US Treasury market liquidity back to pre-Fed tightening levels, says NY Fed

Liquidity in the $27 trillion U.S. Treasury market, the largest government bond market in the world, is back to levels seen before the Federal Reserve started hiking interest rates in 2022, according to a New York Fed report.

Liquidity – or the ability to trade an asset without significantly moving its price – worsened over the past few years as U.S. government bond prices swung sharply since the U.S. central bank started hiking rates to tame inflation.

But common measures to assess trading conditions “point to an improvement in Treasury market liquidity in 2024 to levels last seen before the start of the current monetary policy tightening cycle,” Michael Fleming, head of Capital Markets Studies in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group, said in a post on the New York Fed’s Liberty Street Economics blog on Monday.

Fleming observed improvements in the bid-ask spread, which is the difference between the highest bid price and the lowest ask price for a security. Spreads have been narrow and stable since mid-2023, after widening in the aftermath of the U.S. regional banking turmoil in March last year, he said.

 

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