Posted on 05/05/2023 7:24:46 AM PDT by Twotone
U.S. federal and state officials are assessing whether "market manipulation" caused the recent volatility in banking shares, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday, as the White House vowed to monitor "short-selling pressures on healthy banks."
Shares of regional banks resumed their slide this week after the collapse of First Republic Bank , the third U.S. mid-sized lender to fail in two months. Short sellers raked in $378.9 million in paper profits on Thursday alone from betting against certain regional banks, according to analytics firm Ortex.
Increased short-selling activity and volatility in shares have drawn increasing scrutiny by federal and state officials and regulators in recent days, given strong fundamentals in the sector and sufficient capital levels, said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
"State and federal regulators and officials are increasingly attentive to the possibility of market manipulation regarding banking equities," the source said.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Biden administration was closely watching on the situation, but any possible action would be taken by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
"The administration is going to closely monitor the market developments, including the short-selling pressures on healthy banks," Jean-Pierre told a White House briefing.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Start a rumor — “Hunter was behind the manipulation” — and watch this all disappear.
We are "transitioning" really quickly into a wholly corrupt, corporate fascist state.
Gee, it couldn’t be their inherently unstable position, and the recent collapses of other banks in similar positions that caused the volatility, could it?
Smart money went short on big urban banks especially those in San Francisco, LA, Chicago, NYC and Atlanta.
How about looking at the manipulation of Gold and Silver prices while you’re at it.
Pay special attention when the debt ceiling is raised as that gives TPTB more ammunition to manipulate markets even more.
The administration is going to closely monitor the market developments.
Decoded: Speed up the failures for a better cause digital
currency so the gubment can control money for your
own safety.
NEVER trust anything this administration dose or say note last two years.
Maybe the SEC should get off it’s eff’n diversity and inclusion bandwagon and go after real criminals. I may not have heard, but there have been no charges brought against SVB execs that dumped their stock 11 days prior to SVB going under. That’s certainly insider trading.
Have long suspected that Soros was behind the 2008 collapse.
“ White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Biden administration was closely watching on the situation, expecting a piece of the action. “
What is going on is the media misrepresenting what short sellers are saying i.e. the regional banks are insolvent conflating that into a crisis. They are undercapitalized due to the assets they own being less than par value BUT the issue is are their assets worthless or is the mark to market accounting being over hyped. Unless the banks are holding foreclosed assets, I don’t see the problem, eventually the loans will be paid off albeit if someone went to sell those assets today, they get 60-70 cents on the dollar. Banks which do not have a hedged portfolio of loans cannot absorb that accounting standard on their books so they become insolvent.
Its unfortunate but shorts will make a ton of money on this escapade, bank investors will lose everything and at the end of the day the loans go forth, the depositors get their cash. The beat goes on. Make the same argument about the SS system and one will get it is different. It is a distinction with out a difference, the money is not there to pay the claims.
Yes. Soros always gets full credit for breaking the Bank of England, but many people fail to see his connection to 2008.
US officials assessing possible ‘manipulation’ on banking shares
The first place I would look is the FED.
I don’t doubt there are people that took advantage of the situation caused by Biden policies.
Part 1: Inflation ran wild because pandemic-caused shortages (predictably) resulted in higher consumer prices (inflation). The exact wrong thing to do was intervene in the markets, yet that’s what team-Biden did - flooding the market with more spending. This didn’t fix the shortages, and increased demand - driving inflation higher.
Part 2: the Fed raises interest rates in an attempt to reduce inflation, as caused by FedGov over-stimulus.
Part 3: Silicon Valley Bank & Signature Bank go under when depositors make sizeable withdraws that can’t be met with cash on-hand and the sale of stable-principal, highly liquid assets. This forced them to sell other “safe” assets at a loss, as their values had declined due to the Fed interest-rate hikes.
Part 4: Hedge-funds and market-manipulators see opportunity, in that many other banks are similarly exposed. So they short certain bank-stocks, then pump rumors on blogs & social media sites about the next domino to fall. The public, worried mightily in the wake of the SVB and Signature Bank failures, pull their deposits from these “next in line” banks, and the process repeats with more banks taken over by the FDIC, or forced into “arranged weddings” with mega-banks (First Republic/JP Morgan). This results in the value of the common-stocks of these banks to be decimated, and those that shorted the stock make a fortune.
So NOW FedGov is signaling that they’re concerned about this having occurred. Likely they’ll find a scapegoat or 2 to charge with some sort of securities fraud or market manipulation, and will charge them for their crimes, parade them before the TV cameras, and the news will dominate coverage for a few days.
In the mean-time, FedGov will never go back to the root-cause of it all - Biden’s economic policies and the reaction to the original supply-chain crisis. That reaction, IMHO, was entirely driven by politics, as the Dems couldn’t afford to look bad going into the 2022 mid-terms. They literally kicked the can down the road, deferring any actual solutions for another day.
BTW - the profligate spending - unprecedented DEFICIT spending - and flooding of the markets with newly created dollars, has DE-VALUED the dollar in real terms, and around the world. This is THE CAUSE of all of the talk of other countries looking to replace the US Dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Other countries want a currency that is, first and foremost, safe and stable. USD is currently perceived as neither.
[/rant]
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