Front-End Plumbing (Reserve Regime)
The reserve-regime / front-end plumbing leg (Joe Abate framework, Odd Lots 2025-10-03): banks stopped trading fed funds when reserves turned abundant, pinning FF-IORB at ~-7bp for four years; money-market spreads are the honest barometer of whether the Fed's liquidity management is working. States ABUNDANT / AMPLE / SCARCE-WATCH / SCARCE from EFFR-IORB and SOFR-IORB spreads (persistence-gated for SCARCE), TGCR-SOFR tiering, RRP buffer level and drain, and WALCL balance-sheet direction. One sensor filling two declared gaps: RATE DNA's declared-UNAVAILABLE front-end (the compositor now prints the plumbing regime as its front-end clause) and dealer-capacity's declared-ABSENT repo leg (carried as repo-leg metadata, never a state driver there). v1.0.2 with two declared falsifier-driven corrections (flood-floor EFFR pin level; RRP-drain gate on WALCL direction), thresholds re-frozen in the docstring. Episode-verified: Sept-2019 repo spike SCARCE (SOFR-IORB +315bp), 2020 flood ABUNDANT, 2023-25 pinned era median EFFR-IORB -7.0bp (Abate's claim verified exactly), quiet windows clean. Information-add CONFIRMED vs kawa_rate_pressure (rho +0.04) and dealer_capacity (rho +0.16).
State History
State Definitions
AMPLE — spreads pinned but the buffer draining or the balance sheet flat-to-shrinking (the QT-era pin).
SCARCE — EFFR above the administered rate or SOFR-IORB > +25bp, persisted two publication days (the Sept-2019 signature).
ABUNDANT — spreads pinned and the balance sheet expanding or the RRP buffer full (the 2020 flood shape; the 2022-24 full-buffer shape).
SCARCE-WATCH — a watch-band breach (EFFR at the administered rate, SOFR-IORB > +10bp, TGCR-SOFR > +10bp) or the RRP low and draining while the balance sheet is not expanding.
Sources
Read-only intelligence. Sensor states are diagnostic observations, not predictions.