherent link between carry trades and the dual prongs of the fed, you come to some sobering realizations; namely: In this world, with the dominance of the Fed and the dollar, and the liquidity of the S&P 500 derivatives markets, the S&P 500 has evolved to become itself a carry trade at the centre of the global carry regime. A sudden crash in the S&P 500 crashes the global economy. The Fed then reacts by becoming a giant carry trader itself, replacing the private sector carry trade and ultimately reinforcing the carry regime.Leverage also forms an important part of the definition of Carry as defined by the authors. FX carry trades often yield a desultory sum, like the 2% a year currently available from the USD/EUR pair. This would need to be leveraged several times to get a reasonable return. Naturally, option selling is an inherently leveraged activity. As the authors rightly say, the use of leverage is a key characteristic of carry trades. A carry trader who uses no leverage can ride out any storm. But with high leverage, the slightest adverse price movement will wipe them out. Carry as trading strategy Jamie Lee works for investment guru and philanthropist Jeremy Grantham, focusing on environmental research and volatility trading. He previously worked as economist and analyst for asset management companies in Boston and London. Jamie holds a B.A. in Mathematics and English from Dartmouth College. Robin Wigglesworth, “Jane Street: The Top Wall Street Firm ‘No One’s Heard Of,’” Financial Times, January 28, 2021. Interestingly, this expectation of ample liquidity runs counter to what has actually transpired when consensus views have changed and investors have sought to reposition their portfolios accordingly. In May–June 2013, when Chairman Bernanke uttered that famous word — “taper” — and raised questions about the Fed’s continuous support for markets, many investors were unable to complete their desired transactions for even the most vanilla-type securities (p. 115, El-Erian) Volatility insurance differs in one important respect from other common forms of insurance (such as life, home, and vehicle insurance), which allow the specific risk of events to be pooled. In these forms of insurance, the aggregate risks taken by insurers are significantly less than the sum of the individual risks. Homeowners who buy fire insurance, for instance, pay regular premiums and are pro­tected thereby against loss. The number of houses destroyed by fire annually does not vary much from year to year, and so the insurance industry’s total income is sufficient each year to pay for the individual costs without being at risk of significant overall loss, although profits will fluctuate as fire damage varies from year to year. But this common sort of risk pooling is not characteristic of the carry trade, in which the aggregate risk is systemic rather than specific.