Tag: banks

The purported defection of China’s chief central banker would not appear to bode well for the so-called recovery:

Rumors have circulated in China that People’s Bank of China Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan has left the country. The rumors appear to have started following reports on Aug. 28 which cited Ming Pao, a Hong Kong-based news agency, saying that because of an approximately $430 billion loss on U.S. Treasury bonds, the Chinese government may punish some individuals within the PBOC, including Zhou.

I doubt it’s going to help the animal spirits much either if he quietly turns up dead. Of course, if he did defect to Panama or some other offshore center, one has to wonder if Ben Bernanke is giving some thought to joining him soon.

UPDATE – STRATFOR says Zhou hasn’t defected after all:

People’s Bank of China governor Zhou Xiaochuan has not defected from China to the United States, authoritative sources have informed STRATFOR. The Washington Post has also spoken with unnamed officials who said there was no indication that Zhou had defected, that he was not in U.S. custody and that the rumors on Chinese internet discussion forums should be ignored.

Is anyone genuinely surprised that the White House’s foreclosure plan is designed to help the banks, and not the homeowners as advertised?

Banks will get the biggest benefit from an Obama administration housing program designed to help unemployed homeowners escape foreclosure. Housing experts expressed concern that banks, not homeowners, will be helped by the White House’s $3 billion funding infusion — $2 billion from the Treasury Department and another $1 billion from the Housing and Urban Development Department — going to those states hit hardest by the housing market crash and unemployment.

This is exactly the same trickle-down assistance approach that was previously taken by Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve and failed miserably. The fact of the matter is that the only reason foreclosures are a concern to the admininstration and the central bank is because they threaten to expose the insolvency of the banks. As is quite clearly the case, they are indifferent to the fate of the homeowning peasantry, otherwise they would have simply used that trillion in bailout cash to pay off problem mortgages.

Inflationistas have long insisted that the Fed can “print” all the money it wants. Deflationistas argue that it can’t. And now, we are beginning the process of finding out who is correct:

Fed Looks to Spur Growth by Buying Government Debt. Federal Reserve officials decided to reinvest principal payments on mortgage holdings into long-term Treasury securities, making their first attempt to bolster growth since March 2009 to keep the slowing U.S. economy from relapsing into recession.

The conventional inflationist argument is that the government can print as much paper as it wants. The problem with that is that in the US system, the government doesn’t print any paper, the Fed prints it and the government borrows from the Fed. So, the revised inflationist argument is that the purchase of Federal government debt is effectively the same thing as simply printing paper. I am dubious of this, as I am confident that the addition of these two intermediary steps with all the various complications they likely entail will derail the assumed equivalence. And then, of course, there is the question of whether the government can create debt as fast as it can print money even with the Fed promising that it will buy some of that debt. It is, after all, a mistake to assume that because the Fed has shown a willingness to buy a small portion of the newly-issued Federal debt, it will be willing to buy all of the newly-issued debt for an indefinite period of time. Which, you will note, is necessary if the equivalence is to hold.

I, for one, have seen absolutely no sign that the Federal Reserve is willing to put the interests of the national economy ahead of the health of its member banks, let alone itself. Have you? And remember, the $8 trillion in the M2 money supply is dwarfed by the $53 trillion in outstanding debt. The theoretical “printing” of the former will have to make up for the decline of the latter. Do the math.

For a society that is supposedly free, open, and democratic, it is interesting to note that what little public oversight of the powerful financial institutions that exists is being rapidly eliminated:

Under a little-noticed provision of the recently passed financial-reform legislation, the Securities and Exchange Commission no longer has to comply with virtually all requests for information releases from the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The law, signed last week by President Obama, exempts the SEC from disclosing records or information derived from “surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities.” Given that the SEC is a regulatory body, the provision covers almost every action by the agency, lawyers say. Congress and federal agencies can request information, but the public cannot.

Why, it’s almost as if the executive and legislative branches of government believe that they have, or will have, something very important to hide from the public. The interesting question is if this new law was inspired by something that has happened already or something that is going to happen. On a tangential note, those who believe more regulation is going to solve anything would do well to keep the implications of this law in mind.

Even with permission from the relevant regulator, fraud is still fraud. This is why no government bailout should EVER be permitted:

Goldman Sachs sent $4.3 billion in federal tax money to 32 entities, including many overseas banks, hedge funds and pensions, according to information made public Friday night. Goldman Sachs disclosed the list of companies to the Senate Finance Committee after a threat of subpoena from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia.

Imagine that. Goldman should be closed down immediately and its executives investigated, and if necessary, prosecuted for fraud, theft, and any other crimes that apply here.

This astonishing display of madness should settle the question about who runs the country, Washington or Wall Street:

Just a few months ago, amid populist anger at the Fed for failing to prevent the financial crisis of 2008 and bailing out Wall Street, Congress was talking of stripping the central bank of its supervisory oversight of banks or forcing it to submit to congressional audit of its interest-rate decisions.

Instead, the new law gives the Fed more power and a better tool box to help prevent financial crises. It will become the primary regulator for large, complex financial firms of all kinds, such as American International Group, the insurer which built a massive derivatives portfolio that regulators didn’t see until it was too late.

So, the Fed created the debt boom, which led to the subsequent credit crunch and the initial stages of Great Depression 2.0. And rather than auditing the central bank, Washington has elected to give it more powers. This should end well.

So much for Mr. Bernanke’s magic printing press:

Now we’re really in trouble:

The ECB failed to auction the €55bn in fixed term deposits it had planned to, and what it did auction (€31.86bn) was at a much-higher rate (0.54 per cent) than what it offered at the start of its Securities Markets Programme (SMP). The market seems to be holding tight to liquidity.

The wall has been hit.

This is a clear warning to the money-printing screamers (of which there are many adherents) and the “we can do this without impacting aggregates” crowd (commonly known as Central Banks with God complexes.) Sadly, as I have repeatedly pointed out, all Ponzi Schemes fail, and they fail at the most inopportune time, after you have spent the proceeds of your previous scamming and thus lack the ability to deal with the failure to sell your latest batch of whatever it is you’re attempting to do.

Oh, and by the way, it gets better. Much better.

See, the ECB has a rollover problem coming, in that they need to roll a significant amount of term liquidity deposits Thursday. If those rolls fail, the markets will crash. Both credit and equity.

As I have repeatedly paraphrased Bob Prechter, the problem with the Whiskey Zulu scenario is that neither Europe nor the USA have a paper money system. The debt money system requires that each new note find a borrower. But when the limits of demand for debt are reached, it’s not possible to continue to issuing more money. Furthermore, most money is created through the fractional reserve banking system, not the central bank, and creating that money also requires a constantly growing demand for credit.

Now, it’s true, the national governments could convert to a paper money system and this is one of the legitimate possibilities, but they cannot possibly do so fast enough to avoid a period of deflationary crash, especially when the politicians who would be responsible for the switch would have to brave the wrath of the financial powers who would be ruined by such a move.

Which is why it’s not going to happen. My best guess is that Plan A was another attempt to solve the problem through more centralization; devaluing the current currencies as they are converted to a regional or global currency. However, given that the global public is already furious with the banking establishment, this probably isn’t viable now. The stimulus plans were supposed to work well enough to give them time to smoothly transition to the next stage of monetary harmonization, but due to their reliance on a bad economic model, that obviously hasn’t happened.

Interesting times indeed.

Apparently the big banks aren’t just too big to fail, they’re too big to be prosecuted for breaking all of those invasive laws that require you to turn over fingerprint, blood, and DNA samples in order to open a checking account or buy a cell phone, just in case you might be a Mexican money launderer:

Oh, so the banks don’t just bilk investors and rip off municipalities, they also help Mexican Gangs run drugs?

This was no isolated incident. Wachovia, it turns out, had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers. Wells Fargo & Co., which bought Wachovia in 2008, has admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering by narcotics traffickers — including the cash used to buy four planes that shipped a total of 22 tons of cocaine. The admission came in an agreement that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia struck with federal prosecutors in March, and it sheds light on the largely undocumented role of U.S. banks in contributing to the violent drug trade that has convulsed Mexico for the past four years.

That’s nice. Guns and ammunition cost money – lots of it. Getting that money requires some means of transporting it and “laundering” it. For that, we turn to the largest financial institutions in the world, who, it turns out, have never been prosecuted for these felonious acts.

This is the salient quote: “No big U.S. bank — Wells Fargo included — has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Justice Department settles criminal charges by using deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again.”

It is completely obvious that there is no longer any rule of law in the USA. There increasingly isn’t even any pretense at it. It is no longer a republic, but a financial aristocracy divided into a thousand corporate fiefdoms. Given human nature, how long can it be before the executives begin granting themselves titles like the Archduke of Wells Fargo and the Grand Count of Google?