Home » Posts tagged 'Shadow Banking' (Page 3)
Tag Archives: Shadow Banking
Don’t Forget China’s “Other” Spinning Plate: Trillions In Hidden Bad Debt
Don’t Forget China’s “Other” Spinning Plate: Trillions In Hidden Bad Debt
To be sure, there’s every reason to devote nearly incessant media coverage to China’s bursting stock market bubble and currency devaluation.
The collapse of the margin fueled equity mania is truly a sight to behold and it’s made all the more entertaining (and tragic) by the fact that it represents the inevitable consequence of allowing millions of poorly educated Chinese to deploy massive amounts of leverage on the way to driving a world-beating rally that, at its height, saw day traders doing things like bidding a recently-public umbrella manufacturer up 2,700%.
The entertainment value has been heightened by what at this point has to be some kind of inside baseball competition among media outlets to capture the most hilarious picture of befuddled Chinese traders with their hands on their faces and/or heads with a board full of crashing stock prices visible in the background. Meanwhile, the world has recoiled in horror at China’s crackdown on the media and anyone accused of “maliciously” attempting to exacerbate the sell-off by engaging in what Beijing claims are all manner of “subversive” activities such as using the “wrong” words to describe the debacle and, well, selling stocks. Finally, China’s plunge protection has been widely criticized for, as we put it, “straying outside the bounds of manipulated market decorum.”
And then there’s the yuan devaluation that, as recent commentary out of the G20 makes abundantly clear, is another example of a situation where China will inexplicably be held to a higher standard than everyone else.That is, when China moves to support its export-driven economy it’s “competitive devaluation”, but when the ECB prints €1.1 trillion, it’s “stimulus.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The 8 Trillion Black Swan: Is China’s Shadow Banking System About To Collapse?
The 8 Trillion Black Swan: Is China’s Shadow Banking System About To Collapse?
“Wealth management products in China have come under the spotlight after a series of missed payments raised concerns over the shadow banking sector that often directs credit to firms shut out from bank lending or capital markets,” Reuters said in February, after reporting that CITIC (China’s top brokerage), was looking at ways to repay investors after the issuer of one of the wealth management products the broker sold missed a $1.12 million payment to investors.
That news came a little over a year after the now infamous “Credit Equals Gold #1 Collective Trust Product” incident and a subsequent default scare on a similar product backed by loans to a struggling coal company.
Although wealth management products and CTPs (which differ from WMPs) are often described as “murky” and “opaque”, the basic concept is fairly simple. WMPs are marketed to investors as a way to get more bang for their buck (er.. yuan) than they would with bank deposits. Funds from these investors are then invested at a higher rate. If the assets investors’ money is used to fund run into trouble, that’s not good news for WMP investors. Simple.
The main issue here is the sheer size of the market. As FT notes, “in 2010, as regulators tried to rein in the explosion in bank credit resulting from the country’s Rmb4tn economic stimulus plan, banks turned to trusts to help them comply with lending controls.” So essentially, trusts helped banks offload credit risk at the behest of the PBoC. Here’s the process whereby banks use trusts to get balance sheet relief:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fed Admits Economy Can’t Function Without Bubbles
In short, the dot-com bust was the last chance for the Fed to pivot and liberate the American economy from the corrosive financialization it had fostered. A determined policy of higher interest rates and renunciation of the Greenspan Put would have paved the way for a return to current account balance, sharply increased domestic savings, the elevation of investment over consumption, and a restoration of financial discipline in both public and private life. Needless to say, the Fed never even considered this historic opportunity. Instead, it chose to double-down on the colossal failure it had already produced, driving interest rates into the sub-basement of historic experience. This inexorably triggered the next and most destructive bubble ever. – David Stockman, The Great Deformation
Over the course of the roughly twelve and a half years from Black Monday to the beginning of the end for the dot-com bubble, the Fed effectively engineered a mania by facilitating the explosion of bank loans, GSE debt, and the shadow banking complex, which together grew from under $5 trillion in 1987 to $17 trillion by the beginning of 2000.
For evidence that this expansion was indeed the work of monetary authorities and was not funded by an increase in America’s savings, look no further than the following chart which shows an accommodative Fed and an increasingly savings averse American public:
When the Nasdaq collapsed, the Fed was given an opportunity to restore some semblance of order and discipline to a market that had learned to rely on the Greenspan put. Instead, it chose to inflate a still larger bubble and now, courtesy of Janet Yellen’s friends at the San Francisco Fed, we know precisely why.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
This Coal Mine Valued At $630 Million In 2011 Just Sold For One Dollar
This Coal Mine Valued At $630 Million In 2011 Just Sold For One Dollar
The following photos are from Australia’s Isaac Plains coking-coal mine.
Why is Isaac Plains relevant? Well, in 2011 at the height of the Australian mining boom, Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo thought it has spotted a bargain, and a SMH reports, it approached Tony Poli, the founder of mid-tier miner Aquila Resources with an offer: it would buy its 50% stake in Isaac Plains, at the time Aquila’s only producing mine, for $430 million. Market participants thought Aquila’s stake might fetch $300 million at best but Sumitomo was confident it would make a strong return, and offered almost 50% above fair value, especially since Brazil’s legendary mining company Vale owned the other 50% stake. Net, the total value of the Isaac Plains mine in 2011 just just about $630 million. It turns out Sumitomo was very, very wrong, and within a few years the writing was on the wall. In September 2014, Sumitomo and Vale shuttered the mine citing the downturn in the international coal market. Sumitomo said it would also take a writedown worth ¥30 billion ($11 million) on its Australian coal investments. And as SMH tongue in cheekly adds, Isaac Plains was added to the long list of coal mines up for sale – but at a price. That price was finally revealed on Thursday: the princely sum of $1. Why the complete collapse in price of the mine? Simple: blame China. As Bloomberg explains, “a slump in the price of coking coal, used to make steel, to a decade low is forcing mines to close across the world and bankrupting some producers. Alpha Natural Resources Inc., the biggest U.S. producer, plans to file for bankruptcy protection in Virginia as soon as Monday, said three people with direct knowledge of the matter. It was valued at $7.3 billion in 2008.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
It’s Not Just Margin Debt: Presenting The Complete Chinese Stock Market Ponzi Schematic
It’s Not Just Margin Debt: Presenting The Complete Chinese Stock Market Ponzi Schematic
Late last month in “The Biggest Threat To Chinese Stocks: Shadow Lending Crackdown“, we suggested that the pressure on Chinese equities – which at that point had only begun to build – was at least partially attributable to an unwind in the country’s CNY1 trillion backdoor margin lending edifice.
As we explained, brokerages were only allowed to facilitate margin trading for investors whose account balances totaled at least CNY500K, and even then, traders could only lever up 2X. Brokerages naturally looked for ways to skirt the rules, leading to the development of multiple off-the-books vehicles and creating a situation wherein the official headline figure for margin lending (around CNY2.2 trillion at the time) woefully underrepresented the actual amount of leverage behind China’s world-beating equity rally.
Put simply, precisely measuring the amount of shadow financing that helped China’s legions of newly-minted retail day traders make leveraged bets on the SHCOMP and Shenzhen is virtually impossible, as is determining how much of that leverage has been unwound and how much remains or has been restored thanks to Beijing’s explicit efforts to reignite the margin madness by pumping PBoC cash into CSF.
For our part, we’ve suggested that regardless of what the actual figure is, the important point is that the unwind has probably just begun. In short: it seems unlikely that all of the leverage has been squeezed out of China’s exceedingly intricate shadow financing system.
As it turns out, BofAML agrees and is out with a valiant attempt to not only identify each shadow lending channel, but to quantify just how much leverage is built into the Chinese market.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Shadow mortgage lending on the rise as house prices soar
Shadow lending represents about 4 to 5 per cent of Canada’s mortgage market
Canada’s housing boom is increasingly driving homebuyers to seek mortgages from private lenders, who demand rates that can be more than five times higher than those charged by the nation’s banks.
Canadian house prices have risen 36 per cent since June 2009, according to the Teranet-National Bank house price index. At the same time, Canadian banks have become more conservative and regulators are making it harder to lend, giving rise to an alternative market, including Canadians who refinance their own homes at low rates and then use the money to become mortgage lenders themselves.
Some analysts say a housing investment is increasingly risky because the pace of price increases has vastly outstripped wage growth, all amid a time of historically low interest rates and record debt levels. If and when interest rates rise, the concern is that consumers would have little ability to increase their payments, because they have so much debt.
- Real estate market in Toronto shows no sign of cooling
- Overvalued home prices could put new owners at risk
- Ontario house prices may be 25% overvalued due to condo threat
“The risk arises if the unintended consequence of regulation is to push out the risk profile of the less regulated sector, and to encourage it to grow quickly at the same time,” said Finn Poschmann, vice-president of policy analysis at the C.D. Howe Institute.
“In dollar terms it is not a huge part of the economy (but) my concern is that we pay attention, because small problems sometimes get unexpectedly large, and quickly so.”
Mortgage broker Lou Perrotta said that in terms of volume, 20 per cent to 30 per cent of the mortgages he puts together are now privately financed, typically because borrowers are declined for a bank loan for reasons like a low credit rating or unsteady income. That represents about $4 million to $5 million of the $20 million of mortgage business he does annually, he said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The 75 Trillion Dollar Shadow Banking System Is In Danger Of Collapsing
The 75 Trillion Dollar Shadow Banking System Is In Danger Of Collapsing
Keep an eye on the shadow banking system – it is about to be shaken to the core. According to the Financial Stability Board, the size of the global shadow banking system has reached an astounding 75 trillion dollars. It has approximately tripled in size since 2002. In the U.S. alone, the size of the shadow banking system is approximately 24 trillion dollars. At this point, shadow banking assets in the United States are even greater than those of conventional banks. These shadow banks are largely unregulated, but governments around the world have been extremely hesitant to crack down on them because these nonbank lenders have helped fuel economic growth. But in the end, we will all likely pay a very great price for allowing these exceedingly reckless financial institutions to run wild.
If you are not familiar with the “shadow banking system”, the following is a pretty good definition from investing answers.com…
The shadow banking system (or shadow financial system) is a network of financial institutions comprised of non-depository banks — e.g., investment banks, structured investment vehicles (SIVs), conduits, hedge funds, non-bank financial institutions and money market funds.
How it works/Example:
Shadow banking institutions generally serve as intermediaries between investors and borrowers, providing credit and capital for investors, institutional investors, and corporations, and profiting from fees and/or from the arbitrage in interest rates.
Because shadow banking institutions don’t receive traditional deposits like a depository bank, they have escaped most regulatory limits and laws imposed on the traditional banking system. Members are able to operate without being subject to regulatory oversight for unregulated activities. An example of an unregulated activity is a credit default swap (CDS).
These institutions are extremely dangerous because they are highly leveraged and they are behaving very recklessly. They played a major role during the financial crisis of 2008, and even the New York Fed admits that shadow banking has “increased the fragility of the entire financial system”…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
