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Is the U.S. Banking System Safe?–15 Years Later

March 16, 2023

IS THE U.S. BANKING SYSTEM SAFE? – 15 YEARS LATER

“We’ve got strong financial institutions…Our markets are the envy of the world. They’re resilient, they’re…innovative, they’re flexible. I think we move very quickly to address situations in this country, and, as I said, our financial institutions are strong.” – Henry Paulson – 3/16/08

The next financial crisis: Why it looks like history may repeat itself Silicon Valley Bank is shut down by regulators in biggest bank failure since global financial crisis

“I have full confidence in banking regulators to take appropriate actions in response and noted that the banking system remains resilient and regulators have effective tools to address this type of event. Let me be clear that during the financial crisis, there were investors and owners of systemic large banks that were bailed out . . . and the reforms that have been put in place means we are not going to do that again.” – Janet Yellen – 3/12/23

With the recent implosion of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, the largest bank failures since 2008, I had an overwhelming feeling of deja vu. I wrote the article Is the U.S. Banking System Safe on August 3, 2008 for the Seeking Alpha website, one month before the collapse of the global financial system. It was this article, among others, that caught the attention of documentary filmmaker Steve Bannon and convinced him he needed my perspective on the financial crisis for his film Generation Zero. Of course he was pretty unknown in 2009 (not so much anymore) , and I continue to be unknown in 2023.

The quotes above by the lying deceitful Wall Street controlled Treasury Secretaries are exactly 15 years apart, but are exactly the same. Their sole job is to keep the confidence game going and to protect their real constituents – the Wall Street bankers. And just as they did fifteen years ago, the powers that be once again used taxpayer funds to bailout reckless bankers. Two hours before the only solution the Feds know – print money and shovel it to the bankers – Michael Burry explained exactly what was about to happen.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Better A Year Early Than A Day Too Late

August 22, 2017

livelifehappy.com

Better A Year Early Than A Day Too Late

Preparation only has value if it’s done in advance

He who hesitates is lost.
~proverb

Change, especially a collapse scenario, often happens quite fast. So fast that there’s little to no time to react in the short frenzy between “before” and “after”.

This is true throughout nature. Glaciers that took millennia to form calve off into the sea in a matter of moments. Old-growth forests filled with thousand-year-old trees can be decimated by a single wildfire. The bubonic plague “Black Death” pandemic of the Middle Ages killed one-third of the Earth’s human population within just four short years.

Fast change is also a hallmark of human society. Movements and ideas — oftentimes simmering for years, decades or longer — suddenly reach a critical state in which the populace is swept up into history-making action. The outbreak of World War I. The Civil Rights movement. The dissolution of the USSR. The Digital Age.

When it comes, change happens swiftly. And life after — for better or worse — is forever different.

I’ve witnessed this time and time again since co-founding PeakProsperity.com. And in pretty much every instance, I notice that the vast majority of people — including even many of the the watchful and preparation-minded folks who read this site — are caught by surprise.

Fukushima

A good example of this was the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March of 2011. Of course, no one could have foretold the timing and scale of the tsunami, and virtually nobody expected that it could overwhelm the facility as spectacularly as it did. So in the immediate aftermath of the plant’s failure, the world looked on in sympathy, not fear.

But on March 12th, that changed as the first of several hydrogen explosions was observed among the reactors. And then my phone rang.

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

Mutual Funds, ETFs at Risk of a Run Warns Stockman

February 13, 2016

Mutual Funds, ETFs at Risk of a Run Warns Stockman

In one of his starkest warnings yet, Former White House Budget Director (Office of Management and Budget, OMB), David Stockman has warned that banks and the global financial system remain vulnerable and there is likely to be another global financial crisis which will be worse than the first involving “a run on mutual funds and ETFs.”

stockman

Stockman warns in a Bloomberg interview that Deutsche Bank

“has a $2 trillion balance sheet and they have a net tangible equity of $66 billion. So that is 3% – “they are leveraged 30 to 1 in terms of net tangible equity.”

“What is whirling around in that $2 trillion nobody knows but I do think that the banks have unloaded the worst of their stuff and today it is in mutual funds and ETFs, today it is in non bank financial institutions, like all these companies that have come up over night to make auto loans by selling junk bonds as a form of capital.”

This is reminiscent of the first financial crisis and the financial collapse wrought on the world with the subprime mortgage fraud as beautifully illustrated in the must see movie ‘The Big Short’.

Regarding how ‘mom and pop’ investors and pension owners are vulnerable, Stockman says

“The dangers of a run are far more serious now than it was with banks then. Back then, main street banks did not have to mark to market most of their assets and there never was a run on mainstreet banks, it was only on a few hedge funds  … 

This time you are going to have a run of $5 trillion or $6 trillion of mutual funds. This time you are going to have a run on the ETFs. There were only $1 trillion of ETFs in existence in 2008. There is over $3 trillion now and they are an accelerator mechanism.“

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

Why Dip Buyers Will Get Clobbered: The US Economy Isn’t Doing “Just Fine”

January 26, 2016

Why Dip Buyers Will Get Clobbered: The US Economy Isn’t Doing “Just Fine”

As of June 2008 no Wall Street banking house was predicting a recession, yet by then the Great Recession—–the worst economic downturn since the 1930s—– was already six months old, as per the NBER’s subsequent official reckoning.

Actually, it was already several years old if you concede that the phony housing boom of 2005-2007 was generating merely transient “statistical” GDP, not permanent gains in main street wealth. Even the movie houses now showing “The Big Short” have some pretty palpable reminders on that point——not the least being the strip club dancer who owned 5 residential properties, with two adjustable rate mortgages on each.

In fact, by then main street America was crawling with strippers. That is, equity strippers who were repeatedly doing “cash out” refinancings in order to generate between $20,000 and $100,000 or more of mortgage proceeds to spend on vacations, cars, man caves, aspirational leather goods, shoes and apparel, among much else.

At the peak in 2006-2007, upwards of 10% of personal consumption expenditures were accounted for by MEW (mortgage equity withdrawal). The utter unsustainability of that kind of Potemkin prosperity goes without saying, but the point here is that it was no deep dark secret buried in the economic entrails.

In fact, Chairman Greenspan went to great lengths to publicize the facts of MEW on an up-to-date basis. But he wasn’t trying to warn that the end was near. Unaccountably, he and his Wall Street acolytes concluded that the US economy had become virtually recession proof because of the extra firepower being accorded to household consumption by MEW!

MEWQ42014

In short, the economic booby trap of MEW was hiding in plain sight and so was the Great Recession. Yet there was nothing at all unusual about the 2008 recession call miss.

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

Betting on the Wall Street Crash

January 24, 2016

Betting on the Wall Street Crash

Exclusive: The 2008 Wall Street crash resulted from a combination of unrestrained greed and political contempt for government regulators who might have prevented the devastation. In The Big Short, the tale is told from the perspective of a few players who saw the inevitable and made money on the crash, writes James DiEugenio.

If you read Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short or see the movie by the same name, you won’t find much about how the financial crisis of 2008 was set in motion more than two decades earlier. You won’t learn much about the roles of Ronald Reagan and his disdain for big government or about Bill Clinton’s faith in neo-liberalism, trusting that the modern markets and the supposedly sophisticated investors would keep excesses in check.

Nor will you find much about economist-turned-politician Phil Gramm who incorporated many of Reagan’s and Clinton’s beliefs into legislative actions, slashing taxes on the rich in the 1980s (and thus incentivizing greed) and, in the 1990s, brushing aside Franklin Roosevelt’s painfully learned lessons from the Great Depression about the need for firewalls between the speculation of Wall Street and the hard-earned savings of Main Street.

The-Big-Short-teaser-poster1-e1445275948938

Also out of Lewis’s narrative frame is Brooksley Born, the federal commodities regulator who foresaw the looming danger from the exotic new financial instruments that sliced and diced risky subprime mortgages and packaged them in bonds with ratings far above what they deserved – and the even riskier tendency to lay bets on how the bonds would perform.

But Born was out-muscled by bigger financial stars with larger egos, the esteemed Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (originally a Reagan appointee) and Clinton’s brash Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a rising star in the neo-liberal establishment which treated the market’s “invisible hand” as a new-age god.

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

The Big Short

January 6, 2016

The Big Short

Big-Short

QUESTION: Marty; I am curious what you thought of the Big Short especially since you are the one who got the timing right to the day. In markets, I do not have to tell you that being too early is more dangerous than being too late. Since that fateful day on the floor when the Case-Shiller real estate index peaked and the stock market began to crash, everyone was calling it Armstrong’s Revenge for it began on the day of your ECM. They lucked out on their trades since they were all too early and played a game where the bankers fixed the price rigging the game. So any comment?

ANSWER: The BIG SHORT was financed by Plan B Entertainment Inc., which is owned by Brad Pitt. I thought the film was very accurate in describing what took place. It is questionable to what extent the bankers knew the full implications of what they had done. They knew they will filling the CDOs with garbage. They knew what they sold would collapse in price. I think what they did not comprehend was the extent to which the leverage would implode.

The movie did a fair job of trying to explain complex issues for the average person. But I think it still was over the heads of most. The casino explanation was clever, but short of the mark. Perhaps they should have used the analogy of life insurance. You can take a policy out on yourself. However, anyone else can as well. Your boss may take an insurance policy on you because you have a key role. There can be multiple policies on you but there is only one you.

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

The Big Short is a Great Movie, But…

January 5, 2016

The Big Short is a Great Movie, But…

 

Paris — Michael Lewis is the chronicler of Wall Street.  He takes the complexity behind which the inhabitants of the financial world hide and weaves a tale that is both understandable and compelling.  Starting with the classic “Liars Poker” (1989), Lewis has produced a number of books about the financial markets including “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt” (2014) and “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” (2010).  Working with director Adam McKay and some great actors and screen writers, Lewis has managed to produce what is perhaps the most accessible and relevant treatment of the mortgage boom and financial bust of the 2000s, and the subsequent 2008 financial crisis.

The beauty of “The Big Short,” both as a movie and a book, is that it provides sufficient detail to inform the general audience about events and issues that are not part of everyday life.  Wall Street is a secretive place, but “The Big Short” manages to convey enough of the details to make the story credible as a journalistic effort, yet also enormously entertaining.  Lewis does this with two essential ingredients of any film: a simple story and compelling characters.

Images of greed and stupidity are presented like Italian frescos in “The Big Short,” pictures that are memorable and thought provoking.  Indeed, what many people know and remember years from now about the 2008 financial crisis will be shaped by creative efforts such as “The Big Short” for the simple reason that Lewis has simplified the description into a manageable portion.  Unlike hedge fund manager Michael Burry (played by Christian Bale), most people lack the patience and expertise to sift through and understand reams of financial data.

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

This Time Isn’t Different

January 4, 2016

THIS TIME ISN’T DIFFERENT

Last year ended with a whimper on Wall Street. The S&P 500 was down 1% for the year, down 4% from its all-time high in May, and no higher than it was 13 months ago at the end of QE3. The Wall Street shysters and their mainstream media mouthpieces declare 2016 to be a rebound year, with stocks again delivering double digit returns. When haven’t they touted great future returns. They touted them in 2000 and 2007 too. No one earning their paycheck on Wall Street or on CNBC will point out the most obvious speculative bubble in history. John Hussman has been pointing it out for the last two years as the Fed created bubble has grown ever larger. Those still embracing the bubble will sit down to a banquet of consequences in 2016.

At the peak of every speculative bubble, there are always those who have persistently embraced the story that gave the bubble its impetus in the first place. As a result, the recent past always belongs to them, if only temporarily. Still, the future inevitably belongs to somebody else. By the completion of the market cycle, no less than half (and often all) of the preceding speculative advance is typically wiped out.

Hussman referenced the work of Reinhart & Rogoff when they produced their classic This Time is Different. Every boom and bust have the same qualities. The hubris and arrogance of financial “experts” and government apparatchiks makes them think they are smarter than those before them. They always declare this time to be different due to some new technology or reason why valuations don’t matter. The issuance of speculative debt and seeking of yield due to Federal Reserve suppression of interest rates always fuels the boom and acts as the fuse for the inevitable explosive bust.

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

The Big Short–A Review

December 26, 2015

THE BIG SHORT – A REVIEW

“The truth is like poetry, and most people fucking hate poetry.”

The Big Short opens nationwide today. But it happened to have one showing last night at a theater near me. My youngest son and I hopped in the car and went to see it. I loved the book by Michael Lewis. The cast assembled for the movie was top notch, but having the director of Anchorman and Talledaga Nights handle a subject matter like high finance seemed odd.

The choice of Adam McKay as director turned out to be brilliant. The question was how do you make a movie about the housing market, mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, collateralized debt swaps, and synthetic CDOs interesting for the average person. He succeeded beyond all expectations.

Interweaving pop culture icons, music, symbols of materialism, and unforgettable characters, McKay has created a masterpiece about the greed, stupidity, hubris, and arrogance of Wall Street bankers gone wild. He captures the idiocy and complete capture of the rating agencies (S&P, Moodys). He reveals the ineptitude and dysfunction of the SEC, where the goal of these regulators was to get a high paying job with banks they were supposed to regulate. He skewers the faux financial journalists at the Wall Street Journal who didn’t want to rock the boat with the truth about the greatest fraud ever committed.

What makes the movie great are the characters, their motivations, their frustrations, their anger at a warped demented system, and ultimately their hollow victory when the entire edifice of fraud came crashing down on the heads of honest hard working Americans. The movie does not glorify the men that ended up making billions from the demise of the housing bubble. But it clearly defines the real bad guys.

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

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