Stocks surged today, although still on fairly light volume, in a striking response to the ECB's proposal of a plan we already knew most of the details of. The S&P rallied 2%, and Treasury yields rose 7bps at the 10-year point (1.67%), with 10y TIPS yields +5bps (-0.65%) and breakevens therefore 2bps wider. Commodities were relatively strong, outside of the livestock group.

The ECB's plan is essentially as described in leaks previously, although apparently there are some minor asterisks that prevent the central bank from just going in to buy lots of bonds right away. The ECB didn't cut rates, or make the deposit rate negative, as some 40% of economists expected according to Bloomberg. That cut wasn't in the cards, for the nonce anyway. As I pointed out yesterday, if the ECB wants to sterilize bond purchases, they certainly can't cut deposit rates and probably have to raise them (if they were serious about sterilizing). In theory, they could cut deposit rates and then offer short-term bank bills as a way to absorb the extra money in circulation, but that's the same thing in the end: we hold your money and pay you interest. The fact that it isn't reserves, but bills, is not relevant to the sterilization discussion, and that approach is actually somewhat more flexible since the ECB can more easily raise the rate it pays on bills to be sure of soaking up enough money than it can adjust the deposit rate to accomplish the same thing. The problem, though, is that bill sales occur in the open, and it will be really obvious if they aren't able to sterilize the purchases.

It continues to be striking how resistant central bankers are to the notion that markets, and not central bankers, ought to set market rates. Bloomberg and other media sources wrote of the ECB's "fight to wrest back control of rates...after nearly three years of turmoil." When, exactly, were rates in control of central bankers to begin with? Other than the trivial case of the overnight rate, that is. That's just crazy talk.

There is, however, still the issue that sovereign governments need to formally request aid, and agree to conditions, before the unlimited buying can begin. It occurs to me that the unlimited buying might be tied to the conditions, and so not be unlimited after all. But the bigger problem is that governments (especially now that their rates have rallied a bit and the wolf has temporarily retreated from the door) insist on having the temerity to negotiate conditions, rather than to simply accept the gruel the EU says they're entitled to. For example, according to the Spanish news outlet El Pais, Spain's opening bid is for a full bailout without any extra conditions (hat tip to Andy F). At least that gives them plenty of room for concessions.

Now, perhaps the rally in equities wasn't due to the ECB's offer to buy bonds after all. Maybe it was because the economic data was slightly stronger than expected, although I'm skeptical of that. ADP showed a gain of 201,000 jobs, the highest gain since March, plus an upward revision to 173,000 last month. Initial Claims were a bit lower than expected, at 365,000. These are both on the better side of expectations, but negligibly so given the size of the error bars involved. The ADP report may have encouraged some shorts to cover in front of the Employment Report tomorrow, but the short-term correlation between changes in ADP and changes in the Employment Report is quite poor, as the chart below shows. The R-squared of the relationship is 0.165. That is, if you know that ADP accelerated 28k this month compared with last month, it tells you almost nothing about whether Non-Farm Payrolls will accelerate or decelerate from last month's figure.

The correlation of the levels of the changes themselves is of course much better, with an R-squared of 0.857 over the same period, but the standard error is 93k. So, today's 201k from ADP would produce a point estimate, based on the regression (not shown here), of 210k for Payrolls. But the error bar would make the expected range 117k on the low side to 303k on the high side. Ergo, it's still a bit early to get over-excited about the Payrolls report tomorrow.

There's a secondary concern here that is silly, but needs to be considered. If the number is strong tomorrow, there will be some investors (and perhaps quite many) who will be skeptical that the numbers just happened to improve right in the middle of the Democratic National Convention, hours after President Obama accepts the nomination. I am not one of those who will be skeptical, not because I think any particular Administration is above the idea of manipulating the data, but because I think it would be almost impossible to do so without the conspiracy coming to light. There are simply too many people involved in the generating of this government statistic (and, of course, the ADP figure is not remotely influenced by the government). But the same people who believe the government manipulates CPI will believe they manipulate the jobs report, and this has market implications: if the figure is weak, investors will have a higher level of confidence in the data (since it goes without saying that no one would manipulate the number to be worse) than if it is strong, which further implies - especially after today's rally - that the price response in the equity market is likely to be skewed negatively. I don't like taking positions ahead of major numbers, but in this case I'd be inclined to shade a bit short. But just a bit.

ADP was a bit stronger-than-expected, and Payrolls may be higher or lower. But either way, these figures do have the usual error bars, and it seems unlikely that this augurs an unexpected and durable improvement in the employment situation when the man on the street is still reporting that jobs are harder to get. Nevertheless, the economy seems not to be getting worse at the moment, either, and with traditional monetary policy there would be no cause whatsoever to ease. I suppose it goes without saying that those traditions are no longer being observed, however, and I continue to think we'll see the Fed ease next week - almost regardless of what the data does.