Do Ben and Tim = Thelma and Louise?
by ilene - September 25th, 2009 5:33 pm
Do Ben and Tim = Thelma and Louise?
Courtesy of Jesse’s Café Américain
One cannot help but note that Team Obama is trying to derail serious proposals regarding financial reform for Wall Street at the G20 meeting, as we suggested they would.
The concerns raised by US revelations at the G20 today about new intelligence regarding Iran’s secret underground nuclear facility have overshadowed financial reform and economic problems, and Gordon Brown’s prescription yesterday that the G20 would become the new governing council for the world. It also stepped rather heavily on the House Hearings on HR 1207 "Audit the Fed" bill sponsored by Ron Paul and a good part of the Congress.
Why waste a crisis indeed. Especially when you can cop a two-fer.
Yesterday we put forward a somewhat lengthy piece on the Fed and reverse repos being considered titled Fed Eyes US Money Market Funds.
There is a key quote in there that we would like to highlight today.
The central bank is now considering dealing with money market funds because it does not think the primary dealers have the balance sheet capacity to provide more than about $100 billion… Money market mutual funds have about $2.5 trillion under management…"
Only 100 billion in available capital for a relatively risk free short term investment in the global banking system including the Primary Dealers, does seem a bit tight for a set of such ‘well capitalized’ banks, especially since they aren’t making many commerical loans, preferring to speculate in the commodity and equity markets for daytrading profits.
BNP Paribas Securities Corp., Banc of America Securities LLC, Barclays Capital Inc., Cantor Fitzgerald & Co., Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Daiwa Securities America Inc., Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., Goldman, Sachs & Co., HSBC Securities (USA) Inc. , Jefferies & Company, Inc., J. P. Morgan Securities Inc., Mizuho Securities USA, Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated, Nomura Securities International, Inc., RBC Capital Markets Corporation, RBS Securities Inc., UBS SecuritiesLLC.
Couple that with the revelation reported some time ago at ZeroHedge and covered here, that the Fed is taking on more than 50 percent of the longer dated Treasuries, and there is only about Ten Billion left on their balance sheet for expansion, and you get the picture of a financial system not cruising into recovery but heading straight at a…