Deleveraging typically means selling assets to raise cash to meet margin calls or pay debts coming due. But there may be another twist to deleveraging that has fueled the manic market rally since late December.  I am indebted to Peter C. of M3 Financial Sense for explaining this dynamic.

To understand this non-intuitive dynamic, let’s start with a simple example of how options work. If this is new to you, please stay with me, your head will not explode…. at least for awhile.

An option is a financial instrument which grants you the right to buy X number of shares of a company at Y price (the strike price). One option controls 100 shares. An option is either a put (a bet the price will decline in the future) or a call (a bet the price will rise in the future).

An option is “in the money” when the stock price is above the call strike price or below the put  strike price. For example, if you own one call option on Netflix (NFLX) at a strike price of $100, then your option is worth $2,900 ($29 per share) as of today because Netflix is trading for $129 per share. (There is also a time value in options, but let’s leave that aside in this example.)

So if you bought 10,000 options on Netflix (NFLX), whomever sold you the options is obligated to deliver 1,000,000 shares of Netflix to you (at the strike price of the option) upon expiration of the option.

If your option is “in the money” as in the above example, the specialist who sold  you the options will hedge his position so he can meet the obligation.  If your options  are just barely in the money, he might buy 250,000 shares of Netflix to cover his future obligation.

As your option becomes ever more valuable, i.e. becomes deeper in the money, the specialist has to increase his hedge up to the full 1,000,000 shares that he is obligated to deliver to you upon expiration.

That purchase of 750,000 shares to cover his bet will drive the price of Netflix up.

Here is an important point about options and derivatives.In theory, the number of  options should equal the number of outstanding shares. If there are 1,000,000 shares of a stock outstanding, then there shouldn’t be more than 10,000  options contracts written and sold.

In the parlance of options, these puts and calls are “covered,” meaning there are enough shares available to “cover” the options, i.e. when the option expires, there are enough shares to meet the delivery obligations of actual shares.

If a specialist sells options without holding the requisite number of actual shares to cover the options, then he will have to buy those shares as the delivery date looms. If the number of option contracts exceeds the number of available shares, then the rush to acquire those shares for delivery will spark a massive rally.

This is somewhat akin to the infamous “short-covering rallies” triggered when those who sold shares short have to buy shares to close their short positions.

Options and futures contracts are all marked to market at the close of every trading day. The price is thus transparent for all to see.

Derivatives are not marked to market. That sort of requirement is evil, evil, evil and anti-capitalist–or so we are told by the financial cartels who profit from selling derivatives.

Derivatives can be sold in whatever quantity can be fobbed off to credulous buyers. This is how the world ends up with 700 gazillion dollars in notional derivatives.

Consider the  debt of a sovereign state–for example, Greece. Just to keep things simple, let’s say there are $100 billion of outstanding Greek bonds. Back in the good old days around 2009, the risk of Geece defaulting on that debt was considered low. Nonetheless, prudent owners of the debt bought insurance against default. The insurance is a derivative called a credit default swap (CDS).

The contract works somewhat like an option, in the sense that if a default occurs, the seller of the CDS must cover their contract by delivering the value promised in the CDS to  its owner. If no default ever occurs, the financial institution that originated and sold the CDS gets to keep the hefty premium.

Nice.  Since there are no limits on how many CDs I can write on Greek debt, why not sell more CDS?  In fact, why not sell more CDS than there are Greek bonds?

As in our options example, in the normal course of things the number of CDS equals the outstanding bonds.  In other words, the owners of the $100 billion in bonds would buy $100 billion in notional CDS insurance against default.

If Greece defaulted and the value of the bonds fell in half to $50 billion, the sellers of the CDS would owe the owners of the CDS $50 billion. (This is simplified, but you get the picture.) That was, after all, the bet: in exchange for this hefty premium, if Greece defaults then we will make good your horrendous losses.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the derivatives market: wise guys realized they weren’t limited to selling CDS to the owners of Greek bonds–anyone could buy a CDS on Greek debt.  So why not sell $1 trillion in CDS against Greek bonds? That’s ten times the premium.

Some issuers hedged their bet by buying CDS issued by other institutions. These other institutions are the “counterparty”, that is, the party who pays off the CDS I bought from them so I can pay off the owner of my CDS.  Thus the derivatives market for Greek debt is  a daisy-chain of counterparties, all planning to use the proceeds from the CDS they own to pay off the CDS they sold.

It was a license to print money–until Greece defaults. Yikes, now what?  Just as in the classic film The Producers, where 100% of the proceeds of the Broadway play were promised to ten different investors, the CDS schemers reckoned the odds of a Greek default were effectively zero–”the E.U. will never let a member state default.”

Ahem. Until they do. In The Producers, the schemers devised a play so odious, so bad and so repellent that they felt extremely confident it would close after one night for a tremendous loss–and they would get to keep the 10X oversubscribed investors’ money.

This was the same bet made by sellers of CDS on Greek debt– and on Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Irish et al. debt as well.

Now that leaves the canny financiers in a pickle, as they owe various parties $1 trillion when $100 billion in Greek debt goes up in smoke.

Now we get to the deleveraging part. As I understand it, some of these CDS are  written against various swaps or stock indices, meaning that the asset to be delivered  upon default is ultimately a claim against stock indices, currencies, etc.

That means that those holding the CDS obligations have to acquire these assets so they can pay off their obligation when Greece defaults.

There is one more wrinkle. Many sellers of CDS protected themselves against any potential loss by buying a CDS originated by someone else. As noted in When Greece Defaults, the Credit Default Swap Dominoes Fall(February 4, 2012), this “can be likened to a pool of $100 bets leveraged off $5 in cash. If every bet is covered perfectly, then it’s somewhat like $95 in bets being paid by passing $5 around–much  like the famous email that depicts all debts in a small town being paid by the same $5.”

But some players have issued more CDS than they bought as insurance, meaning that they will be unable to meet all their obligations. Everyone is depending on a host of counterparties to deliver, and now there is a growing fear that some counterparties will be unable to make good on their obligations.

That’s how the dominoes topple. Prudent institutions aren’t waiting around until the dominoes fall–they’re buying the underlying assets so they can meet their CDS obligations. That’s the only way not to topple into insolvency when the default causes CDS to be recognized as due and payable.

In this light, it’s no wonder stocks have been rising. If even a modest percentage of CDS are tied to stock indices, then those deleveraging their derivatives positions must acquire the underlying assets. They can no longer count on all counterparties paying off as promised, and so they are raising cash and buying the underlying assets needed to make good their obligations.

The whole thing is a farce, just like The Producers. The moment the default is recognized, then all the CDS become due and payable, and it will only take handful of failed counterparties to bring the entire system down.

No wonder the Eurocrats and central bankers are twisting everyone’s arms to accept a 70% loss–the alternative is a Greek default and the collapse of the banking cartel’s profitable scheme. It is beyond absurd–what is a 70% loss but default?  When banana republics default, their bondholders don’t necessarily absorb a 70% loss.  yet now, to “save” the despicably parastic shadow banking system and the “too big to fail” financial institutions, a default cannot be called a default: it is a “voluntary haircut.”

Greece, please do the world a favor and openly default–right now, today. Declare a default and pay nothing. Force the shadow banking system to recognize a default and bring down the entire rotten  heap of worm-eaten corruption.

At that point, there will be no reason to  buy equities.

Charles Hugh Smith – Of Two Minds

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=731G71Sahok

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOuOz2mec3Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igoDhHyDiHY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEw25ByILkY

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

This story from Bloomberg just hit the wires this morning.  Bank of America is shifting derivatives in its Merrill investment banking unit to its depository arm, which has access to the Fed discount window and is protected by the FDIC.

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.  You will also read below that JP Morgan is apparently doing the same thing with $79 trillion of notional derivatives guaranteed by the FDIC and Federal Reserve.

What this means for you is that when Europe finally implodes and banks fail, U.S. taxpayers will hold the bag for trillions in CDS insurance contracts sold by Bank of America and JP Morgan.  Even worse, the total exposure is unknown because Wall Street successfully lobbied during Dodd-Frank passage so that no central exchange would exist keeping track of net derivative exposure.

This is a recipe for Armageddon.  Bernanke is absolutely insane.  No wonder Geithner has been hopping all over Europe begging and cajoling leaders to put together a massive bailout of troubled banks.  His worst nightmare is Eurozone bank defaults leading to the collapse of the large U.S. banks who have been happily selling default insurance on European banks since the crisis began.

—

Bloomberg

Excerpt:

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.

Three years after taxpayers rescued some of the biggest U.S. lenders, regulators are grappling with how to protect FDIC- insured bank accounts from risks generated by investment-banking operations. Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms.

“The concern is that there is always an enormous temptation to dump the losers on the insured institution,” said William Black, professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former bank regulator. “We should have fairly tight restrictions on that.”

Moody’s Downgrade

The Moody’s downgrade spurred some of Merrill’s partners to ask that contracts be moved to the retail unit, which has a higher credit rating, according to people familiar with the transactions. Transferring derivatives also can help the parent company minimize the collateral it must post on contracts and the potential costs to terminate trades after Moody’s decision, said a person familiar with the matter.

Keeping such deals separate from FDIC-insured savings has been a cornerstone of U.S. regulation for decades, including last year’s Dodd-Frank overhaul of Wall Street regulation.

U.S. Bailouts

Bank of America benefited from two injections of U.S. bailout funds during the financial crisis. The first, in 2008, included $15 billion for the bank and $10 billion for Merrill, which the bank had agreed to buy. The second round of $20 billion came in January 2009 after Merrill’s losses in its final quarter as an independent firm surpassed $15 billion, raising doubts about the bank’s stability if the takeover proceeded. The U.S. also offered to guarantee $118 billion of assets held by the combined company, mostly at Merrill.

Bank of America’s holding company — the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit — held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades.

That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.

Moving derivatives contracts between units of a bank holding company is limited under Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act, which is designed to prevent a lender’s affiliates from benefiting from its federal subsidy and to protect the bank from excessive risk originating at the non-bank affiliate, said Saule T. Omarova, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law.

“Congress doesn’t want a bank’s FDIC insurance and access to the Fed discount window to somehow benefit an affiliate, so they created a firewall,” Omarova said. The discount window has been open to banks as the lender of last resort since 1914.

Continue reading at Bloomberg…

 The Daily Bail

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The hopium is being smoked long and hard here….

European officials are outlining a rescue plan that may include deeper investor losses on Greek bonds, higher bank capital levels and increased firepower for bailouts and the International Monetary Fund.

The plan’s elements emerged as finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 began talks in Paris, seeking ways to end Europe’s two-year sovereign debt crisis. Underscoring the need for action, Standard & Poor’s yesterday cut Spain’s credit rating for the third time in three years and new data showed the eight largest U.S. money-market funds almost halved their lending to French banks last month.

I love these sorts of statements.  Recapitalization of banks eh?  You mean that if I walk into a casino and gamble away all my money, someone will “recapitalize” me?  Who would that be?

Well, that would be me.  But wait – I’m broke.  I lost all my money.  So now I’m going to bail myself out?  How’s that going to work again?

This is the paradox of these “bailouts” and “recapitalizations”, as I listen to Geithner run his pie hole this morning on CNBS.  The fact of the matter is that such “recapitalizations” are in fact nothing more than a circle-jerk, as the government is simply pulling forward tax receipts and handling them to banks “on the come” that productivity and incomes will advance, making it possible to cover the bet.

This, of course, has been the game in the US and elsewhere for the three decades.  But let us remember that it is precisely the fact that we ran this crap for three decades that led us to the place we’re at now, where the housing market has effectively folded back, the consumer is being crunched under the weight of all their debt and we have been narrowing the base of those able to accept the additional leverage, with the largest remaining group over the last two years being student loans!

Yet there is still no acceptance of what happened, that it’s unsustainable — that neither government or any other sector of the economy can in fact spend on a sustainable basis more than it has available in economic surplus!

Coming soon: A huge national finance education of the masses