As first reported here, two weeks ago European banks saw the amount of USD-loans from the Fed, via the ECB's revised swap line, surge to over $50 billion - a total first hit in the aftermath of the Bear Stearns failure prompting us to ask "When is Lehman coming?" However, according to little noted prepared remarks by Anthony Sanders in his Friday testimony to the Congress Oversight Committee, "What the Euro Crisis Means for Taxpayers and the U.S. Economy, Pt. 1", we may have been optimistic, because the end result will be not when is Lehman coming, but when are the next two Lehmans coming, as according to Sanders, the relaunch of the Fed's swaps program may "get to the $1 trillion level, or perhaps even higher." As a reference, FX swap line usage peaked at $583 billion in the Lehman aftermath (see chart). Needless to say, this estimate is rather ironic because as Bloomberg's Bradely Keoun reports, "Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke yesterday told a closed-door gathering of Republican senators that the Fed won’t provide more aid to European banks beyond the swap lines and the discount window -- another Fed program that provides emergency funds to U.S. banks, including U.S. branches of foreign banks." Well, between a trillion plus in FX swap lines, and a surge in discount window usage which only Zero Hedge has noted so far, there really is nothing else that the Fed can possibly do, as these actions along amount to a QE equivalent liquidity injection, only denominated in US Dollars. Aside of course to shower Europe with dollars from the ChairsatanCopter. Then again, before this is all over, we are certain that paradollardop will be part of the vernacular.
Historical ECB swap line usage with the Fed, and projected assuming $1+ trillion in use. Just to put it all into perspective.
For all those lamenting the ECB's lack of willingness to print, fear not: the almighty Chairsatan has vowed to valiantly take his place when needed. As in 2 weeks ago. From Bloomberg:
European financial companies led by Royal Bank of Scotland Plc were borrowing about $538 billion directly from the Fed when the central bank’s emergency loans to all banks peaked at $1.2 trillion on December 2008, according to a Bloomberg News examination of data released by the Fed under last year’s Dodd- Frank Act and earlier this year under court-upheld Freedom of Information Act requests.
The Fed hasn’t provided any estimates of how large the swap lines might get, said David Skidmore, a Fed spokesman. He declined to elaborate.
“To get above $600 billion wouldn’t be a stretch,” said Desmond Lachman, a former International Monetary Fund deputy director who’s now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative public-policy center in Washington. “You’re talking about a European banking system that is huge in relation to that of the United States.”
Josh Rosner, a banking analyst with New York-based Graham Fisher & Co., said the Fed’s swap lines may end up helping Europe support banks that might not deserve emergency loans.
“As a result of this commitment of financial support, we’re now supporting undemocratic approaches implemented largely by authorities who have demonstrated an ongoing inability to either recognize the scope and scale of the problems or come to a consensus on the proper approach,” Rosner said.
The ultimate size of the swap lines is “unknowable at this point,” he said.
For those wondering what all this means, we remind you that there was a roughly $6.5 trillion synthetic (duration mismatch) USD short as of 4 years ago, as we reported at the time. That short has gotten substantially larger following a 4 year regime of the USD as a funding currency courtesy of ZIRP. Which means that any time the liquidity shortage threatens to collapse the system, the first thing to go stratospheric will be the USD as the global financial system scrambles to cover its short. It also means that anything the Fe and/or ECB can do from a pure printing standpoint will be peanuts compared to the utter carnage unless the dollar short is not preserved. Which naturally means that it is up to the Fed to continue drowning the world in either nominal dollars, or swapped ones, such as under the form of a USD-EUR swap, which is nothing but a forward operations. In essence, with the FX swap lines, the Fed engages in the ultimate currency warfare tool: it sells dollars to the entities most needy. And it does so, because if it doesn't, said needy entities will implode, and the hollow financial dominoes will topple, leading to a mess that not even infinite synthetic or real printing of binary of paper dollars, euros, or anything else will do to fix.
Which is why all those wondering if gold should be bought now or the second after the ECB starts printing, we have one piece of advice: just look at the chart above. It says all one needs to know.
Lastly, since the Sanders testimony is worth a read in and of itself, we recreate it below. Some of the choice selections:
The Eurozone is teetering on collapse and it has been decades in the making. The cause of their problems is 1) excessive government spending leading to 2) excessive government debt coupled with 3) slow GDP growth.
If we look at Household and Financial Debt in addition to Government Debt, the UK’s Debt to GDP ratio exceeds 900%. Japan is over 600% and Europe is almost 500% Debt to GDP. The U.S. is over 300%. In summary, Euro, Japan and the U.S. are drowning in debt. And a recent article from economists at the ECB that finds:
The European Union will unify, break up or downsize. But regardless of what option they choose, they still have too much spending and debt relative to the ability to pay for it: GDP growth. But additional debt is not the answer. It is the problem.
The obvious solution is austerity (reduction in government spending). But making loans to the European Central Bank or individual countries doesn’t solve the underlying structural problems; it only makes the Debt to GDP problem even worse. It is simply a short-term solution and actually encourages the Eurozone to delay making the hard decisions.
Full testimony: