Treasury Changed Its Sentence by Deleting Two Words. Nobody Forecast a Deletion.
Treasury changed its forward-guidance sentence on 4 November by deleting two words, not by substituting a phrase.
August read that Treasury "anticipates maintaining nominal coupon and FRN auction sizes for at least the next several quarters"; November drops "at least" and keeps "for the next several quarters". That is the one outcome a text-keyed reader cannot classify: a diff-keyed reader flags a change, a phrase-keyed reader reports none, both are correctly implemented, and two wires led in opposite directions on the same release. Scoring the four banks we published two hours before it — Citigroup expected 20- and 30-year cuts this month, wrong; UBS said the guidance would move before the sizes, right as stated and the only one that scored; JPMorgan expected the phrase to survive through next year, half right depending on which reader you are; Barclays expected "coming quarters", which appears in no source we read. All three wording forecasts predicted a substitution and what happened was a subtraction. The change nobody forecast is in the calendar: the 7-year note becomes a quarterly auction with two reopenings, so eight of twelve dates a year stop being new issues. Buybacks up to $70 billion across the curve plus $25 billion in the one-month to two-year bucket, bill sizes cut in December and raised in January. Next week's $58bn, $42bn and $25bn on 9, 10 and 12 November are confirmed exactly as we published them. And Treasury's own statement page returned a client error, so every quotation here is secondary.