FedUpUSA

Archive for February, 2010

The Ultimate Ponzi Scheme – FDIC is Backing $5.3 Trillion through the Deposit Insurance Fund that now has a Balance of -$20.8 Billion. FDIC has Cash and Marketable Securities of $66 Billion. Is that Really Enough to Back Every Account for $250,000?

Posted by mybudget360

The FDIC is running the biggest confidence game in the country.  The FDIC is now protecting through the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) some $5.3 trillion in deposits in banks across the country.  All of this is secured by an insurance fund that is now in the negative by $20.8 billion.  In the middle of this financial crisis we allowed the government to suddenly up the deposit insurance coverage from $100,000 to $250,000 which on face value seems fantastic.  I mean every average American wants their money to be covered so upping it to $250,000 seems fantastic even though most middle class Americans have nothing close to that and are merely trying to pay their bills from one month to another.  But what if people suddenly pulled their money out of banks similar to what occurred with IndyMac Bank in California?  Think this can’t happen again?  One of the too big to fail banks seems to think this might be coming down the pipeline.  Some interesting information on Citigroup:

“(Prison Planet) A new advisory being sent by America’s third largest bank to its account holders has stoked fears that major financial institutions could be preparing for old fashioned bank runs if the economy takes a turn for the worse.

Originally reported by John Carney over at the Business Insider website, Citigroup is sending the following information to customers along with their bank statements.

“Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change.”

In other words, let us assume many clients decide to withdraw all their funds in a short period of time because people suddenly realize that $250,000 is actually being supported by pure faith.  In addition, average Americans realize that -$20.8 billion will certainly not cover $5.3 trillion in actual deposits that can be redeemed at any given time!  That is the psychology of our current banking system.  As long as people believe the wizard behind the curtain can back up the deposits then all is fine.  This worked as long as assets actually had values that banks claimed were true.  We know that game is over.  In fact, that is why the entire banking system has received roughly $13 trillion in bailouts and backstops.  It really is this fragile.  This is how the deposit insurance fund looks like:

Source:  FDIC

So you would think that people would at least try to diversify their investments since even a minor bank run would cause major damage.  But instead, people have increased their deposits at these banks at a rapid pace:

And I can’t blame them.  What choice is there?  Gamble in the Wall Street rigged casino or put it in the bank.  If we go back to December of 2007 when the crisis started, DIF-Insured deposits have shot up by $1.1 trillion and the actual fund has gone negative because of all the additional bank failures.  This psychology really does remind me of the mania surrounding the housing bubble boom. What if, hypothetically, people decide that one of the too big to fail is suddenly not that big at all, and Americans start withdrawing funds to some other institution.  Worse yet, they take their funds out and put them in a non-DIF insured institution.  Then what?  Or maybe people want the actual cash.  This is what is so troubling.  Just go to any local store and see how much actual cash is being exchanged.  It is all electronic debits and credits.  Insured to $250,000?  On what?  Clearly the U.S. Treasury would step in at this point and flat out start printing money but what use would that be since the dollars you are being paid with would quickly devalue (even more).

I’ve seen a few people dismiss the current negative DIF fund by saying “the FDIC is flush with cash.”  Really?  Let us examine that part of the equation.  From the latest FDIC quarterly bank report:

“In June 2008, before the number of bank and thrift failures began to rise significantly, total assets held by the DIF were approximately $56 billion and consisted almost entirely of cash and marketable securities (i.e. liquid assets). As the crisis has unfolded, liquid assets of the DIF have been to protect depositors of failed institutions and were exchanged for less liquid claims against assets of failed institutions. As of September 30, 2009, although total assets had increased to almost $63 billion, cash and marketable securities had fallen to approximately $23 billion.”

Did you get that?  The FDIC “cash” went from roughly $56 billion in June of 2008 to $23 billion in September of 2009.  And supposedly, they now have “assets” of $63 billion but how much of this is crap mortgages from failed banks like WaMu and IndyMac?  In reality, the FDIC at this point only had $23 billion to back up $5.3 trillion.  But in December of 2009 the FDIC took the radical step to front-load prepaid assessments:

“To provide the FDIC with the funds needed to carry on with the task of resolving failed institutions in 2010 and beyond, but without accelerating the impact of assessments on the industry’s earnings and capital, the FDIC approved a measure to require insured institutions to prepay 13 quarters worth of deposit insurance premiums. These prepayments—about $46 billion—were collected on December 30, 2009. Cash and marketable securities stood at $66 billion on December 31, 2009.”

Now don’t you feel better?  The FDIC took in 13 quarters of prepaid deposit insurance premiums and we now have a combined total of cash and marketable securities of $66 billion.  In other words, one too big to fail going down and good luck with that $250,000 backup really being worth what you would actually think.  This is what surprises me here.  We all know things are actually getting worse with the banking system yet we keep piling on the risk.  In fact, the FDIC has even upped the number of troubled banks on their list:

You know if the FDIC is saying 702 we know it is much higher.  I still stand by my prediction that this crisis will bring down at least 1,000 banks when all is said and done.  I love how the FDIC lists “assisted institutions” as 8 with total assets of nearly $2 trillion.  I wonder who those could be?

The bottom line is, we are playing a very big game of confidence here.  Gallup just ran a poll showing that 19.9 percent of Americans are underemployed.  That number is getting really close to the 25 percent rate of the Great Depression but with part-time employment.  That does a number on the psyche of average Americans.

Discovering Recovery In Wall Street and Washington

By Eric Fry

02/25/10 Laguna Beach, California – The recession is over. Everyone says so. Well, not everyone actually…just economists…especially economists from Wall Street and Washington.

In a research note entitled, “Return to Normalcy,” John Silvia, Chief Economist at Wachovia, gushes, “With the war against the Great Recession over, our newly reappointed head of the Federal Reserve now seeks to take us back to normalcy in the financial markets. Let’s trust that he too ushers in a decade of prosperity.

“After World War I,” Silvia explains, “American voters longed for a return to normalcy and elected Warren Harding, whose administration began a decade of economic growth. For Ben Bernanke, the return to normalcy we expect will lead to at least two years of economic expansion but with some volatility along the way.”

Okay, so two years is not quite the same thing as ten years. But at this point, most Americans would settle for two months of “normalcy.”

“Two important indicators – industrial production and leading indicators index – suggest continued economic growth,” says Silvia, explaining his optimism, “Industrial production registered its seventh straight increase and these data suggest the economic recovery began in the second quarter of 2009.”

Upbeat macro-economic projections from the likes of John Silvia illustrate that economics is less a “dismal science” than a “faux science” – guided by prejudice and misguided by personal experience.

Of course the economists on Wall Street believe the recession has ended. Why wouldn’t they? Former Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, shipped enough taxpayer money to Lower Manhattan in 2008 to employ every Wall Street economist for life…along with every Wall Street CEO, proprietary trader, managing director, vice-president, secretary, security guard, lunch-runner, limo driver and yoga instructor.

Similarly, the economists in Washington have absolutely no reason to doubt that the recession has ended…because the recession never arrived in Washington in the first place! Government employment in the Greater Washington DC region has jumped more than 10% during the last eight years, while retail employment has gone nowhere. And this divergence has accelerated as the recession has deepened!

Unfortunately, the employment trends depicted in the nearby chart are not the trends that typically produce national prosperity. If government employment were to continue rising while private sector employment fell, the economy would become less productive…at least that would be our guess. (Picture the post office operating every McDonald’s in the land).

Thus, the recession may be ending for Wall Street economists and government workers, but not for anyone else. Adult male workers, to name just one conspicuously under-employed group of Americans, are hurting big-time…

“Male employment (aged 25 to 54 years old) plunged 114,000 in January and is back to levels last seen in June 1996,” observes David A. Rosenberg, an economist who toils neither for Wall Street nor Washington. “Almost 10% of what was once considered the ‘breadwinner’ part of the workforce has been extinguished during this recession. How could anyone realistically be excited about recovery prospects knowing this?”

Furthermore, Rosenberg notes, “the average duration of unemployment rose to a record 30.2 weeks from 29.1 weeks in December; and for the first time ever, we have more than 6.3 million Americans (up from 6.1 million in December) who have been looking for a job with no luck for at least six months. That is an unprecedented 41.2% share of the pool of unemployment… The level of unemployment today, at 129.5 million, is the exact same level it was in 1999.”

Not surprisingly, therefore, your average American laborer is noticeably less optimistic than your average Wall Street economist. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index plummeted from 56.5 in January to 46 this month. Even more telling, the “present conditions” component of the index dropped more than 20% from January, to its lowest reading since 1983. At the same time, the “business is good” component of the index dropped to its lowest reading in the 43-year history of the Consumer Confidence Index.

If these are the signs of recovery, it is a very strange recovery indeed.

Regards,

Eric Fry

for The Daily Reckoning

Not Again…. (CDS)

Posted by Karl Denninger

Banks Bet Greece Defaults on Debt They Helped Hide

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and ERIC DASH

Bets by some of the same banks that helped Greece shroud its mounting debts may actually now be pushing the nation closer to the brink of financial ruin.

Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers.

These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.

“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house — you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.

As Greece’s financial condition has worsened, undermining the euro, the role of Goldman Sachs and other major banks in masking the true extent of the country’s problems has drawn criticism from European leaders. But even before that issue became apparent, a little-known company backed by Goldman, JP Morgan Chase and about a dozen other banks had created an index that enabled market players to bet on whether Greece and other European nations would go bust.

Last September, the company, the Markit Group of London, introduced the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which is based on such swaps and let traders gamble on Greece shortly before the crisis. Such derivatives have assumed an outsize role in Europe’s debt crisis, as traders focus on their daily gyrations.

A result, some traders say, is a vicious circle. As banks and others rush into these swaps, the cost of insuring Greece’s debt rises. Alarmed by that bearish signal, bond investors then shun Greek bonds, making it harder for the country to borrow. That, in turn, adds to the anxiety — and the whole thing starts over again.

On trading desks, there is fierce debate over what exactly is behind Greece’s recent troubles. Some traders say swaps have made the problem worse, while others say Greece’s deteriorating finances are to blame.

“This is a country that is issuing paper into a weakening market,” said Ashish Shah, co-head of credit strategy at Barclays Capital, referring to Greece’s need for continual borrowing.

But while some European leaders have blamed financial speculators in general for worsening the crisis, the French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, last week singled out credit-default swaps. Ms. Lagarde said a few players dominated this arena, which she said needed tighter regulation.

Trading in Markit’s sovereign credit derivative index soared this year, helping to drive up the cost of insuring Greek debt, and, in turn, what Athens must pay to borrow money. The cost of insuring $10 million of Greek bonds, for instance, rose to more than $400,000 in February, up from $282,000 in early January.

On several days in late January and early February, as demand for swaps protection soared, investors in Greek bonds fled the market, raising doubts about whether Greece could find buyers for coming bond offerings.

“It’s the blind leading the blind,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R&R Consulting in New York. “The iTraxx SovX did not create the situation, but it has exacerbated it.”

The Markit index is made up of the 15 most heavily traded credit-default swaps in Europe and covers other troubled economies like Portugal and Spain. And as worries about those countries’ debts moved markets around the world in February, trading in the index exploded.

In February, demand for such index contracts hit $109.3 billion, up from $52.9 billion in January. Markit collects a flat fee by licensing brokers to trade the index.

European banks including the Swiss giants Credit Suisse and UBS, France’s Société Générale and BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank of Germany have been among the heaviest buyers of swaps insurance, according to traders and bankers who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

That is because those countries are the most exposed. French banks hold $75.4 billion worth of Greek debt, followed by Swiss institutions, at $64 billion, according to the Bank for International Settlements. German banks’ exposure stands at $43.2 billion.

Trading in credit-default swaps linked only to Greek debt has also surged, but is still smaller than the country’s actual debt load of $300 billion. The overall amount of insurance on Greek debt hit $85 billion in February, up from $38 billion a year ago, according to the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, which tracks swaps trading.

Markit says its index is a tool for traders, rather than a market driver.

In a statement, Markit said its index was started to satisfy market demand, and had improved the ability of traders to hedge their risks. The index and similar products, it added, actually make it easier for buyers and sellers to gauge prices for instruments that are traded among players over the counter, rather than on exchanges.

“These indices have helped bring transparency to the sovereign C.D.S. market,” Markit said. “Prior to their creation, there was no established benchmark index enabling investors to track the performance of segments of the sovereign C.D.S. market.”

Some money managers say trading in Greek swaps alone, not the broader index, is the problem.

“It’s like the tail wagging the dog,” said Markus Krygier, senior portfolio manager at Amundi Asset Management in London, which has $40 billion in global fixed-income assets. “There is a knock-on effect, as underlying positions begin to seem riskier, triggering risk models and forcing portfolio managers to sell Greek bonds.”

If that sounds familiar, it should. Critics of these instruments contend swaps contributed to the fall of Lehman Brothers. But until recently, there was little demand for insurance on government debt. The possibility that a developed country could default on its obligations seemed remote.

As a result, many foreign banks that held Greek bonds or entered into other financial transactions with the government did not hedge against the risk of a default. Now, they are scrambling for insurance.

“Greece is not a small country,” said Mr. Raynes, at R&R in New York. “Credit-default swaps give the illusion of safety but actually increase systemic risk.”

15 Reasons Why Barack Obama’s Declaration That “A Second Depression Is No Longer A Possibility” Is Dead Wrong

Is the United States economy headed for another Great Depression?  Well, according to Barack Obama, that is no longer possible.  According to Obama, the United States has avoided an economic collapse and is headed for another wonderful era of growth and prosperity.  But is Obama right?  Do the economic signs indicate that the U.S. is headed towards recovery or towards even more difficult times?  As you shall see below, there is no way in the world that Barack Obama should have ever said that “a second depression is no longer a possibility”.  In fact, as the U.S. financial system continues to crumble, it is likely that those words will be exploited by his political adversaries again and again.  If you are a politician and you are going to issue a guarantee, you had better be able to deliver the goods.  In this case, Obama is making a promise that defies all of the economic data.

Video of Obama making his declaration that “a second depression is no longer a possibility” is posted below….      

So why is Obama wrong?  Well, if you want a full examination of why the United States is headed for an economic collapse, please read the rest of this blog.  In this article we just wanted to highlight a few of the reasons why the U.S. is headed for a complete financial meltdown….

#1) The U.S. housing market is continuing to come apart like a 20 dollar suit.  The U.S. government just announced that in January sales of new homes plunged to the lowest level on record.  This is not a sign that the U.S. economy is recovering.

#2) In fact, a lot more houses may be on the market soon.  The number of U.S. mortgages more than 90 days overdue has climbed to 5.1 percent.  An increasing number of Americans find themselves simply unable to keep up with their mortgages.  This is another indication that things are getting worse instead of better.

#3) Over 24% of all homes with mortgages in the United States were underwater as of the end of 2009.  So in other words, nearly one out of every four U.S. homeowners with a mortgage owe more on their homes than the homes are worth.  That is a giant mess, and it is going to be very painful to untangle it.

#4) If all of that wasn’t bad enough, a massive “second wave” of adjustable rate mortgages is scheduled to reset beginning in 2010.  The “first wave” of mortgage resets from 2006 – 2008 absolutely crippled the U.S. housing market, and this second wave threatens to make things far worse.

#5) Confidence among U.S. consumers fell dramatically in February to the lowest level in 10 months.  Consumers that are not confident in the economy tend to hold on to their money.  If consumers don’t spend their money then the economy is not going to grow.

#6) Many analysts are predicting that the next “shoe to fall” in the ongoing financial crisis will be commercial real estate.  U.S. commercial property values are down approximately 40 percent since 2007 and currently 18 percent of all office space in the United States is sitting vacant. 

#7) In fact, the commercial real estate sector is just now entering the danger zone.  It is projected that the largest commercial real estate loan losses will be experienced in 2011 and the years following.  Some analysts are estimating that losses from commercial real estate at U.S. banks alone could range as high as 200 to 300 billion dollars.  To get an idea of how rapidly commercial real estate loans are turning sour, just check out the chart below….

#8) All of these bad loans are causing banks to dramatically slow down real estate lending.  During the middle of the decade, the number of commercial real estate loans exploded, but now the bubble has burst, and as the chart below reveals, commercial real estate lending has dropped through the floor….

#9) All of these real estate problems are decimating America’s small and mid-size banks.  The FDIC has announced that the number of banks on its “problem” list climbed to 702 at the end of 2009.  This is compared to only 552 banks that were on the problem list at the end of September and only 252 banks that were on the problem list at the end of 2008.  As you can see from these figures, the banking crisis in the U.S. is escalating rapidly.

#10) The U.S. national debt is now over 12 trillion dollars and it is rising at a rate of about 3.8 billion dollars per day.  In fact, some analysts are projecting that the United States will borrow more money in 2010 than the rest of the governments of the world combined.

#11) The financial mess in the U.S. is scaring off other nations from buying U.S. government debt.  In fact, the Federal Reserve now has to “buy” most U.S. government debt because others are extremely hesitant to purchase the massive amount of bad paper the U.S. is trying to sell.  In addition, other countries are now using the massive amounts of U.S. government debt that they already hold as leverage.  A major U.K. newspaper is warning that evidence is mounting that recent Chinese sales of U.S. Treasury bonds are intended as a warning to the United States government rather than simply being part of a routine portfolio shift.

#12) But the U.S. is not the only economy that is suffering during this economic downturn.  The entire world economy has been impacted.  The World Trade Organization has announced that world trade fell by 12% last year as the world economic crisis caused the biggest drop in world trade since 1945.

#13) The United States should not expect the rest of the world to pick up the economic slack either.  The crisis in Greece has made headlines all over the globe recently, and Harvard University Professor Kenneth Rogoff is warning that we could soon see a huge wave of sovereign defaults.

#14) The reality is that things are so bad in some parts of Europe that it could take years and years to recover.  In fact, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund is warning that financial ”belt-tightening” in Europe will be “extremely painful” and could take up to 20 years.  The truth is that if Europe is suffering economically, it will be very difficult for the U.S. to recover at the same time.

#15) In addition, some of the most prominent investors in the world know what is coming and are issuing their own warnings.  For example, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s long-time business partner, has warned in a new article for Slate.com that “it’s basically over” for the U.S. economy.  Marc Faber is warning that things are going to get so bad that it is time for investors to buy farmland and gold.

But apparently Barack Obama knows better. 

Apparently Barack Obama can guarantee that it is impossible for the United States to go into another depression.

Do you believe him?

Tickerguy On Max Kaiser

Posted by Karl Denninger

About 14 minutes in…