Home » Posts tagged 'banking system'

Tag Archives: banking system

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen keeps insisting that the banking system is “sound.” Is it though? Because it doesn’t look particularly sound.

In fact, we just witnessed the second-largest US bank failure ever.

Government regulators seized control of First Republic Bank over the weekend and sold the majority of the bank’s operations to JP Morgan Chase. It was the third major bank failure this year and the biggest bank to collapse since the 2008 financial crisis. It was the second-largest bank by assets to fail in US history.

First Republic went under after it revealed $100 billion in deposit losses in the first quarter.

The beleaguered bank has been struggling for a while. It was initially bailed out back in March with $30 billion in deposits from several large banks, including JP Morgan and Wells Fargo. The bank also borrowed heavily from the Federal Reserve’s bank bailout program. First Republic shares tumbled 75% last week before the FDIC stepped in.

While JP Morgan is taking over First Republic’s business, the FDIC will provide “shared-loss agreements.” As the FDIC website explains it, “the FDIC absorbs a portion of the loss on a specified pool of assets sold through the resolution of a failing bank – in effect sharing the loss with the purchaser of the failing bank.”

If we are to believe the mainstream narrative, the failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank were isolated events and do not reflect a broader problem in the banking system. But as we have reported, these bank failures are just the tip of the iceberg. A report by the Wall Street Journal cites a study from Stanford and Columbia Universities that found 186 US banks are in distress.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Peter Schiff: Bank Bailouts Will Devalue the Dollar

March 29, 2023

Peter Schiff: Bank Bailouts Will Devalue the Dollar

MARCH 28, 2023 BY SCHIFFGOLD 0 0

Peter Schiff appeared on NTD News to talk about the bank bailout and the March Federal Reserve meeting. During the conversation, Peter explained that everybody is going to pay for these bailouts because they will ultimately devalue the dollar as inflation skyrockets.

During his press conference after the March FOMC meeting, Jerome Powell said the banking system is “sound and resilient.” Peter said it’s not sound at all.

It’s a house of cards that is starting to collapse.”

Peter explained how the banking system became so unsound.

First, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates at zero for over a decade. During that time, banks loaded up on low-yielding, long-term Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities. With interest rates so low, they had to go out further on the yield curve. And the reason they were able to take so much risk is because the government guarantees bank accounts. That created a moral hazard. Customers didn’t care what the banks did with their money because they knew the government would bail them out.

Thanks to the mistakes the Fed has made since the 2008 crisis, we have a much bigger bubble now. The Fed caused the bubble that led to the financial crisis of 2008, and then they inflated a bigger bubble to try to paper over those mistakes and kick the can down the road so that we wouldn’t have to deal with the full consequences of resolving all those mistakes. And of course, we just compounded the problem with bigger mistakes and now the US economy is poised on the biggest economic disaster in its history.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Charles Hugh Smith: The System Will Fall Apart

September 24, 2021

Charles Hugh Smith: The System Will Fall Apart

Markets Next “Minsky Moment”

July 27, 2021

Technically Speaking: The Markets Next “Minsky Moment”

In this past weekend’s newsletter, I discussed the issue of the markets next “Minsky Moment.” Today, I want to expand on that analysis to discuss how the Fed’s drive to create “stability” eventually creates “instability.”

In 2007, I was at a conference where Paul McCulley, who was with PIMCO at the time, discussed the idea of a “Minsky Moment.” At that time, this idea fell on “deaf ears” as markets were surging higher amidst a real estate boom. However, it wasn’t too long before the 2008 “Financial Crisis” brought the “Minsky Moment” thesis to the forefront.

So, what exactly is a “Minsky Moment?”

Economist Hyman Minsky argued that the economic cycle is driven more by surges in the banking system and credit supply. Such is different from the traditionally more critical relationship between companies and workers in the labor market. Since the Financial Crisis, the surge in debt across all sectors of the economy is unprecedented.

Markets Minsky Moment, Technically Speaking: The Markets Next “Minsky Moment”

Importantly, much of the Treasury debt is being monetized, and leveraged, by the Fed to, in theory, create “economic stability.” Given the high correlation between the financial markets and the Federal Reserve interventions, there is credence to Minsky’s theory. With an R-Square of nearly 80%, the Fed is clearly impacting financial markets.

Those interventions, either direct or psychological, support the speculative excesses in the markets currently.

Bullish Speculation Is Evident

Minsky’s specifically noted that during periods of bullish speculation, if they last long enough, the excesses generated by reckless, speculative activity will eventually lead to a crisis. Of course, the longer the speculation occurs, the more severe the problem will be.

Currently, we see clear evidence of “bullish speculation” from:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fed Drains $485 Billion in Liquidity from Market via Reverse Repos, Undoing 4 Months of QE, Even as QE Continues, Total Assets Near $8 Trillion

May 28, 2021

Fed Drains $485 Billion in Liquidity from Market via Reverse Repos, Undoing 4 Months of QE, Even as QE Continues, Total Assets Near $8 Trillion

It’s a crazy situation the Fed backed into as tsunami of liquidity goes haywire, banking system strains under $4 trillion in reserves, and General Treasury Account gets drawn down.

This morning, the Fed sold a record $485 billion in Treasury securities via overnight “reverse repos” to 50 counterparties, beating the prior record set on December 31, 2015. These overnight reverse repos will mature and unwind tomorrow morning. Today, yesterday’s $450 billion in overnight reverse repos matured and unwound, and were more than replaced with this new batch of $485 billion in overnight reverse repos.

Reverse repos are liabilities on the Fed’s balance sheet. They’re the opposite of repos, which are assets. With these reverse repos, the Fed is selling Treasury securities to counterparties and is taking their cash, thereby massively draining liquidity from the market – the opposite effect of QE.

In past years of large reserves following QE, banks shed reserves via reverse repos, reducing reserves on the balance sheet and increasing their Treasury holdings, to dress up their balance sheet at the end of the quarter, and particularly at the end of the year. Reverse repos declined after the Fed started reducing its assets during Quantitative Tightening in 2018 and 2019. But the current record spike is taking place in the middle of the quarter, a sign that the enormous amount of liquidity is going haywire:

This is a crazy situation that the Fed backed into.

Even as liquidity is going haywire, and as the Fed trying to deal with it via reverse repos, the Fed is still buying about $120 billion per month in Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities, thereby adding liquidity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fed Drains $351 Billion in Liquidity from Market via Reverse Repos, as Banking System Creaks under Mountain of Reserves

May 23, 2021

Fed Drains $351 Billion in Liquidity from Market via Reverse Repos, as Banking System Creaks under Mountain of Reserves

This is the first time I’ve seen Wall Street banks clamor for the Fed to back off QE. The Fed is struggling to keep the liquidity it created from going haywire.

In the fall of 2019, when the repo market blew out, the Fed stepped in and bought Treasury securities and MBS and handed out cash via repurchase agreements. When these repos matured, the Fed got its money back, and the counterparties got their securities back. The Fed also did this during the market rout in March 2020. But by July 2020, the last repos matured and were unwound.

Now the Fed is doing the opposite, with “reverse repos.” Repos are assets on the Fed’s balance sheet. Reverse repos are liabilities. With these reverse repos, the Fed is now massively selling Treasury securities to counterparties and taking their cash, thereby draining liquidity from the market – the opposite effect of QE.

This morning, the Fed sold $351 billion in Treasury securities via overnight reverse repos to 48 counter parties, thereby blowing past the brief spike at the end of March 2020, and more than replacing yesterday’s $294 billion in Treasury securities that it has sold via reverse repos to 43 counterparties and that matured and unwound this morning.

These reverse repos are a sign that the banking system is struggling to deal with the liquidity that the Fed has been injecting via its QE. And that’s in part why there is now some clamoring on Wall Street for the Fed to taper its QE purchases because the banking system is now drowning in liquidity that banks have as reserves on their balance sheet. By buying Treasuries in the repo market, the banks lower their reserves and increase their Treasury holdings.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Disoreder Will Come–As Confucious Warned

April 5, 2021

DISORDER WILL COME – AS CONFUCIUS WARNED

When bubbles burst, we will discover how very few superior men there actually are – as defined by Confucius:

“The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved.” – Confucius

Superior man can exist at many different levels in society, not necessarily linked to money or investments. There will be many people without money who are prepared at an intellectual or psychological level. These people are probably the happiest since sadly many wealthy people worry about their money all the time rather than enjoy it.

In this piece I am talking primarily about preparedness in relation to one’s wealth.

PS Important Postscript at the end of the article.

FOCUS ON WEALTH PRESERVATION

The investors we meet in our business are people who are risk averse and therefore very much focus on wealth preservation. These investors buy physical gold because they are concerned about the excessive risks in markets. They want to protect and insure their wealth against unprecedented financial and currency risk. Like ourselves, these investors consider physical precious metals, stored outside a fragile banking system, as the ultimate form of wealth preservation.

But investment gold represents less than 0.5% of world financial assets. This means that a minuscule percentage of investors insure their wealth in gold. This is clearly surprising bearing in mind that over 5,000 years gold is the only money that has survived.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Egon von Greyerz, gold switzerland, inflation, risk, gold, precious metals, wealth, financial bubble, bubble, currency, banking system

IMPORTANT TOM CLOUD PRECIOUS METALS UPDATE: Including Gold & Silver Eagle Best Buy Prices

April 23, 2020

IMPORTANT TOM CLOUD PRECIOUS METALS UPDATE: Including Gold & Silver Eagle Best Buy Prices

As the global contagion continues to cause a great deal of uncertainty in the markets, I thought it was a good idea for precious metals dealer Tom Cloud to provide a new update. Tom starts off the video saying that in his 44 years in the industry, he has never seen anything like the current situation in the precious metals markets.

Tom stated that one of his wealthier clients last week took money out of the banking system and purchased a large sum ($millions) of physical precious metals. Unfortunately, there still are only a fraction of financial planners that advise their clients to own a percentage of physical gold and silver in their portfolio. I believe investors should be increasing the typical 5-10% of precious metals in one’s portfolio to at least 20-25%.

Tom also went on to say that some leading financial analysts are calling for a 30% drop in U.S. GDP by Q2 2020. This is no longer a recessionary event. Rather, we are heading into a Depression, the likes we haven’t seen for nearly eight decades. Very few Americans are prepared for what’s coming.

With investment demand for physical precious metals at near-record levels, Gold and Silver Eagle premiums are some of the highest ever. It is quite amazing to see Silver Eagles buy prices more than $10 over the spot price. One large online dealer is selling its Silver Eagles for nearly $12 over spot. Thus, Silver Eagle premiums are ranging between 50-80% over spot.

I also wanted to provide an update on the Gold & Silver Eagle BEST BUY prices. I spoke to Tom yesterday for about a half-hour. He told me that Silver Eagle premiums increased again, but CLOUD HARD ASSETS still has the lowest prices versus the top leading online dealers:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Repocalypse: The Second Coming

December 24, 2019

Repocalypse: The Second Coming

This little monster that feeds beneath the surface of global banking at its core briefly raised one ugly eye out of the water as 2018 turned into 2019. I wrote back then that the interest spike we saw in the kind of overnight interbank lending known as repurchase agreements (repos) was just the foreshock of a financial crisis being created by the Fed’s monetary tightening. I said the Fed’s continued tightening would eventually result in a full-blown recession that would emerge, likely out of the repo market, sometime in the summer. In the very last week of summer, the Repo Crisis raised its head fully out of the water and roared.

When I first wrote of these things at the start of 2019, the Fed had only been up to full-speed tightening for three months, and already it was blowing out the financial system at its core. The stock market had just crashed with the onset of full-speed tightening just as I had said it would. It fell hard enough to where the only index holding just one nostril above the icy water was the S&P 500 at a 19.8% plunge. Even that holdout briefly dipped its last air-hole under water in the middle of the day (i.e., below 20%), but didn’t stay below for the count. All other major indices and most minor ones took the full polar-bear plunge into the deep, dark water by this day in December.

If not for the obvious bullish bias in all reportage everywhere (except alternative media), the market would have been declared a new bear market at that time (based on the market’s own historic standards where a 20% fall is a bear market), and any bull market after that would be a new bull market, not what is now called “the longest bull market on record.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Monetary Looting

December 18, 2019

Monetary Looting

The United States has historically bragged about its free and transparent markets. But what the Fed is doing today is pulling a dark curtain around the financing of this so-called free and transparent market. The public has no idea which Wall Street firms have received this $3 trillion or why they can’t borrow it elsewhere. This kind of obfuscation by the Federal Reserve could actually stimulate distrust in the U.S. banking system. The Fed admitted as much in its most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes, writing that participation in the Fed’s loan program “could become stigmatized.”

– Wall Street on Parade: Is the Fed’s $3 Trillion in Loans to Trading Houses on Wall Street Legal?

The business model of Wall Street is fraud.
– Bernie Sanders

Financial services as currently structured is the most pernicious, predatory and corrupt industry on earth. Moreover, it’s the deliberately complex and opaque nature of the industry which then limits public debate when some problem arises and governments and central banks are called upon to take emergency measures to “save the system,” which is just a euphemism for enormous sums of corporate welfare being funneled to people and institutions who couldn’t survive otherwise.

It is systemic looting on a massive scale and the primary patrons of this ongoing and seemingly endless scheme are central banks. In the U.S. this means the Federal Reserve, which recently came back into the “market” with enormous new interventions in both the repo market and via renewed balance sheet expansion. I’ve read many of the smart takes on the repo crisis and still don’t feel confident I know precisely what’s going on. This is intentional.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

When It Becomes Serious You Have To Lie: Update On The Repo Fiasco

December 11, 2019

When It Becomes Serious You Have To Lie: Update On The Repo Fiasco

Occasionally, problems reveal themselves gradually. A water stain on the ceiling is potentially evidence of a much larger problem. Painting over the stain will temporarily relieve the unsightly condition, but in time, the water stain will return. This is analogous to a situation occurring within the banking system. Almost three months after water stains first appeared in the overnight funding markets, the Fed has stepped in on a daily basis to “re-paint the ceiling” and the problem has appeared to vanish. Yet, every day the stain reappears and the Fed’s work begins anew. One is left to wonder why the leak hasn’t been fixed.

In mid-September, evidence of issues in the U.S. banking system began to appear. The problem occurred in the overnight funding markets which serve as one of the most important components of a well-functioning financial and economic system. It is also a market that few investors follow and even fewer understand. At that time, interest rates in the normally boring repo market suddenly spiked higher with intra-day rates surpassing a whopping 8%. The difference between the 8% repo rate recorded on September 16, 2019 and Treasuries was an eight standard deviation event. Statistically, such an event should occur once every three billion years.

For a refresher on the details of those events, we suggest reading our article from September 25, 2019, entitled Who Could Have Known: What The Repo Fiasco Entails.

At the time, it was surprising that the sudden change in overnight repo borrowing rates caught the Fed completely off guard and that they lacked a reasonable explanation for the disruption. Since then, our surprise has turned to concern and suspicion.

We harbor doubts about the cause of the problem based on two excuses the Fed and banks use to explain the situation. Neither are compelling or convincing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Battle of the ‘Flations has Begun

August 16, 2019

The Battle of the ‘Flations has Begun

Inflation? Deflation? Stagflation? Consecutively? Concurrently?… or from a great height (apologies to Tom Stoppard).

We’ve reached a pivotal moment where all of the narratives of what is actually happening have come together. And it feels confusing. But it really isn’t.

The central banks have run out of room to battle deflation. QE, ZIRP, NIRP, OMT, TARGET2, QT, ZOMG, BBQSauce! It all amounts to the same thing.

How can we stuff fake money onto more fake balance sheets to maintain the illusion of price stability?

The consequences of this coordinated policy to save the banking system from itself has resulted in massive populist uprisings around the world thanks to a hollowing out of the middle class to pay for it all.

The central banks’ only move here is to inflate to the high heavens, because the civil unrest from a massive deflation would sweep them from power quicker.

For all of their faults leaders like Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini and even Boris Johnson understand that to regain the confidence of the people they will have to wrest control of their governments from the central banks and the technocratic institutions that back them.

That fear will keep the central banks from deflating the global money supply because politicians like Trump and Salvini understand that their central banks are enemies of the people. As populists this would feed their domestic reform agendas.

So, the central banks will do what they’ve always done — protect the banks and that means inflation, bailouts and the rest.

At the same time the powers that be, whom I like to call The Davos Crowd, are dead set on completing their journey to the Dark Side and create their transnational superstructure of treaties and corporate informational hegemony which they ironically call The Open Society.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Bank’s ‘Stress’ Tests

August 12, 2019

THE BANK’S ‘STRESS’ TESTS

MY REPORT ON THE BANK OF ENGLAND’S LATEST (NOVEMBER 2018) STRESS TESTS WAS PUBLISHED BY THE ADAM SMITH INSTITUTE ON AUGUST 3^RD.

The purpose of the stress tests is, in essence, to persuade us that the banking system is in good shape on the basis of a make-believe exercise which purports to show what might happen in the event of a supposed severe stress scenario as modelled by a central bank with a dodgy model and a vested interest in showing that the banking system is in great shape thanks to its own wise policies.

We are expected to believe that the central bank has managed to rebuild the banking system despite enormous pressure placed on it by the institutions it regulates, whose principal objective is to run down their capital ratios (or equivalently, maximise their leverage) in order to boost their returns on equity and resulting short-term profits, and never mind the systemic risks and associated costs imposed on everyone else or the damage their high leverage did in the Global Financial Crisis.

These latest Bank of England’s stress tests were published in the Bank’s November 2018 Financial Stability Report, the core message of which was that the UK banking system was doing just great, but that a No-Deal Brexit would be a disaster. Wrong on both counts.

I will focus here on the first issue, the state of the banking system.

In essence, the Bank paints a reassuring picture of bank resilience. The message is that the UK banking system is now so strong that it could sail through another crisis that is more severe than the last one and still be in good shape. How do we know this? Because the stress tests tell us, claims the Bank. However, the truth is that the Bank’s stress tests are useless at detecting bank fragility.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As China’s Banking System Freezes, SHIBOR Tumbles To Lowest In A Decade

June 24, 2019

As China’s Banking System Freezes, SHIBOR Tumbles To Lowest In A Decade

One trading day after we reported that China was “Hit By “Significant Banking Stress” as SHIBOR tumbled to recession levels, and less than a week after we warned that China’s interbank market was freezing up in the aftermath of the Baoshang Bank collapse and subsequent seizure, which led to a surge in interbank repo rates and a spike in Negotiable Certificates of Deposit (NCD) rates…

… China’s banking stress has taken a turn for the worse, and on Monday, China’s overnight repurchase rate dropped to its lowest level in nearly 10 years, after the central bank’s repeated liquidity injections to ease credit concerns in small-to-medium banks: The rate fell as much as 11 basis points to 0.9861% on Monday, before being fixed at exactly 1.000%.

Seeking to ease funding strains after the Baoshang collapse and to unfreeze the financial channels in the banking sector, the PBOC has been injecting cash into the financial system to soothe credit risk concerns in smaller banks following the seizure of Baoshang Bank, which sent shockwaves through China’s markets.

Also helping drive the rate lower is China’s move to allow brokerages to issue more debt, said ANZ Bank’s Zhaopeng Xing, quoted by Bloomberg. As a result, at least five brokerages had their short-term debt quotas increased by the People’s Bank of China in recent days, according to filings.

The improved access to shorter-term debt will cut costs for brokerages compared with alternative funding sources such as bond issuance. The flipside, of course, is that the lower overnight funding rates drop, the greater the investor skepticism that China’s massive, $40 trillion financial system is doing ok, especially since the last time overnight funding rates were this low, the near-collapse of the global financial system was still fresh and the S&P was trading in the triple-digits.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

International Monetary Fund: Storm Clouds Of The Next Financial Crisis Are Gathering

December 12, 2018

International Monetary Fund: Storm Clouds Of The Next Financial Crisis Are Gathering

The International Monetary Fund is sounding the alarms of another global crisis. IMF is warning that the storm clouds are currently gathering for another financial crisis.

According to a report by The Guardian, David Lipton, the first deputy managing director of the IMF, said that “crisis prevention is incomplete” more than a decade on from the last meltdown in the global banking system. Not only that but on an individual basis, people are largely unprepared for a major financial downturn. “As we have put it, ‘fix the roof while the sun shines.’ But like many of you, I see storm clouds building and fear the work on crisis prevention is incomplete,” Lipton said.

Lipton said individual nation states alone would lack the firepower to combat the next recession while calling on governments to work together to tackle the issues that could spark another crash.

“We ought to be concerned about the potency of monetary policy,” he said of the ability of the US Federal Reserve and other central banks to cut interest rates to boost the economy in the event of another downturn, while also warning that high levels of government borrowing constrained their scope for cutting taxes and raising spending. –The Guardian

Lipton said individual nation states alone would lack the firepower to combat the next recession while calling on governments to work together to tackle the issues that could spark another crash. Which is an odd position to take considering the central banks and governments of the world cause recession and economic crises in the first place.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: banking system

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts