The basis for the ongoing economic paradigm shift that seems to be manifesting in a slow, lingering slowdown (that is now more than year into contraction) in the US and global economies can be nothing but the withdrawal of banks from the necessities of the credit-based reserve currency. So far, the updated bank reports for Q4 last year continue the [...]
Part 1 is here. Even if the eurodollar paradigm had started shifting long before the full panic, this is not to say that various individual firms have not tried to rekindle the former construction; in fact, I have paid particular attention to those who at various points attempted the recreation. Citigroup is one of those though it isn’t clear what [...]
Proprietary trading has taken on connotations that are extreme for some good reason owing to the events of 2008. It was there, called “principal transactions” on some balance sheets, that claimed the majority of accounting losses that perpetuated internecine banking struggles from liquidity to revenue and earnings. As with most things, there was much more to it than that rough [...]
JP Morgan reported late last month that its total exposure to oil & gas credit (directly on its books, I would assume) is $44 billion, or which $19 billion is currently rated junk. There was no update as to junk or junk-like corporates beyond energy, which in the end might be the more pressing concern. The old joke is that [...]
Barclays has received all the media attention in the past few days after announcing its exit from Africa. Specifically, the bank intends to divest enough of its 62% stake in the Africa unit so as to skirt tougher UK regulations intended to “ringfence” domestic operations; to keep the global bank from potential global financial horrors recurring and devastating once more [...]
Standard Chartered reported a massive yearly loss for 2015, the bank’s first in almost thirty years. The results were so bad that the company has publicly stated it might even “claw back” bonuses from about 140 executives. If the firm is truly interested in assigning blame, however, it might first look to Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen (as primary representatives [...]
As banks have trickled out their third quarter balance sheet filings, we gain more insight into the events of that quarter as well as some additional color as to the ongoing drama of the current one. Perhaps the most startling shift in an otherwise quite busy and at times despondent period was the universal compression of swap spreads into negative [...]
JP Morgan announced back in February that the firm would be scaling back, particularly in “non-operational” deposits. These were not retail deposits in the traditional sense from regular folks doing actual banking, but rather institutional “deposits” linked to shadow conduits and wholesale functions. The idea, along with some other restructuring measures, was to cut about $5 billion in costs over [...]
I think it is worth re-examining at this point, with a lull in the “dollar” at the moment, the effects of dark leverage upon actual bank mechanics and thus actual “dollar” supply. The idea of liquidity in the wholesale system is multi-dimensional and often confusing as it relates to what is typically believed. For example, the week the world woke [...]
In case it isn't clear, and it really isn't, the lack of bank capacity matters in ways both indirect and direct. Indirectly, banking and the "dollar" are supposed to support the global economy. Instead, the eurodollar system came to dominate and now we live in its absence as economic trends developed from that domination (hello China), serial asset bubbles as [...]
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