$1 Trillion In Liquidity Is Leaving: "This Will Be The Market's First Crash-Test In 10 Years"

In his latest presentation, Francesco Filia of Fasanara Capital discusses how years of monumental liquidity injections by major Central Banks ($15 trillion since 2009) successfully avoided a circuit break after the Global Financial Crisis, but failed to deliver on the core promise of economic growth through the "wealth effect", which instead became an "inequality effect", exacerbating populism and representing a constant threat to the status quo.

Fasanara discusses how elusive, over-fitting economic narratives are used ex-post to legitimize the "fake markets" - as defined previously by the hedge fund - induced by artificial flows. Meanwhile, as an unintended consequence, such money flows produced a dangerous market structure, dominated by both passive-aggressive investment vehicles and a high-beta long-only momentum community ($8 trn and rising rapidly), oftentimes under the commercial disguise of brands such as behavioral Alternative Risk Premia, factor investing, risk parity funds, low vol / short vol vehicles, trend-chasing algos, machine learning.

However as Filia, and many others before him, writes, only when the tide goes out, will we discover who has been swimming naked, and how big of a momentum/crowding trap was built up in the process. The undoing of loose monetary policies (NIRP, ZIRP), and the transitioning from "Peak Quantitative Easing" to Quantitative Tightening, will create a liquidity withdrawal of over $1 trillion in 2018 alone. The reaction of the passive community will determine the speed of the adjustment in the pricing for both safe and risk assets.

And, echoing what Deutsche Bank said last week, when it warned that central bank liquiidty injections will collapse from $2 trillion now to 0 in 12 months, a "most worrying" turn of events, Fasanara doubles down that "such liquidity withdrawal will represent the first real crash-test for markets in 10 years." 

Filia concludes that "the big opportunity in today"s markets is to position for such moment of adjustment, as it is totally priced out despite its potential for severe disruption, thus offering the most pronounced asymmetric profile."

Below are the key slides from Fasanara"s presentation:

The full, must read presentation is below (link):