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Archive for the ‘Derivatives’ Category

European finance ministers and politicians have come to the conclusion that a deal, even one involving a credit event, is better than no deal at all. Thus it is increasingly likely the Greek Debt Wranglewill trigger credit default swaps.

Opposition to payouts on Greek credit-default swaps from European Union policy makers is softening as disputes over a voluntary debt exchange threaten to push the nation into default.

Any agreement between the Greek government and the Washington-based Institute of International Finance on debt writedowns will only bind 50 percent of investors in the 206 billion euros ($270 billion) of notes being negotiated, Barclays Capital estimates. Hedge funds may resist a deal, seeking to get paid in full or compensated from insurance contracts

“Politicians seem less concerned than before about CDS triggers,” said Michael Hampden-Turner, a credit strategist at Citigroup Inc. in London. “Having a payout on Greek CDS is probably better than the alternative: a loss in market faith of the product’s ability to provide a hedge against sovereign risk.”

Officials, including former European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet, have insisted that a swaps trigger was unacceptable because traders would be encouraged to bet against indebted nations and worsen the crisis.

Greece said it may impose losses on investors who fail to support the debt restructuring by adding a so-called collective action clause, or CAC, into its bond documentation. That would force holdouts to accept the same terms as the majority.

Use of CACs would trigger a restructuring credit event and a payout of default swaps, according to rules from the International Swaps & Derivatives Association.

“A CAC is looking increasingly like the best option,” Citigroup’s Hampden-Turner said. “That route seems to tick a lot of boxes: they don’t have a bond default, the official sector gets treated differently than the private sector, and everybody has to participate in the exchange without anybody getting paid in full.”

ECB Opposition

While the ECB oppose any involuntary restructuring of Greek debt, policy makers such as Dutch Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager say they aren’t against a credit event.
The softer stance signals Greece is unlikely to get sufficient participation in a voluntary bond swap to make its debt burden sustainable.

The ECB is now alone in its opposition to a credit event. Then again, the ECB alone was against haircuts, soft defaults etc.

As late as May 7, 2011 former ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet insisted there would be “no Greek debt restructuring”. I wrote about it in Trichet Reiterates Restructuring “Not on the Agenda”, Market Reiterates “Trichet is a Pompous Fool”.

Since then there have been two restructurings, and we are now headed for an involuntary restructuring that will trigger credit default swaps.

I suspect an effort will be made to placate the ECB somewhat so that the ECB does not take a loss on the 40 billion euros of Greek debt it stupidly bought, but otherwise, the ECB is about to have this crammed down their throats.

Portugal waits on deck.
Mike  “Mish”  Shedlock – Global Economic Analysis

The Federal Reserve has been going back and forth with reporting from Bloomberg regarding the massive bailouts and loans made to the financial sector during the crisis.  What is rather astonishing is the ability to discuss trillions of dollars of loans made to largely irresponsible financial institutions with absolutely no oversight.  Like an angry couple on Maury Povich, only an objective outsider can see how dysfunctional the relationship has become.   All of this happened in the shadows.  What is more astonishing is a large amount of questionable assets that were shifted from bank balance sheets are still sitting comfortably in the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve.  This is not disputed.  Profits at banks are on the rise but it is hard to lose money when you have unlimited access to taxpayer bailouts and the ability to dilute the currency of the nation.  U.S. banks hold $9.7 trillion in deposits with a FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) that currently has $7.8 billion.  Do the math on that one.

A glance of U.S. banking data

Here is a nice snapshot of U.S. banking data:

Source:  Bank Tracker

What is the most amazing fact is that over $9.7 trillion in deposits is backed by a measly $7.8 billion.  This is like trying to stop a hurricane with a paper napkin.  Most Americans are earning virtually nothing on their deposits at banks but what other options are available?  Should they enter the highly volatile and opaque stock market?  When a typical savings account is paying close to 0 percent it is hard to digest but the volatility of the stock markets for this entire year have rendered a nearly neutral result.  Even money market accounts have fallen strongly since the recession hit:

“The typical money market account is down over 80 percent since 2006.  It isn’t like inflation has suddenly disappeared or that our debt problems have gone away like dust in the wind.  To the contrary the economy has gotten much more mired in a stagnating funk.”

Banks are back at making profits but it is hard to lose when you have unlimited taxpayer bailouts:

Source:  FDIC

While the Federal Reserve was trying to cast doubt on the results published by Bloomberg, they failed to address the massive amount of “assets” that remain on their balance sheet.

Read the rest at My Budget 360

Do you want to know the real reason banks aren’t lending and the PIIGS [Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain] have control of the barnyard in Europe?

It’s because risk in the $600 trillion derivatives market isn’t evening out. To the contrary, it’s growing increasingly concentrated among a select few banks, especially here in the United States.

In 2009, five banks held 80% of derivatives in America. Now, just four banks hold a staggering 95.9% of U.S. derivatives, according to a recent report from the Office of the Currency Comptroller.

The four banks in question: JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C), Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS).

Derivatives played a crucial role in bringing down the global economy, so you would think that the world’s top policymakers would have reined these things in by now – but they haven’t.

Instead of attacking the problem, regulators have let it spiral out of control, and the result is a $600 trillion time bomb called the derivatives market.

Think I’m exaggerating?

The notional value of the world’s derivatives actually is estimated at more than $600 trillion. Notional value, of course, is the total value of a leveraged position’s assets. This distinction is necessary because when you’re talking about leveraged assets like options and derivatives, a little bit of money can control a disproportionately large position that may be as much as 5, 10, 30, or, in extreme cases, 100 times greater than investments that could be funded only in cash instruments.

The world’s gross domestic product (GDP) is only about $65 trillion, or roughly 10.83% of the worldwide value of the global derivatives market, according to The Economist. So there is literally not enough money on the planet to backstop the banks trading these things if they run into trouble.

Keith Fitz-Gerald is Chief Investment Strategist, Money Morning

Global Research

It looks like the EU is getting a bailout from the IMF that could be nearly $800 billion.  Gold is going straight up, and I am sure global stock markets will also surge on the bailout news.  This will not really fix what is wrong.  It will also not put an end to the chronic crisis mode Europe and the U.S. have been in for the past 3 years.  I mean, if all the global bailouts didn’t fix the problem, including $16 trillion pumped out by the Fed after the 2008 meltdown, what’s another $800 billion going to do?  The reason why things are not going to get better is that corruption is rampant and the financial system is totally broken.  Bailouts are treating the symptom, but the disease is unbridled fraud.  Many people don’t realize this because the corporate controlled mainstream media will not report on crimes of the financial elite.

Last week, I wrote a piece called “False Narrative.”  I was stunned by a comment from a guy named Jim that said, “It amazes me that you maintain the narrative of the “guilt” of private business that asked for consideration from Congress and the president and it was granted. Nobody has gone to jail because no laws were broken.”  This is the most false of the false narratives.  The 2008 meltdown is 70 times bigger than the S&L crisis of the 1980’s and early 1990’s.  Back then, more than 1,000 financial elites were convicted of felonies.  According to Professor William Black, the reason why we have “recurrent intensifying crises . . . is these epidemics of fraud from the C-Street—from the CEOs and CFOs.”  Professor Black holds duel PhD’s in economics and law, but he is not just some run-of-the-mill academic.  Professor Black is also a former bank regulator who spearheaded the cleanup of the S&L crisis.  In a speech Black gave last week, he said, “In the Savings and Loans crisis, the inevitable National Commission said that fraud was invariably present at the typical large failure. In the Enron era, always frauds from the very top of the organization, and in this crisis the frauds came from the very top of the organization again. But what’s different in this crisis? In this crisis, the same agency that I worked with that made over 10,000 criminal referrals in a tinier crisis made zero criminal referrals. They got rid of the entire function. And so there are zero convictions of anybody in the elite ranks of Wall Street. And if they can defraud us with impunity they will cause crisis after crisis and they will produce maximum inequality. . . . And that’s why we have a crisis and it came from the very top of these organizations, and it went through—as the FHFA said in its complaint—the largest banks in the world were endemically fraudulent. It is not a few rotten apples. It is an orchard of one percenters who are rotten to the core.” (Click here to read his complete speech.)

Don’t believe the professor, then how about the “maestro” Alan Greenspan.  The former Fed Chief admitted the system was fraudulent and needed to be cleaned up last November.  He said, “If you cannot trust your counter-parties it won’t work and . . . it didn’t.”  He was sitting on set with Ben Bernanke when he said it.  Look at the video below, and watch Mr. Bernanke’s face when Greenspan dishes the dirt.

Look at the latest blowup with MF Global.  There is more than $1 billion of segregated customer funds missing and not a single criminal charge.  Does anyone think Jon Corzine is going to get prosecuted?  I’ll be shocked if he is because he has friends in high places including the White House.

Just because nobody has gone to jail doesn’t mean everything is going to be ok and we all get a free pass.  According to Karl Denninger at Market-ticker.org, the markets will be the ultimate regulator.  Denninger wrote last week, “Without enforcement of the law — swift and certain — there is no deterrent against this behavior.  There has been no enforcement and there is no indication that this will change.  It will take just one — or maybe two — more events like MF Global and Greek CDS “determinations” before the entire market — all of it — goes “no bid” as participants simply stuff their hands in their pockets and say “screw this.”  It’s coming folks, and I guarantee you this: Whatever your “nightmare” scenario is for such an event, it’s not bearish enough.”  (Click here for the complete Denninger post.  It’s really good!)

You cannot have a thriving economy that is shrouded in fraud and mistrust.  Crimes continue to go unpunished, and mistrust is growing.  No bailout, no matter how big, will ever fix that.

Greg Hunter – USA Watchdog

….and it’s depositors.  There’s not enough attention being paid to the shift of Bank of America’s CDS (credit default swap) portfolio from its uninsured investments to its FDIC insured commercial banking account.  In plain language this means if Bank of America goes bankrupt (and this is practically assured at this point), YOU the depositors are second in line behind approximately $50 TRILLION in CDS.  It means that those investors of CDS will be paid by the FDIC before YOU are.  In order to make it even possible for the FDIC to pay those investors, they will have to use taxpayer funds.   So far, this is just Bank of America, but since this required absolutely no public disclosure or discussion, nor did your Member of Congress get to vote on this, how long will it be before the rest of the banks leveraged up to their eyeballs do the exact same thing?  The best way to describe the overall concept is:  Taxation Without Representation.

Are we having fun yet?

Just listen to Reggie Middleton from BoomBustBlog explain our situation:

Yes, we’ve all been bamboozled, that’s for sure.  We’re also being raped and robbed.

Most people have no idea that Wall Street has become a gigantic financial casino.  The big Wall Street banks are making tens of billions of dollars a year in the derivatives market, and nobody in the financial community wants the party to end.  The word “derivatives” sounds complicated and technical, but understanding them is really not that hard.  A derivative is essentially a fancy way of saying that a bet has been made.  Originally, these bets were designed to hedge risk, but today the derivatives market has mushroomed into a mountain of speculation unlike anything the world has ever seen before.  Estimates of the notional value of the worldwide derivatives market go from $600 trillion all the way up to $1.5 quadrillion.  Keep in mind that the GDP of the entire world is only somewhere in the neighborhood of $65 trillion.  The danger to the global financial system posed by derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet once called them “financial weapons of mass destruction”.  For now, the financial powers that be are trying to keep the casino rolling, but it is inevitable that at some point this entire mess is going to come crashing down.  When it does, we are going to be facing a derivatives crisis that really could destroy the entire global financial system.

Most people don’t talk much about derivatives because they simply do not understand them.

Perhaps a couple of definitions would be helpful.

The following is how a recent Bloomberg article defined derivatives….

Derivatives are financial instruments used to hedge risks or for speculation. They’re derived from stocks, bonds, loans, currencies and commodities, or linked to specific events such as changes in the weather or interest rates.

The key word there is “speculation”.  Today the folks down on Wall Street are speculating on just about anything that you can imagine.

The following is how Investopedia defines derivatives….

A security whose price is dependent upon or derived from one or more underlying assets. The derivative itself is merely a contract between two or more parties. Its value is determined by fluctuations in the underlying asset. The most common underlying assets include stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, interest rates and market indexes. Most derivatives are characterized by high leverage.

A derivative has no underlying value of its own.  A derivative is essentially a side bet.  Usually these side bets are highly leveraged.

At this point, making side bets has totally gotten out of control in the financial world.  Side bets are being made on just about anything you can possibly imagine, and the major Wall Street banks are making a ton of money from it.  This system is almost entirely unregulated and it is totally dominated by the big international banks.

Over the past couple of decades, the derivatives market has multiplied in size.  Everything is going to be fine as long as the system stays in balance.  But once it gets out of balance we could witness a string of financial crashes that no government on earth will be able to fix.

The amount of money that we are talking about is absolutely staggering.  Graham Summers of Phoenix Capital Research estimates that the notional value of the global derivatives market is $1.4 quadrillion, and in an article for Seeking Alpha he tried to put that number into perspective….

If you add up the value of every stock on the planet, the entire market capitalization would be about $36 trillion. If you do the same process for bonds, you’d get a market capitalization of roughly $72 trillion.

The notional value of the derivative market is roughly $1.4 QUADRILLION.

I realize that number sounds like something out of Looney tunes, so I’ll try to put it into perspective.

$1.4 Quadrillion is roughly:

-40 TIMES THE WORLD’S STOCK MARKET.

-10 TIMES the value of EVERY STOCK & EVERY BOND ON THE PLANET.

-23 TIMES WORLD GDP.

It is hard to fathom how much money a quadrillion is.

If you started counting right now at one dollar per second, it would take 32 million years to count to one quadrillion dollars.

Yes, the boys and girls down on Wall Street have gotten completely and totally out of control.

In an excellent article that he did on derivatives, Webster Tarpley described the pivotal role that derivatives now play in the global financial system….

Far from being some arcane or marginal activity, financial derivatives have come to represent the principal business of the financier oligarchy in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other money centers. A concerted effort has been made by politicians and the news media to hide and camouflage the central role played by derivative speculation in the economic disasters of recent years. Journalists and public relations types have done everything possible to avoid even mentioning derivatives, coining phrases like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and – most notably – “troubled assets,” as in Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP, aka the monstrous $800 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators which was enacted in October 2008 with the support of Bush, Henry Paulson, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Obama Democrats.

Most people do not realize this, but derivatives were at the center of the financial crisis of 2008.

They will almost certainly be at the center of the next financial crisis as well.

For many, alarm bells went off the other day when it was revealed that Bank of America has moved a big chunk of derivatives from its failing Merrill Lynch investment banking unit to its depository arm.

So what does that mean?

An article posted on The Daily Bail the other day explained that it means that U.S. taxpayers could end up holding the bag….

This means that the investment bank’s European derivatives exposure is now backstopped by U.S. taxpayers. Bank of America didn’t get regulatory approval to do this, they just did it at the request of frightened counterparties. Now the Fed and the FDIC are fighting as to whether this was sound. The Fed wants to “give relief” to the bank holding company, which is under heavy pressure.

This is a direct transfer of risk to the taxpayer done by the bank without approval by regulators and without public input.

So did you hear about this on the news?

Probably not.

Today, the notional value of all the derivatives held by Bank of America comes to approximately $75 trillion.

JPMorgan Chase is holding derivatives with a notional value of about $79 trillion.

It is hard to even conceive of such figures.

Right now, the banks with the most exposure to derivatives are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and HSBC Bank USA.

Morgan Stanley also has tremendous exposure to derivatives.

You may have noticed that these are some of the “too big to fail” banks.

The biggest U.S. banks continue to grow and they continue to get even more power.

Back in 2002, the top 10 U.S. banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets.  Today, the top 10 U.S. banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets.

These banks have gotten so big and so powerful that if they collapsed our entire financial system would implode.

You would have thought that we would have learned our lesson back in 2008 and would have done something about this, but instead we have allowed the “too big to bail” banks to become bigger than ever.

And they pretty much do whatever they want.

A while back, the New York Times published an article entitled “A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Trading in Derivatives“.  That article exposed the steel-fisted control that the “too big to fail” banks exert over the trading of derivatives.  Just consider the following excerpt from the article….

On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan.

The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential.

So what institutions are represented at these meetings?

Well, according to the New York Times, the following banks are involved: JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup.

Why do those same five names seem to keep popping up time after time?

Sadly, these five banks keep pouring money into the campaigns of politicians that supported the bailouts in 2008 and that they know will bail them out again when the next financial crisis strikes.

Those that defend the wild derivatives trading that is going on today claim that Wall Street has accounted for all of the risks and they assume that the issuing banks will always be able to cover all of the derivative contracts that they write.

But that is a faulty assumption.  Just look at AIG back in 2008.  When the housing market collapsed AIG was on the wrong end of a massive number of derivative contracts and it would have gone “bust” without gigantic bailouts from the federal government.  If the bailouts of AIG had not happened, Goldman Sachs and a whole lot of other people would have been left standing there with a whole bunch of worthless paper.

It is inevitable that the same thing is going to happen again.  Except next time it may be on a much grander scale.

When “the house” goes “bust”, everybody loses.  The governments of the world could step in and try to bail everyone out, but the reality is that when the derivatives market comes totally crashing down there won’t be any government on earth with enough money to put it back together again.

A horrible derivatives crisis is coming.

It is only a matter of time.

Stay alert for any mention of the word “derivatives” or the term “derivatives crisis” in the news.  When the derivatives crisis arrives, things will start falling apart very rapidly.

The Economic Collapse