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I’m in Awe of How Fast Deutsche Bank is Falling Apart

October 1, 2016

I’m in Awe of How Fast Deutsche Bank is Falling Apart

Counterparties lose confidence, withdraw cash.

Deutsche Bank, with $2 trillion in assets, amounting to 58% of Germany’s GDP, one of the most globally interwoven banks, with gross notional derivatives exposure of €46 trillion, right at the top along with JP Morgan (booked as €41 billion in derivative trading assets after netting and collateral) – this creature of risk and malfeasance, is finally starting to scare its counterparties.

This is how Lehman came unglued. Slowly and then all of a sudden.

Bloomberg News today:

[S]ome funds that use the bank’s prime brokerage service have moved part of their listed derivatives holdings to other firms this week, according to an internal bank document seen by Bloomberg News. Millennium Partners, Capula Investment Management, and Rokos Capital Management are among about 10 hedge funds that have cut their exposure, said a person familiar with the situation….

So far, these are just the first of Deutsche Bank’s 200 hedge-fund clients that use it to clear their derivatives transactions. Banking is a confidence game. When confidence sags, the whole construct comes tumbling down. And the first movers have a big advantage in getting their cash out in in time. Bloomberg:

Clients review their exposure to counterparties to avoid situations like the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and MF Global’s 2011 bankruptcy when hedge funds had billions of dollars of assets frozen until the resolution of lengthy legal proceedings.

As the leak ricocheted around the world, Deutsche Bank shares plunged 6.6% in late trading today in Frankfurt to €10.25, having been down 8% at one point earlier. Shares are at the lowest level since they started trading on the Xetra exchange in 1992. They’re down 68% from April 2015. Just before the financial Crisis, they briefly traded at over €100 a share. By that measure, they’re down over 90%!

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

US Bank Counterparty Risk Soars After Energy MTM Debacle

January 17, 2016

US Bank Counterparty Risk Soars After Energy MTM Debacle

A few dots are starting to be connected now that we have exposed the debacle of The Fed’s decision to allow banks to mark-to-unicorn their energy loans. “Something” was wrong in recent weeks as the TED-Spread surged (implying rising counterparty uncertainty among banks) and then the last week – since The Fed’s alleged meeting with banks – has seen financial credit and stocks crash.

Coincidence? We don’t think so. In the week since The Fed gave the nod to banks to hide losses on energy loans, credit risk has spiked and stocks tumbled…

It is clear banks are hedging against one another’s systemic risk.

Simply put, it’s 2008 all-over-again as “when in doubt, sell ’em all” is back for the US financial system. When you know/question one bank (or some banks) is not transparent in their loan losses (and implicitly their capital ratios) then contagion (and collateral chains) tells any good fiduciary to sell them all – and the banks themselves will enable a vicious circle as they hedge.

And of course, the unintended consequence of The Fed’s decision to enable cheating in the banks’ energy loans is a surge in financial system instability as banks and the price of oil now become systemically more coupled.

The Next Financial Crisis Won’t be Like the Last One

September 15, 2015

The Next Financial Crisis Won’t be Like the Last One

It seems increasingly likely the next Global Financial Meltdown will arise in the FX/currency markets.

Central banks are like generals: they tend to fight the last war. The Great Financial meltdown of 2008 was centered in too big to fail, too big to jailtransnational banks and other financial entities with enormous exposure to collateral risk (such as subprime mortgages), highly leveraged bets and counterparty risk (the guys who were supposed to pay off your portfolio insurance vanish in a puff of digital smoke, leaving you to absorb the loss).

In response, the central banks and treasuries of the major economies “did whatever it took” to save the private banking sector from insolvency and collapse. In effect, central banks launched a multi-pronged bailout of banks and other financial heavyweights (such as AIG) and hastily constructed a clumsy and costly Maginot Line to protect the now-indispensable private banks from a similar meltdown.

The problem with preparing to fight the last war is that crises arise not from what is visible to all but from what is largely invisible to the mainstream.

The other factor is what’s within the power of central banks to fix and what’s beyond their power to fix. Correspondent Mark G. and I refer to this as the set of problems that can be solved by printing a trillion dollars. It’s widely assumed that virtually any problem can be fixed by printing a trillion dollars (or multiple trillions) and throwing it at the problem.

Yes, the looming student-loan debacle can be fixed by printing a trillion dollars and paying down a majority of the existing student debt.

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

 

 

 

The Crude Crash Comes To Wall Street: Counterparty Risks Rear Their Ugly Heads Again | Zero Hedge

December 14, 2014

The Crude Crash Comes To Wall Street: Counterparty Risks Rear Their Ugly Heads Again | Zero Hedge.

In late 2006, default rates on lower-rate subprime private MBS began to rise considerably. Though not a very transparent market to the mainstream media-watching world, bankers knew trouble was brewing as this had not happened before in such a benign house price decline. Banks, knowing what they had on their books, what they had sold to others, and what that meant for risk, began quietly buying protection on other banks as counterparty risk became a daily worry for desks across Wall Street.

The stocks of US financials continued to rise amid “contained” and “no problem” comments from the status quo but credit spreads for the major US banks kept leaking wider even as stocks rallied… then reality dawned on stocks and the rest is history.

Today, US financial credit spreads (wider) have decoupled once again from stocks (higher) and that divergence began as oil prices started to slump.

Are banks hedging counterparty risk once more ‘knowing’ what loans and exposures they have to the massively levered US oil industry? Or is it different this time?

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