Shadow Banking | Phil's Stock World

Nevertheless, President Obama clearly believes the line fed to him by Wall Street. He is no Teddy Roosevelt. The question you should be asking is, will the tentative reforms proposed by the Obama Administration have any kind of positive effect? The answer is probably in a very temporary fashion, but that is more a function of the impairment of the capital markets themselves. However, if you don’t deal with a cancer fully, it comes back and spreads – even if you conduct surgery to take out some of the tumour.

Reform of the current US financial sector is neither possible nor would it ever be sufficient. It’s a bit like Lincoln saying, "Well, this slavery thing has a few problems, but we can ‘reform’ it and make it better.” As any student of horror films knows, you cannot reform zombies. Zombie banks must be killed. In other words, the financial system must be downsized.

Downsizing can begin with the following set of actions:

All bank assets and liabilities must be brought onto balance sheets, and made subject to reserve and capital requirements and—more importantly—to normal oversight by appropriate regulatory agencies. Any assets and liabilities that are left off balance sheet will be declared null and void, unenforceable by US courts.
All CDSs must be bought and sold on regulated exchanges; otherwise they will be declared unenforceable by US courts.
Unless specifically approved by Congress, securitization of financial products such as life insurance policies will be prohibited and thus unenforceable by US courts.
The FDIC will be directed to examine the books of the largest 25 insured banks to uncover all CDS contracts held. These will then be netted among these 25 banks, canceling CDS contracts held on one another. CDS contracts with foreign banks will be unwound. The FDIC will also examine derivative positions with a view to determine whether unwinding these would be in the public interest.
In its examination, the FDIC

For readers who have the time and interest to follow up on the topic Zero Hedge commenced yesterday discussing money liquidity and the shadow banking system, the best place to start is with Friedrich Hayek’s seminal Prices and Production, published in the depression days of 1935. Curiously Hayek discerned the critical role of the shadow banking system long before the advent of securitization, derivatives and other products that today have caused the monetary supply problem to reach a screaming crescendo. A very salient sample is presented below:

"There can be no doubt that besides the regular types of the circulating medium, such as coin, notes and bank deposits, which are generally recognised to be money or currency, and the quantity of which is regulated by some central authority or can at least be imagined to be so regulated, there exist still other forms of media of exchange which occasionally or permanently do the service of money. Now while for certain practical purposes we are accustomed to distinguish these forms of media of exchange from money proper as being mere substitutes for money, it is clear that, other things equal, any increase or decrease of these money substitutes will have exactly the same effects as an increase or decrease of the quantity of money proper, and should therefore, for the purposes of theoretical analysis, be counted as money.

In particular, it is necessary to take account of certain forms of credit not connected with banks which help, as is commonly said, to economize money, or to do the work for which, if they did not exist, money in the narrower sense of the word would be required. The criterion by which we may distinguish these circulating credits from other forms of credit which do not act as substitutes for money is that they give to somebody the means of purchasing goods without at the same time diminishing the money-spending power of somebody else. This is most obviously the case when the creditor receives a bill of exchange which he may pass on in payment for other goods. It applies also to a number of other forms of commercial credit, as, for example, when book credit is simultaneously introduced in a number of successive stages

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