Currency Wars: Debase, Default, Deny!
by ilene - October 29th, 2010 3:18 am
Currency Wars: Debase, Default, Deny!
Courtesy of Gordon T Long of Tipping Points
In September 2008 the US came to a fork in the road. The Public Policy decision to not seize the banks, to not place them in bankruptcy court with the government acting as the Debtor-in-Possession (DIP), to not split them up by selling off the assets to successful and solvent entities, set the world on the path to global currency wars.
By lowering interest rates and effectively guaranteeing a weak dollar through undisciplined fiscal policy, the US ignited an almost riskless global US$ Carry Trade and triggered an uncontrolled Currency War with the mercantilist, export driven Asian economies. We are now debasing the US dollar with reckless spending and money printing with the policies of Quantitative Easing (QE) and the expectations of QE II. Both are nothing more than effectively defaulting on our obligations to sound money policy and a “strong US$”. Meanwhile with a straight face we deny that this is our intention.
It’s called debase, default and deny.
Though prior to the 2008 financial crisis our largest banks had become casino like speculators with public money lacking in fiduciary responsibility, our elected officials bailed them out. Our leadership placed America and the world unknowingly (knowingly?) on a preordained destructive path because it was politically expedient and the easiest way out of a difficult predicament. By kicking the can down the road our political leadership, like the banks, avoided their fiduciary responsibility. Similar to a parent wanting to be liked and a friend to their children they avoided the difficult discipline that is required at certain critical moments in life. The discipline to make America swallow a needed pill. The discipline to ask Americans to accept a period of intense adjustment. A period that by now would be starting to show signs of success versus the abyss we now find ourselves staring into. A future that is now significantly worse and with potentially fatal pain still to come.
Unemployed Americans, the casualties of the financial crisis wrought by the banks, witness the same banks declaring record earnings while these banks refuse to lend. When the banks once more are caught with their fingers in the cookie jar with falsified robo-signing mortgage title fraud, they again look for the compliant parent to look the other way. Meanwhile the US debt levels and spending associated with protecting these failed…
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By “Shopping” for Regulators, Private Equity Firms Have Discovered How to Buy Banks
by ilene - June 10th, 2009 6:10 pm
By “Shopping” for Regulators, Private Equity Firms Have Discovered How to Buy Banks – Leaving Taxpayers With All the Risk
Courtesy of Shah Gilani
Contributing Editor, Money Morning
The financial Barbarians are at the gates of the U.S. banking sector.
“Regulatory arbitrage” – sometimes called “regulatory shopping” – has emerged as the favorite strategy for these Barbarians, otherwise known as private equity firms, to get around the federal rules that kept them from owning banks.
Why the sudden interest in banks? Like legendary bank robber Willie Sutton is famously (and probably falsely) remembered for saying: “That’s where the money is.”
Like so many of the businesses in the financial sector, the private equity business is right now reeling – and littered with its own bankrupt leveraged buyout deals. So now these LBO firms are shrewdly targeting failed banks, playing regulatory arbitrage, and shopping around as they search for ways around the regulations that were designed to keep companies with their motives out of the U.S. banking industry’s venerable vaults.
The new twist on acquisition leverage is to have taxpayers, through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), backstop losses on acquired banks if the economy continues to falter. And as soon as they can leverage depositors and the FDIC as a source of funds, these private equity firms will go back to buying leveraged-up targeted companies with cheap borrowed money – to which they’ll have easy access, since they’ll actually own the banks.
The Background on Banking Regs
Banks are regulated at the federal level by a number of agencies. The regulators include the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), which oversees national banks chartered by the government, the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), a U.S. Treasury Department office that oversees thrift institutions, savings and loans and credit unions, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the FDIC, not to mention various state banking regulatory bodies.
Lately, approval actions by the OTS and FDIC are at odds with the U.S. Federal Reserve, which has not authorized the acquisition of controlling interests in any banks by any private equity players. The FDIC has expressed its acquiescence as a way of more-quickly offloading insolvent banks in the hope that doing so might help limit its exposure to depositor claims. And the OTS, after being somewhat hesitant – and with its future as…
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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...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site