Trading Houses Will Collapse As “Margin Call Doom Loop” Goes Global, Trafigura CFO Warns
Sometimes repo guru Zoltan Pozsar is so far ahead of his time, it takes the “experts” weeks just to read up on all the required source docs to even grasp what he is talking about.
Last week we reported that the Bloomberg news that one of the world’s largest independent energy merchants – the secretive Trafigura which trades hundreds of billion in commodities every year – was facing “margin calls in the billions of dollars” meant that the commodity “margin call doom loop” idea floated more than three weeks ago by Pozsar who warned that commodity traders and clearinghouses could be facing a liquidity crisis of historic proportions, was coming true and despite Barclays’ earnest attempts to minimize its impact, could threaten broader financial stability and was manifesting itself in broad liquidity squeezes which could be observed in the surge in such unsecured funding markets as the FRA-OIS.
That was just the start, because the very next day Zoltan was proven correct again, after the FT reported that Europe’s largest energy traders have taken the place of Europe’s insolvent banks in calling on governments and central banks to provide “emergency” assistance to avert a cash crunch as sharp price moves triggered by the Ukraine crisis strain commodity markets.
Yes, that’s what happens when a “margin call doom loop” goes global.
The FT wrote that in a letter it had seen, the European Federation of Energy Traders, a trade body that counts BP, Shell and commodity traders Vitol and the margin-call stricken Trafigura as members, said the industry needed “time-limited emergency liquidity support to ensure that wholesale gas and power markets continued to function”.
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