Use of lower-rated debt in repos has returned to pre-crisis levels

Looks like there’s a storm brewing in the U.S. repo markets.

It figures: profit-center banks have every motivation to stay one step ahead of the regs and the pols. Since the gamekeepers have now gotten around to looking at proprietary trading and bringing derivatives onto exchanges, you can almost bet your first-born that the next crisis will be in neither one of these areas but someplace else entirely different

[PREMIUM]: 2012 an inflection point toward S&P500 margin compression

What I have been saying throughout 2011 is that margin compression is going to happen no matter what. The cuts have been made and so margins cannot grow any higher from cuts. It has to come from operating leverage that increases as a result of revenue growth

The Fetish for Liquidity (and Reform of the Financial System)

So here’s the deal. What happened is that the financial sector taken as a whole moved into extremely short-term finance of positions in assets. This is a huge topic and is related to the transformation of investment banking partnerships that had a long-term interest in the well-being of their clients to publicly-held, pump-and-dump enterprises whose only interest was the well-being of top management.

It also is related to the rise of shadow banks that appeared to offer deposit-like liabilities but without the protection of FDIC. And it is related to the Greenspan “put” and the Bernanke “great moderation” that appeared to guarantee that all financial practices—no matter how crazily risky—would be backstopped by Uncle Sam. And it is related to very low overnight interest rate targets by the Fed (through to 2004) that made short-term finance extremely cheap relative to longer-term finance. All of this encouraged financial institutions to rely on insanely short short-term finance

Guess what truth and “truthiness” in the TARP bailout reveal?

Every 60 days the Government Accountability Office issues a report on the various TARP programs. Each report looks at how the Office of Financial Stability, the body currently overseeing all TARP programs, is performing on a given metric. The latest report looks at the estimated lifetime costs to U.S. taxpayers of the programs still in operation, and also at how the Treasury communicates these costs to the public. As for this latter question the short answer is: very selectively, indeed

What’s underneath the TARP?

The GAO says that issues with the TARP are not “material” and chooses instead to go with the less damning term of “significant”. A three-year record of getting it wrong would seem to suggest otherwise. We get that the $470 billion TARP was thrown together in a hurry. But to have “significant” issues with this extremely high-profile and unpopular corporate welfare program for three years running speaks of deliberate carelessness. Why on earth should we believe all the trumpeting about how profitable TARP has been when they can’t get the numbers right? In fact this all leaves me wondering: what’s really underneath that

Bill Black on potential Bank of America derivatives losses

In the video below, Bill Black discusses the issues he raised in a recent post about Bank of America’s accounting activities. At issue is the effect of its shift of assets from the holding company to its FDIC-insured subsidiary. In total, Bank of America owns derivatives with a notional value of $75 trillion. The Federal Reserve authorised this accounting manoeuvre despite FDIC objections

Bank of America’s Death Rattle: Not with a Bang, but a Whimper

Bob Ivry, Hugh Son and Christine Harper have written an article that needs to be read by everyone interested in the financial crisis. The article (available here) is entitled: BofA Said to Split Regulators Over Moving Merrill Derivatives to Bank Unit. The thrust of their story is that Bank of America’s holding company, BAC, has directed the transfer of a large number of troubled financial derivatives from its Merrill Lynch subsidiary to the federally insured bank Bank of America (BofA). The story reports that the Federal Reserve supported the transfer and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) opposed it. Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has written an appropriately blistering attack on this outrageous action, which puts the public at substantially increased risk of loss.

I write to add some context, point out additional areas of inappropriate actions, and add a regulatory perspective gained from dealing with analogous efforts by holding companies to foist dangerous affiliate transactions on insured depositories. I’ll begin by adding some historical context to explain how B of A got into this maze of affiliate conflicts

The End of the Fake Recovery

This is going to be a relatively long post. But I think it’s important. I have been meaning to update my thinking about the “Fake Recovery” which I heralded in early 2009 as the economy in the US began to turn. My view is that without policy support this recovery is now on its last legs.

Here, I want to review how we got here in the context of the banking system and what that means about the banking crisis right now

The Pyramid of Liabilities

Leverage is the practice of holding a small amount of government currency in reserve against IOUs denominated in the state’s unit of account while promising to convert those IOUs to currency. This can lead to a “run” on private IOUs, demanding conversion. Since the reserves held are not nearly sufficient to meet the demand for conversion, the central bank must enter as lender of last resort to stop the run by lending its own IOUs to allow the conversions to take place. Here, we examine bank clearing and the notion of a “pyramid” of liabilities with the government’s own IOUs at the top of that pyramid

Get Them to the Greek (Writedowns) – IASB

Wow! Just came across this piece from the FT about the concerns of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) of how European financial institutions have not reserved enough against potential credit losses on their Greece sovereign bond holdings

Ideology and economics

For ideological reasons, one might believe that limiting or reducing government is better. However, it does not follow that doing so is a painless exercise

Goldilocks, the Crash, and the Perfect Fiscal Storm

Randall Wray revisits the Clintonian Goldilocks economy to find the seeds of the Global Financial Crisis, using the sectoral balance approach