Shadow Banking Makes a Comeback
by ilene - July 23rd, 2010 9:25 pm
Shadow Banking Makes a Comeback
Courtesy of MIKE WHITNEY writing at CounterPunch
Credit conditions are improving for speculators and bubblemakers, but they continue to worsen for households, consumers and small businesses. An article in the Wall Street Journal confirms that the Fed’s efforts to revive the so-called shadow banking system is showing signs of progress. Financial intermediaries have been taking advantage of low rates and easy terms to fund corporate bonds, stocks and mortgage-backed securities. Thus, the reflating of high-risk financial assets has resumed, thanks to the Fed’s crisis-engendering monetary policy and extraordinary rescue operations.
Here’s an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:
"A new quarterly survey of lending by the Federal Reserve found that hedge funds and private-equity funds are getting better terms from lenders and that big banks have loosened lending standards generally in recent months. The survey, called the Senior Credit Officer Opinion Survey, focuses on wholesale credit markets, which the Fed said functioned better over the past quarter." ("Survey shows credit flows more freely", Sudeep Reddy, Wall Street Journal)
In contrast, bank lending and consumer loans continue to shrink at a rate of nearly 5 per cent per year. According to economist John Makin, there was a "sharp drop in credit growth, to a negative 9.7 per cent annual rate over the three months ending in May." Bottom line; the real economy is being strangled while unregulated shadow banks are re-leveraging their portfolios and skimming profits. Here’s more from the WSJ:
"Two-thirds of dealers said hedge funds in particular pushed harder for better rates and looser nonprice terms, and they said some of the funds got better deals as a result….(while) The funding market for key consumer loans remained under stress, with a quarter of dealers reporting that liquidity and functioning in the market had deteriorated in recent months." ("Survey shows credit flows more freely", Sudeep Reddy, Wall Street Journal)
As the policymaking arm of the nation’s biggest banks, the Fed’s job is to enhance the profit-generating activities of its constituents. That’s why Fed chair Ben Bernanke has worked tirelessly to restore the crisis-prone shadow banking system. As inequality grows and the depression deepens for working people, securitization and derivatives offer a viable way to increase earnings and drive up shares for financial institutions. The banks continue to post record profits even while the underlying economy is…
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DiggThe Con of the Decade Part II
by ilene - July 10th, 2010 10:01 am
The Con of the Decade Part II
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds
The con of the decade (Part II) involves sheltering the Power Elites’ income while raising taxes on the debt-serfs to pay the interest owed the Power Elites.
The Con of the Decade (Part II) meshes neatly with the first Con of the Decade. Yesterday I described how the financial Plutocracy can transfer ownership of the Federal government’s income stream via using the taxpayer’s money to buy the debt that the taxpayers borrowed to bail out the Plutocracy.
In order for the con to work, however, the Power Elites and their politico toadies in Congress, the Treasury and the Fed must convince the peasantry that low tax rates on unearned income are not just "free market capitalism at its best" but that they are also "what the country needs to get moving again."
The first step of the con was successfully fobbed off on the peasantry in 2001: lower the taxes paid by the most productive peasants marginally while massively lowering the effective taxes paid by the financial Plutocracy.
One Year Later, No Sign of Improvement in America’s Income Inequality Problem:
Income inequality has grown massively since 2000. According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of 2001-2007′s income growth went to the top 1% of Americans, while the other 99% of the population got a measly 6% increase. How is this possible? One thing to consider is that in 2001, George W. Bush cut $1.3 trillion in taxes, and 32.6% of the cut went to the top 1%. Another factor is Bush’s decision to increase the national debt from $5 trillion to $11 trillion. The combination of increased government spending and lower taxes helped the top 1% considerably.
The second part of the con is to mask much of the Power Elites’ income streams behind tax shelters and other gaming-of-the-system so the advertised rate appears high to the peasantry but the effective rate paid on total income is much much lower.
The tax shelters are so numerous and so effective that it takes thousands of pages of tax codes and armies of toadies to pursue them all: family trusts, oil depletion allowances, tax-free bonds and of course special one-off tax breaks arranged by "captured" elected officials.
Step three is to convince the peasantry that $600 in…
An Age of Miracles and Wonders
by ilene - July 10th, 2010 4:42 am
An Age of Miracles and Wonders
Courtesy of Tim at The Psy-Fi Blog
S-t-r-e-t-c-h
Stretch your arms out to either side and imagine you’re looking at the economic growth of the human race over its entire four thousand year documented history. From the fingertip on your right hand to the first wrinkle on its index ftinger more or less covers the first three thousand eight hundred years. From there to the end of the index finger on your left hand represents growth over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
We truly live in an age of miracles and wonders. Medical advances have ensured more people live longer than ever before, scientific achievements have created a world in which we’re surrounded by astonishing labour saving creations and inventions which allow us to waste the time we’ve saved and the extra years of life we’ve been granted. Meanwhile our economic understanding of how this happened has, well, gone nowhere very interesting really. How did we achieve this state of grace?
Science and Medicine
One thing’s perfectly clear – the massive economic growth seen over the last couple of hundred years doesn’t have an awful lot to do with economics. Perhaps the prevalence of capitalist doctrines has prevented excessive government intervention in free markets at too early a stage, but otherwise we’ve veered about wildly while booming and busting our way to a greater level of wealth and health than ever before seen on the planet.
On the other hand this has had a lot to do with medical advances. Medicine has ensured that our useful lives are greatly extended – although a lot of the increase in average lifespans so often discussed is down to vast decreases in infant mortality. Still, we no longer die en-masse of septicaemia. Better, though, improvements in healthcare have extended the useful working lives of people: imagine a world in which most people were dead by 45. Heck, no politicians.
From Third World to First
Along with this we’ve seen incredible advances in science and engineering. In my father’s living memory he recalls the arrival of electricity, sewage disposal and tarmac to his home village. My grandmother was born before the Wright Brothers took flight and outlived – by far – the Apollo program. Yet her grandfather lived in a world virtually unchanged for a millennium: a world of hard…
The Con of the Decade Part I
by ilene - July 8th, 2010 5:06 pm
The Con of the Decade Part I
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds
The con of the decade (Part I) involves the transfer of private debt to the public (the marks), who then pays interest forever to the con artists.
I’ve laid out the Con of the Decade (Part I) in outline form:
1. Enable trillions of dollars in mortgages guaranteed to default by packaging unlimited quantities of them into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), creating umlimited demand for fraudulently originated loans.
2. Sell these MBS as "safe" to credulous investors, institutions, town councils in Norway, etc., i.e. "the bezzle" on a global scale.
3. Make huge "side bets" against these doomed mortgages so when they default then the short-side bets generate billions in profits.
4. Leverage each $1 of actual capital into $100 of high-risk bets.
5. Hide the utterly fraudulent bets offshore and/or off-balance sheet (not that the regulators you had muzzled would have noticed anyway).
6. When the longside bets go bad, transfer hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal guarantees, bailouts and backstops into the private hands which made the risky bets, either via direct payments or via proxies like AIG. Enable these private Power Elites to borrow hundreds of billions more from the Treasury/Fed at zero interest.
7. Deposit these funds at the Federal Reserve, where they earn 3-4%. Reap billions in guaranteed income by borrowing Federal money for free and getting paid interest by the Fed.
8. As profits pile up, start buying boatloads of short-term U.S. Treasuries. Now the taxpayers who absorbed the trillions in private losses and who transferred trillions in subsidies, backstops, guarantees, bailouts and loans to private banks and corporations, are now paying interest on the Treasuries their own money purchased for the banks/corporations.
9. Slowly acquire trillions of dollars in Treasuries--not difficult to do as the Federal government is borrowing $1.5 trillion a year.
10. Stop buying Treasuries and dump a boatload onto the market, forcing interest rates to rise as supply of new T-Bills exceeds demand (at least temporarily). Repeat as necessary to double and then triple interest rates paid on Treasuries.
11. Buy hundreds of billions in long-term Treasuries at high rates of interest. As interest rates rise, interest payments dwarf all other Federal spending, forcing extreme cuts in all other government spending.
12. Enjoy the hundreds of billions of…
Innovation, Risk and the Forest Fire Analogy
by ilene - July 4th, 2010 3:20 am
Innovation, Risk and the Forest Fire Analogy
Courtesy of Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds
To clear open space for innovation to take root, sometimes you need a forest fire to destroy all the deadwood. Instead, we are frantically piling up more deadwood.
What was once an inflammatory outlier--that our brand of "capitalism" incentivizes exploitation, fraud, complicity, corruption and plunder--is now commonplace. Even the most mainstream financial media websites now sport commentaries which excoriate our systemic fraud, and books galore gleefully sport titles containing "hot" words like plunder.
That is a remarkable turn of events: that a radical critique of our entire financial system has gone mainstream, and in many circles has been accepted as "obvious." (For more on the tricky nature of what’s "obvious," please see the chapters on the politics of experience in Survival+.)
In Innovation: Financial, Technical and Institutional (June 30, 2010), I attempted to connect the dots between risk and innovation. I believe that the two concepts are intrinsically bound like oxygen and hydrogen in the water molecule, but this deep structural connection between the two is generally ignored or not even recognized.
In essence, innovations which remain inherently unstable and unsafe regardless of hedges, controls and safety features--that is, they embody intrinsic risk-- cannot be placed in the same category as innovations with inherently low risk.
One of the keystones of the Survival+ critique is the realization that the risks of our systemic "financial innovations" are ontological and cannot be massaged away to zero. Indeed, the idea that this was possible underpinned the entire credit bubble and its inevitable implosion.
Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot discredited this notion in depth in his book (highly recommended) The Misbehavior of Markets.
I addressed this last year in The Yellowstone Analogy and The Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism (May 18, 2009):
For decades, the operative theory of forestry management was that limited controlled burns-- mild reductions of dead underbrush and debris--would essentially reduce the possibility of a major fire to near-zero.
But the practice actually allowed a buildup of dead wood which then fueled the devastating forest fire which swept Yellowstone National Park in 1988. Various revisionist views sprouted up later, claiming the fire was not the result of misguided attempts to limit natural forces (Vast Yellowstone Fire Now Seen as Unstoppable Natural Cataclysm (NT Times, 1989)).
Now we’re in a financial conflagration which is widely considered the result of
…
Say What?
by ilene - June 29th, 2010 3:22 am
Say What?
Courtesy of James Howard Kunstler
I think America missed something. It must be the time of year, what with inhaling all those fumes from the charcoal starter… and fueling up the Jet-skis so as to turn a perfectly good mountain lake into something like a Cuisinart on the guacamole setting… and the rousing evenings in the Nascar parking lots hitting palmetto bugs with your wiffle bat… and all that anxious waiting for a 10W-40 hard rain to fall on the Gulf Coast states – but President Obama made a very interesting remark when the financial regulation package passed in the senate the other day. He said the bill would make sure that "Main Street is never again held responsible for Wall Street’s mistakes."
Whoosh….
That was the sound of something going over America’s head. Something about the size of Rodan the Flying Reptile. And frankly I don’t think the president even meant to be coy or deceptive. It just means he doesn’t get it either. Never again….
Never again?
What the f*ck?
Why even this time? Why isn’t there an army of federal attorneys out there, their teeth bristling with subpoenas, beating the bushes in every lane and skyscraper floor of lower Manhattan (and Fairfield County, Connecticut, not to mention a thousand office parks around the USA) to roust out the grifters and swindlers who took Main Street to the cleanersthis time.
The audacity of cluelessness! And the hilarity of "next time."
Earth to President Obama: there isn’t going to be a next time. This time was enough to git ‘er done. Wall Street – in particular the biggest "banks" – packaged up and sold enough swindles to unwind 2500 years of western civilization. You simply cannot imagine the amount of bad financial paper out there right now in every vault and portfolio on the planet. Enough, really, to sink any company even pretending to trade in things more abstract than a mud brick or an hour of labor. What’s more, the cross-collateralized obligations between them are so vast and intricate that all the standing timber in North America could not be fashioned into enough pick-up sticks to represent the hideous death-dealing tangle of frauds waiting for the wing-beat of a single black swan to come crashing down.
Go out and get a…
Jim Rogers: “I Am Buying Gold For A Relief Rally” But All Fiat Currencies Are Doomed
by ilene - June 17th, 2010 7:59 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
On one hand you have BNP revising their mid-term EURUSD forecast to 0.98, on the other you have such pessimists as Jim Rogers saying to buy the Euro. Who to trust anymore? Granted, Rogers’ thesis is only predicated on a a relief rally, pretty much the same as what we suggested when we saw the Goldman downgrade of the EURUSD, and immediately beckoned readers to get right back in. We consider the +50,000 pips picked in the ensuing week a direct gift from god (or at least his favorite worker). At this point the relief rally has likely fizzled, and the direction now is indeed down, at least until the next time the CFTC notes the net EUR shorts have hit a fresh record. Back to Rogers: in the long-term, Jim is just as bearish as always: "The European governments are not getting their act together, not at all. All paper money is flawed, nearly every currency in the world."
Rogers on European credibility: "If Greece went bankrupt it would send the signal to the world, and to the rest of Europe – ok, we’re not going to let people lie about their finance anymore, we are not going to let them spend money they don’t have, we are going to run a tight ship. That means the euro would be an extremely sound currency, it would the old Deutsche Mark." On Keynesianism: "You can’t keep spending money you don’t have because eventually the whole thing collapse in a house of cards." On the transition to reality: "I am not suggesting it is going to be a good time, don’t get me wrong. But if you wait 5 years from now, 10 years from now, when there is nothing you can do, and the whole system collapses, then you have real chaos in the streets, then you have Greece never recovering. In the US we have had states go bankrupt, cities go bankrupt, counties go bankrupt. It didn’t end the US, it didn’t end the US dollar." And on the flaws of our political system, which are just as applicable to our own president: "Greece is just trying to get through the next election, I am trying to figure out what’s good for country, what’s good for the world, what’s good for Europe, what’s good for the financial system."
FinReg Update: Rob Johnson Exposes the Financial System’s Plumbing
by ilene - June 13th, 2010 1:21 pm
FinReg Update: Rob Johnson Exposes the Financial System’s Plumbing
By Bryce Covert, courtesy of New Deal 2.0
The Real News Network sat down with Roosevelt Senior Fellow Rob Johnson to discuss what he thinks of the FinReg bill currently in conference. Johnson supports the split between proprietary trading and commercial banking; after all, the Federal guarantees for are meant to “fortify the necessary plumbing” of traditional activities. He argues using that money to subsidize proprietary gambles encourages the addiction. The problem is, though, that these risky activities are now the “sump pumps being used to fill the hole in these balance sheets.” It’s a risk-taking Catch 22.
Overall, the bill has been watered down, Johnson notes, because “people depend upon the mother’s milk of politics, called money, to get re-elected,” and a lot of that money comes from the financial sector. But there are a few areas where he sees glimmers of hope: the CFPA, ratings agency reforms, and resolution authority are all steps in the right direction. Watch the full interview:
Hugh Hendry Warns To “Prepare For Hyperinflation”
by ilene - May 28th, 2010 3:40 pm
Hugh Hendry Warns To "Prepare For Hyperinflation"
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
The endlessly entertaining Hugh Hendry, who gave Jeffrey Sachs a royal beatdown yesterday and pretty much discredited the Columbia professor for life, is back in this interview with Money Week’s Merryn Webb, in which he once again is not afraid to make "bold" statements. Such as that hyperinflation is pretty much inevitable, that China is the functional equivalent of the Next fashion chain in the 1980s, that instead of listening to idiots on TV who just talk their high beta books, investors should buy the largest and safest stocks. Interestingly, Hendry actually suggests a viable way to fix America’s problems, which would require China to write off its US debt, thus "securing the health and vitality of China’s biggest customer." Alas, we don’t think it would be sufficient, as China holds about $1 trillion of US debt (at least officially). For the Hendry plan to work, debt repudiation would have to go viral, with all banks, US and European, writing down foreign debts as well. Of course, this would bring about the crash of the financial system overnight which is why it won’t happen. And yes, it still will crash, as the financed assets are bled of all their cash flows, but at least the grind into systemic bankruptcy will be slow, painful (for the middle class) and very drawn out. As for hyperinflation, Hendry’s view coincides with that of Zero Hedge: "the current deflationary shock will deepen and then create "political legitimacy to go nuclear with hyperinflation" via the printing press."
h/t Kevin
Max Keiser And Gerald Celente Deconstruct Financial Fraud
by ilene - May 23rd, 2010 4:48 am
Max Keiser And Gerald Celente Deconstruct Financial Fraud
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Max Keiser at his best, deconstructing the global ponzi with Gerald Celente, another very much outspoken critic of the broken financial system. Most ZH regulars will be quite familiar with the overriding themes exposing the mass corruption perpetrated by the kleptocratic oligarchy, yet Max as always delivers the message with his patented iconoclastic panache that just draws you in.
h/t Ian
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
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