What Could Possibly Go Wrong

Belgian card payment network crashes two days after record usage

"Belgium’s card payment network failed on Monday night, leaving millions of Belgians unable to pay at stores or to withdraw cash from ATMs and self-service terminals inside banks. Atos subsidiary Worldline, operator of Belgium’s Bancontact-Mister Cash payment network, reported on its website that it was difficult for cardholders throughout the country to make payments or withdrawals from around 4 p.m. local time on Monday. Local media reported long lines to make cardless withdrawals at bank counters. Worldline put its business continuity plan into effect, and payment traffic began to recover from 5.15 p.m., returning to near-normal levels from 6.30 p.m., the company said in a statement." Continue reading →

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China puts out yet another credit market fire with more liquidity

"The People’s Bank of China announced that it had injected cash into the short-term credit markets. While the PBOC does that regularly—twice a week via its regular, publicly announced open market operations—the cash injection that it announced today was a different kind of mechanism known as a short-term liquidity operation or SLO. It directs the central bank’s money to 12 large Chinese banks seen as crucial to the stability of the system. That the central bank has been so quick to try to ease stress in short-term markets indicates that policy makers are leery of repeating last-summer’s severe credit crunch." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingChina puts out yet another credit market fire with more liquidity

What Happened to the Fed’s Trillions? Back on Deposit…at the Fed!

"So you can understand why they wanted to have the tool. Now the question is whether or not this tool as it was implemented throughout this financial crisis, and aftermath, has exacerbated the problems with the credit channel. A bank can decide, 'Do I want to give a three-year loan to a risky borrower, or do I want to get 25 basis points at the Federal Reserve? I'm really risk averse right now. I don't really want to lend to anybody so I'd rather take my 25 basis points.' So I believe that at the margin, this has affected the credit channel, the effectiveness of the credit channel." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingWhat Happened to the Fed’s Trillions? Back on Deposit…at the Fed!

David Stockman: Lunatic Fed Engineering Global Collapse

"Yellen has been part of this Fed system since the 1990s. Just start with the year 2000: The balance sheet of the Fed was $500 billion. Today it’s pushing $4 trillion. That’s an eight-fold increase just in this century. She’s been part of it all along, and if that isn’t monetizing the debt, (then) I don’t know what the word means. It is only the top 1% that has experienced a huge windfall from the serial bubbles that the Fed has created. So, if you go right to the core of what this is all about -- what the Fed’s mission is, what the new chairman of the Fed will be doing and saying, I think we had a pretty good indication that she’s going to take this lunatic policy that we’ve had for years now right over the edge." Continue reading →

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The FED’s New Normal: $900 Billion a Year . . . Indefinitely

"This is the Federal Reserve System at 100 years. The economy is now addicted to an emergency monetary policy. The FOMC has made it clear: the bubble conditions of the financial markets will not deliberately be popped by a return to 2007. This is the new normal -- endless addiction to monetary expansion. Meanwhile, the banks refuse to lend into the economy. They pile up excess reserves. The FOMC clearly does not expect this to cease. That is why $900 billion a year is the new normal." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingThe FED’s New Normal: $900 Billion a Year . . . Indefinitely

The Biggest Interest-Rate Turn in 37 Years

"We witnessed the power of bond market vigilantes in 1980, at a time when most of them were in the United States. Now it’s much worse because so many are overseas. We witnessed their power again in 1994, at a time when there was virtually no inflation scare. Now, it’s worse because all the Fed’s money printing is spooking investors about future inflation. We also saw their power repeatedly in 2011 and 2012, when they dumped the bonds of Greece, Spain and Italy. Now it’s worse because, unlike the situation in Europe, there’s no country or union in the world big enough to bail out America. In one sense, nothing has changed since Carter’s day of reckoning on April 15, 1980." Continue reading →

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How the Paper Money Experiment Will End

"We are now in a situation that looks like a dead end for the paper money system. After the last cycle, governments have bailed out malinvestments in the private sector and boosted their public welfare spending. Deficits and debts skyrocketed. Central banks printed money to buy public debts (or accept them as collateral in loans to the banking system) in unprecedented amounts. Will money printing be a constant with interest rates close to zero until people lose their confidence in the paper currencies? Can the paper money system be maintained or will we necessarily get a hyperinflation sooner or later? There are at least seven possibilities." Continue reading →

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Barbados Debt Higher Than Cyprus Prompts Firing of 3,000

"Barbados will fire 3,000 public sector workers by March and freeze wages as the eastern Caribbean island’s debt burden soars and the International Monetary Fund says 'urgent adjustments' are needed. Barbados’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product reached 94 percent in September, the IMF said today, more than the 93 percent that forced Cyprus to seek a European Union-brokered bailout in March. Finance Minister Chris Sinckler told lawmakers yesterday that the government risks 'further hemorrhaging' of its reserves and the local currency’s peg to the dollar if nothing is done. Barbados’s financial struggles are mirrored across much of the Caribbean, which has seen eight debt defaults since 2003." Continue reading →

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Fed to Explode QE Next Downturn – Can’t Control Velocity

"'What's going to happen the next time there's an economic downturn? They're going to double, triple, quadruple (QE). Instead of making 85 billion per month, they're going to be making 850 billion per month. It'll go up TEN times.'" Continue reading →

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Investors, Run for Cover From the Incoming ‘Taper Bomb’

"The bond market sell-off is leaving fixed-income investors (at least, those who didn’t heed my advice to get out of the way) with the worst annual losses on bonds since 1999. It also proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the bond market is more powerful than the Fed. Now, against that backdrop, the Fed is about to hold its last policy meeting of 2013. On Dec. 17 and 18, policymakers will gather around a conference table in Washington and decide whether to continue their $85 billion-per-month QE program. My prediction? They drop a taper bomb and start dialing down those purchases, probably by at least $10 billion." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingInvestors, Run for Cover From the Incoming ‘Taper Bomb’