• Tag Archives Bailout

  • Russian Depositors On Edge After Second Major Bank Fails In Under A Month

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    If once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is a full-blown collapse in the financial system, then Russia may be getting close.
    Just three weeks after Russia bailed out its largest and very politically connected private bank, Otkritie, after an unexpectedly acute bank run resulted in the bank’s near-collapse, already nervous Russian depositors shifted their attention to another domestic lender, and earlier today Russia’s B&N Bank, the country’s 12th biggest lender by assets, also sought a bailout from the central bank. While it is unclear how much this bailout would cost Russian taxpayers, when the central bank took over Otkritie last month, it said it might need up to $6.9 billion, the biggest ever bailout in the country.
    B&N Bank, which is controlled by Russian oligarch Mikhail Gutseriev and was not on the central bank’s list of systemically important lenders, said it had under-estimated the problems within the banks it had bought during an expansion drive. ‘Our objective is, with the support of the central bank … to conduct an effective financial rehabilitation of the bank,’ said Mikail Shishkhanov, who was named as chairman of B&N Bank, whose assets account for 2 percent of the Russian banking system, according to ratings agency Fitch.

    This post was published at Zero Hedge on Sep 20, 2017.

    This entry was posted in Alternative Media Banking Blogosphere Economy and tagged

  • Who Gets Hit by Mortgage Losses in Harvey and Irma Areas?

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    ‘We need to ask for a policy change because the burden with these losses is too big.’ Somebody is going to pay for losses on mortgages of homes that were destroyed by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. It’s a just a question of who.
    The taxpayer is on the hook, along with some investors. But then there are the servicers of mortgages guaranteed by the Government National Mortgage Association, for short Ginnie Mae. The largest of them is Wells Fargo, but they mostly include smaller non-banks such as PennyMac and Quicken Loans. The amounts could be large. And now they’re asking for a bailout of sorts.
    In total, 4.3 million properties with nearly $700 billion in outstanding mortgage balances are located in FEMA-designated disaster areas in Texas and Florida, according to a preliminary estimate by Black Knight Financial Services:
    Disaster areas of Hurricane Harvey: 1.18 million mortgaged properties with $179 billion in unpaid mortgages. Disaster areas of Hurricane Irma: 3.14 million mortgaged properties with $517 billion in unpaid mortgages. Many of these homes survived mostly unscathed. So the mortgage balances of homes that have been severely damaged or destroyed remain uncertain but are significant.

    This post was published at Wolf Street on Sep 19, 2017.

    This entry was posted in Banking Blogosphere Economy Government Market Commentary Real Estate and tagged

  • Fearing Contagion, Russia Bails Out Bondholders in its Biggest Bank Collapse Yet

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    ‘The panicky mood has been dampened down,’ as other banks are rumored to be teetering.
    True to the playbook of bank bailouts, the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) decided to bail out Bank Otkritie Financial Corporation, the largest privately owned bank in the country, and the seventh largest bank behind six state-owned banks.
    The Central Bank put in an undisclosed amount of money in return for at least a 75% stake. This is likely to be Russia’s biggest bank bailout ever, well ahead of the current record holder, the $6.7 billion bailout of the Bank of Moscow in 2011.
    Otkritie and its businesses would operate as usual, the Central Bank said. The banks obligations to creditors and bondholders, which include other Russian banks, would be honored to avoid contagion.
    The controlling shareholder of Otkritie bank is Otkritie Holding, with a 65% stake. The bank had grown by wild acquisitions, grabbing other banks, insurers, non-pension funds, and the diamond business of Russia’s second largest oil producer Lukoil. Otkritie Holding is owned by executives of Lukoil, state-owned VTB bank, Otkritie, and other companies. So clearly, this bank is too big to fail.

    This post was published at Wolf Street on Aug 30, 2017.

    This entry was posted in Economy and tagged

  • Social Security requires a bailout that’s 60x greater than the 2008 emergency bank bailout

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    / August 11, 2017
    A few weeks ago the Board of Trustees of Social Security sent a formal letter to the United States Senate and House of Representatives to issue a dire warning: Social Security is running out of money.
    Given that tens of millions of Americans depend on this public pension program as their sole source of retirement income, you’d think this would have been front page news…
    … and that every newspaper in the country would have reprinted this ominous projection out of a basic journalistic duty to keep the public informed about an issue that will affect nearly everyone.
    But that didn’t happen.
    The story was hardly picked up.
    It’s astonishing how little attention this issue receives considering it will end up being one of the biggest financial crises in US history.
    That’s not hyperbole either – the numbers are very clear.
    The US government itself calculates that the long-term Social Security shortfall exceeds $46 TRILLION.
    In other words, in order to be able to pay the benefits they’ve promised, Social Security needs a $46 trillion bailout.
    Fat chance.

    This post was published at Sovereign Man on Simon Black.

    This entry was posted in Government and tagged

  • Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac May Require $100 Billion In A New Crisis

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    This is a syndicated repost courtesy of Snake Hole Lounge. To view original, click here. Reposted with permission.
    According to the results from the annual stress test of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac released today by their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the ‘GSEs’ which were nationalized a decade ago in the early days of the crisis, would need as much as $100 billion in bailout funding in the form of a potential incremental Treasury draw, in the event of a new economic crisis.
    ***
    Bear in mind that the 30-year fixed-rate mortgages must reside somewhere. If not Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s balance sheet, then on the balance sheets of lenders (like Wells Fargo and Bank of America), or some other financial entity. Or FHA insurance fund.

    This post was published at Wall Street Examiner on August 8, 2017.

    This entry was posted in Economy and tagged

  • IMF admits disastrous love affair with the euro and apologises for the immolation of Greece

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    The International Monetary Fund’s top staff misled their own board, made a series of calamitous misjudgments in Greece, became euphoric cheerleaders for the euro project, ignored warning signs of impending crisis, and collectively failed to grasp an elemental concept of currency theory.
    This is the lacerating verdict of the IMF’s top watchdog on the fund’s tangled political role in the eurozone debt crisis, the most damaging episode in the history of the Bretton Woods institutions.
    It describes a ‘culture of complacency’, prone to ‘superficial and mechanistic’ analysis, and traces a shocking breakdown in the governance of the IMF, leaving it unclear who is ultimately in charge of this extremely powerful organisation.
    The report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) goes above the head of the managing director, Christine Lagarde. It answers solely to the board of executive directors, and those from Asia and Latin America are clearly incensed at the way European Union insiders used the fund to rescue their own rich currency union and banking system.
    The three main bailouts for Greece, Portugal and Ireland were unprecedented in scale and character. The trio were each allowed to borrow over 2,000pc of their allocated quota – more than three times the normal limit – and accounted for 80pc of all lending by the fund between 2011 and 2014.

    This post was published at The Telegraph

    This entry was posted in Banking and tagged

  • Earnings Rise with Boost from Falling U.S. Dollar But Consumers Will Bear the Brunt of Rising Prices

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    There seems to be an unlimited supply of methods in which the rich in America keep getting richer and the average Joe picks up the tab. (Think about the $16 trillion secret bailout of Wall Street by the Federal Reserve from 2007 to 2010 for the quintessential example.)
    Yesterday, Fortune Magazine ran this sobering headline: ‘The Wealth Gap in the U. S. Is Worse Than In Russia or Iran.’ The article quotes Richard Florida, author of The New Urban Crisis, as follows:
    ‘Inequality in New York City is like Swaziland. Miami’s is like Zimbabwe. Los Angeles is equivalent to Sri Lanka. I actually look at the difference between the 95th percentile of income earners in big cities and the lower 20%. In the New York metro area, the 95th percentile makes $282,000 and the 20th percentile makes $23,000. These gaps between the rich and the poor in income and wealth are vast across the country and even worse in our cities.’
    Against that backdrop comes news from FactSet last Friday that with 57 percent of the companies in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index reporting actual earnings results for the second quarter of 2017, ‘ten sectors are reporting year-over-year earnings growth, led by the Energy, Information Technology, and Financials sectors.’ FactSet adds this: ‘The only sector reporting a year-over-year decline in earnings is the Consumer Discretionary sector.’ That would be the sector in which the average Joe lives.

    This post was published at Wall Street On Parade By Pam Martens and Russ Marte.

    This entry was posted in Economy and tagged

  • Scaramucci: First Fired by Goldman Sachs, Now the White House

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    Were it not for the profanity-laced tirade that Donald Trump’s briefly tenured Director of Communications offered up to a New Yorker reporter, it might be considered a badge of honor to get fired from both the great vampire squid, Goldman Sachs, and by the President whose administration is firmly ensnared in Goldman Sachs’ tentacles.
    Wall Street veteran and hedge fund titan, Anthony Scaramucci, who was fired yesterday after a 10-day stint as Director of Communications for Trump’s White House, told reporter Courtney Comstock in 2010 at Business Insider that he had been ‘fired from Goldman a year and five months’ into his tenure there as an investment banker. Scaramucci was rehired by Goldman a few months later, but in a sales position.
    Scaramucci’s ties to Wall Street are extensive, including a stint as Managing Director at Lehman Brothers, the iconic investment bank which filed bankruptcy in September 2008 during the height of the financial crisis.
    Scaramucci founded SkyBridge Capital in 2005 and in 2010 it purchased a hedge fund of funds from Citigroup, the behemoth Wall Street bank that received the largest bailout in U. S. history during the financial crisis.

    This post was published at Wall Street On Parade on August 1, 2017.

    This entry was posted in Government and tagged

  • The Hedge Fund That Almost Broke The World

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    Before the financial crisis and the billions of dollars in corporate bailouts, and trillions more in central bank quantitative easing, the world of investing was simpler.
    Back then, markets moved in two directions, traders trusted their models, and hedge funds stacked with PhDs and top executives from well-respected bond trading houses were expected to make money hand over fist. And for three glorious years in the mid-1990s, Long Term Capital Management did exactly that. But when the fund suddenly imploded in 1998, stung by economic crises in Russia and Asia that caused it to lose $4 billion in a bizarre six-week stretch…
    ***
    … it almost brought the entire financial system down with it.
    In a recent interview on Real Vision’s Adventures in Finance podcast, former LTCM Founding Partner Victor Haghani, who was at the epicenter of the firm’s meteoric rise and catastrophic collapse, discusses the birth of the fund, its flawed investment strategy and the impact its collapse had on the broader financial landscape.

    This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jul 29, 2017.

    This entry was posted in Government and tagged

  • Who Bought The New Greek Bonds: Here Is The Answer

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    After triumphantly returning to the bond market three years after it last issued a euro-denominated long bond (which one year later nearly defaulted when only a third bailout prevented Grexit), this morning Bloomberg has provided details of who the lucky buyers of the just priced 3BN bond offering were. And not surprisingly, the biggest source of new funds for the Greek government (which will then use most of this to pay interest owed to the ECB) were US buyers.
    As Bloomberg notes, just under half, or 1.425BN of the 3BN deal was new money with 1.57b of existing paper rolled, with the following geographic distribution of new sources of cash:
    U. S. 44% U. K./Ireland 26% Greece 14% France 7% Spain/Portugal/Italy 3% Germany/Austria 3% Others 3% By investor type:
    Fund managers 46% Hedge funds 36% Banks/private banks 13% Others 5%

    This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jul 26, 2017.

    This entry was posted in Government and tagged

  • Greece Approved for $1.8 Billion Conditional Loan From IMF

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    The International Monetary Fund agreed to a new conditional bailout for Greece, ending two years of speculation on whether it would join in another rescue and giving the seal of approval demanded by many of the country’s euro-area creditors.
    The Washington-based fund said Thursday its executive board approved ‘in principle’ a new loan worth as much as $1.8 billion. The disbursement of funds is contingent on euro-zone countries providing debt relief to Greece.
    ‘As we have said many times, even with full program implementation, Greece will not be able to restore debt sustainability and needs further debt relief from its European partners,’ IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said in a statement. ‘A debt strategy anchored in more realistic assumptions needs to be agreed. I expect a plan to restore debt sustainability to be agreed soon between Greece and its European partners.’
    IMF officials estimate that, even if Greece carries out promised reforms, the nation’s debt will reach about 150 percent of gross domestic product by 2030, and become ‘explosive’ beyond that point. European creditors could bring the debt under control by extending grace periods, lengthening the maturity of the debt or deferring interest payments, the IMF said in a report accompanying the announcement.

    This post was published at bloomberg

    This entry was posted in Economy and tagged

  • Greece Sells 3 Billion In Bonds In 2x Oversubscribed Offering

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    So it can either come cheap with the new issue, which adds to existing debt service problems, or it can….structure around that.
    — Owen Sanderson (@OwenPSanderson) July 25, 2017

    Just over three years after Greece “triumphantly returned” to capital markets in April 2014, when it issued 3 billion in 5 year bonds at a yield of 4.95%, and a cash coupon of 4.75% – an offering which was 8x oversubcribed – and which crashed and nearly defaulted one year later when only the 3rd Greek bailout prevented the country from going bankrupt, only to get taken out at 102, moments ago Greece once again returned to the bond market, if far less triumphantly, by selling another 3 billion in 5 year paper which however was “only” 2x oversubscribed, with indications from Bloomberg that there was only 6.5 billion in demand for the “high yielding” paper. And speaking of yield, it came in lower than 3 years ago, pricing at 4.625% with a coupon of 4.375%.
    For those who did not get their desired allottment in today’s offering, fear not there will be more:

    This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jul 25, 2017.

    This entry was posted in Economy and tagged

  • Against Irredeemable Paper – Precious Metals Supply and Demand

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    The Antidote
    Something needs to be said. We are against the existence of irredeemable paper currency, central banking and central planning, cronyism, socialized losses and privatized gains, counterfeit credit, wealth transfers and bailouts, and welfare both corporate and personal.
    When we write to debunk the conspiracy theories that say manipulation is keeping gold from hitting $5,000 (one speaker here at Freedom Fest claimed gold will go to $65,000), we are not trying to defend the Fed. When we discuss the flaws in predicting that kind of price, and the error in expecting to profit from it, we are not expressing a pro irredeemable dollar view.
    We are saying there are good arguments against the regime of irredeemable paper currency – but this is not one of them. Irredeemable currency has two fatal flaws. One is the interest rate is unhinged.
    It can skyrocket as it did from the end of WWII through 1980, or collapse as it has been doing since then. Two is there is no extinguisher of debt. Debt grows – must necessarily grow – exponentially. As it has been doing for many decades.

    This post was published at Acting-Man on July 25, 2017.

    This entry was posted in Government and tagged

  • The Elephant in the Room: Debt

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    It’s the elephant in the room; the guest no one wants to talk to – debt! Total global debt is estimated to be about $217 trillion and some believe it could be as high as $230 trillion. In 2008, when the global financial system almost collapsed global debt stood at roughly $142 trillion. The growth since then has been astounding. Instead of the world de-leveraging, the world has instead leveraged up. While global debt has been growing at about 5% annually, global nominal GDP has been averaging only about 3% annually (all measured in US$). World debt to GDP is estimated at about 325% (that is all debt – governments, corporations, individuals). In some countries such as the United Kingdom, it exceeds 600%. It has taken upwards of $4 in new debt to purchase $1 of GDP since the 2008 financial crisis. Many have studied and reported on the massive growth of debt including McKinsey & Company http://www.mickinsey.com, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) http://www.imf.org, and the World Bank http://www.worldbank.org.
    So how did we get here? The 2008 financial crisis threatened to bring down the entire global financial structure. The authorities (central banks) responded in probably the only way they could. They effectively bailed out the system by lowering interest rates to zero (or lower), flooding the system with money, and bailing out the financial system (with taxpayers’ money).
    It was during this period that saw the monetary base in the US and the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet explode from $800 billion to over $4 trillion in a matter of a few years. They flooded the system with money through a process known as quantitative easing (QE). All central banks especially the Fed, the BOJ and the ECB and the Treasuries of the respective countries did the same. It was the biggest bailout in history. As an example, the US national debt exploded from $10.4 trillion in 2008 to $19.9 trillion today. It wasn’t just the US though as the entire world went on a debt binge, thanks primarily to low interest rates that persist today.

    This post was published at GoldSeek on Friday, 21 July 2017.

    This entry was posted in Government and tagged

  • Stocks and Precious Metals Charts – No One Sees, No One Knows

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    “It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident…And yet none of this conduct has been punished in any significant way.”
    Charles Ferguson, Inside Job
    ‘The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true. It really happened. These suspicions are valid.’
    Neil Barofsky
    “The historical evidence is overwhelming. Many societies have done well for a while – until powerful people get out of hand. This is an easy pattern to see at a distance and in other cultures. It is typically much harder to recognize when your own society now has an elite less subject to effective constraints and more able to exert power in an abusive fashion. And given the long history of strong institutions in the United States, it appears particularly difficult for some people to acknowledge that we have serious governance issues that need to be addressed.”
    Simon Johnson

    This post was published at Jesses Crossroads Cafe on 17 JULY 2017.

    This entry was posted in Economy and tagged

  • Is California Bailing Out Tesla through the Backdoor?

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    Tesla will lose federal subsidies; so something big needs to be done. The California state Assembly passed a $3-billion subsidy program for electric vehicles, dwarfing the existing program. The bill is now in the state Senate. If passed, it will head to Governor Jerry Brown, who has not yet indicated if he’d sign what is ostensibly an effort to put EV sales into high gear, but below the surface appears to be a Tesla bailout.
    Tesla will soon hit the limit of the federal tax rebates, which are good for the first 200,000 EVs sold in the US per manufacturer beginning in December 2009 (IRS explanation). In the second quarter after the manufacturer hits the limit, the subsidy gets cut in half, from $7,500 to $3,750; two quarters later, it gets cut to $1,875. Two quarters later, it goes to zero.
    Given Tesla’s ambitious US sales forecast for its Model 3, it will hit the 200,000 vehicle limit in 2018, after which the phase-out begins. A year later, the subsidies are gone. Losing a $7,500 subsidy on a $35,000 car is a huge deal. No other EV manufacturer is anywhere near their 200,000 limit. Their customers are going to benefit from the subsidy; Tesla buyers won’t.

    This post was published at Wolf Street on Jul 16, 2017.

    This entry was posted in Government and tagged

  • Chapter 36: Bailouts

    Posted on by Jon Comment

    Christian Economics: Teacher’s Edition
    It is as I told Pharaoh; God has shown to Pharaoh what he is about to do. There will come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt, but after them there will arise seven years of famine, and all the plenty will be forgotten in the land of Egypt. The famine will consume the land, and the plenty will be unknown in the land by reason of the famine that will follow, for it will be very severe. And the doubling of Pharaoh’s dream means that the thing is fixed by God, and God will shortly bring it about. Now therefore let Pharaoh select a discerning and wise man, and set him over the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh proceed to appoint overseers over the land and take one-fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt during the seven plentiful years. And let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming and store up grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it. That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine that are to occur in the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish through the famine’ (Genesis 41:28 – 36).
    AnalysisA bailout is a government program that transfers wealth from the government to an organization that has suffered a major setback. This text describes a bailout. But it was like no other bailout in history. It was a bailout of the entire nation. It was paid for by taxing the nation’s farmers. But since most Egyptians were farmers, this was not a bailout of a special-interest group at the expense of the taxpayers. It was a bailout of the whole nation.
    There was a warning about the need for this bailout. First, there was a prediction of a series of events over a 14-year period. Then there was a plan to implement it. From the point of view of the masses, this was a bailout in advance. Joseph did not recommend that Pharaoh announce this prophecy to government officials. He did not tell them to tell the masses: ‘You’re on your own.’ He possessed unique information. He believed it. He was given a plan by Joseph. This was central planning by the state.
    The bailout was not a free lunch. The masses had to pay for food with money. Pharaoh kept the money. In year two, the people’s money was gone.

    This post was published at Gary North on July 14, 2017.

    This entry was posted in Government and tagged