Free Republic

Amidst the unfolding year, concerns heighten over a looming financial crisis, with a potential bank failure on the horizon. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) proposes rule changes, including waiving margin requirements for major banks during periods of “high volatility,” sparking questions about the stability of the financial system. The specter of last year’s challenges resurfaces, with shares of $NYCB plummeting and regional banks experiencing a downturn. Notably, the financial sector is gripped by worries of a derivatives implosion, adding complexity to an already precarious situation. The ongoing decline in commercial property values, coupled with the exposure...

When European leaders meet in Brussels on Friday to tackle the continent’s energy crisis, politicians will be focused on windfall taxes and energy price caps. And no wonder: spiralling electricity costs are creating mounting pain for households and businesses — and political upheaval. However, investors should keep an eye on another item on the agenda: their approach to energy derivatives markets, clearing houses and exchanges. This might seem arcane but the issues now bubbling in the derivatives sphere represent another potential time bomb for Europe — one that needs to be urgently addressed.

Precious metals expert and former auditor lifts the lid on the scale of regulatory malfeasances common among big banks with the tacit approval of the government in the paper Gold market, Commodities Exchange (COMEX). The physical supply of real Gold is small in comparison to the derivative products and when there is a crisis (as we see all these crisis on the horizon) and people run to Gold and Silver they won't run to the derivative product because that can't be converted to real Gold and Silver. Derivative markets are not real markets you need physical Gold.

Despite recent hedge fund disasters and almost every economic indicator pointing to a potential stock crash, Biden’s administration has completely ignored a potential equities bubble.Since March 2020, $5.9 trillion in so-called relief spending authorized by Congress, as well as $3.3 trillion in quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve, has been pumped into the U.S. economy. America’s pandemic response resulted in 22 million jobs lost in a matter of months, and we still have 10 million fewer jobs than before March of last year. The fiscal and economic repercussions of going from stronger than expected job and wage growth in January...

The world’s largest cryptocurrency dropped to its lowest level in more than a year on Monday. Bitcoin hit a low of $4,951.47, bringing its losses to more than 21 percent in the past seven days and more than 62 percent this year, according to data from CoinDesk. The digital currency began stumbling last week after months of relative calm. Bitcoin had been trading in the $6,400 range, a break from its volatility earlier this year, for the majority of October as the rest of global markets sold off. The cryptocurrency is now down more than 30 percent since last Thanksgiving....

Oh, and the unintended consequences of trying to regulate a monster. Economists at the New York Fed included this gem in their report on a two-day conference on “Derivatives and Regulatory Changes” since the Financial Crisis: Though the notional amount [of derivatives] outstanding has declined in recent years, at more than $500 trillion outstanding, OTC derivatives remain an important asset class. An important asset class. A hilarious understatement. Let’s see… the “notional amount” of $500 trillion is 25 times the GDP of the US and about 7 times global GDP. Derivatives are not just an “important asset class,” like bonds;...

Wall Street Backs Blockchain for Savings on Derivatives DTCC chooses startup Axoni to use the tech behind bitcoin to track payouts between big banks Telis Demos Jan. 9, 2017 A big Wall Street middleman is bringing in the technology behind the digital currency bitcoin to try to save banks tens of millions of dollars on fees for derivatives trades. Following a series of tests last year, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. has picked startup Axoni to use a blockchain—the networking system originally created to move digital currencies—to start tracking credit-derivatives payouts between big banks by early next year, the...

In my forthcoming book The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites’ Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis, I make a very simple point: In 1998 we were hours away from collapse and did everything wrong following that. In 2008, we were hours away from collapse and did the same thing. Each crisis is bigger than the one before. The stock market today is not very far from where it was in November 2014. The stock market has had big ups and downs. There was a big crash in August 2015, followed by a big crash in January 2016. Followed...

According to a study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in March of last year, U.S. taxpayers have already injected $187.5 billion into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two companies that prior to the 2008 financial crash traded on the New York Stock Exchange, had shareholders and their own Board of Directors while also receiving an implicit taxpayer guarantee on their debt. The U.S. government put the pair into conservatorship on September 6, 2008. The public has been led to believe that the $187.5 billion bailout of the pair was the full extent of the taxpayers’ tab....

Oh yes, remember the banks cleaned up their balance sheets and closed all those pesky derivative trades.... Right? "NEW YORK – This spring, traders and analysts working deep in the global swaps markets began picking up peculiar readings: Hundreds of billions of dollars of trades by U.S. banks had seemingly vanished." “We saw strange things in the data,” said Chris Barnes, a former swaps trader now with ClarusFT, a London-based data firm." Except.... they didn't vanish. They went overseas, but are still there. Just remember, it was CDS and IR products that blew up the world last time, and you...

Greece banks to stay closed on Monday, Piraeus Bank chief says, after emergency meeting in Athens This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly

Earlier this month, Deutsche Bank’s co-CEOs Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen were shown the door ... Jonathan Pollack, the bank’s global head commercial real estate, is leaving after 16 years. ... Pollack's departure comes just one month after the bank's head of structured finance Elad Shraga left to start his own fund. Shraga was instrumental in helping Deutsche become "an award-winning arranger of asset- and mortgage-backed debt." Shraga had been with Deutsche Bank for 15 years. All of this seems to lend credence to the idea that Deutsche Bank may be in trouble. The employee exodus appears to be gathering...

Submitted by NotQuant.comLooking back at the Lehman Brothers collapse of 2008, it’s amazing how quickly it all happened.  In hindsight there were a few early-warning signs,  but the true scale of the disaster publicly unfolded only in the final moments before it became apparent that Lehman was doomed.First, for purposes of drawing a parallel, let’s re-cap the events of 2007-2008:There were few early indicators of Lehman’s plight.   Insiders however, were well aware:   In late 2007, Goldman Sachs placed a massive proprietary bet against Lehman which would be known internally as the “Big Short”.  (It’s a bet that would later profit from during...

BEWARE OF THE BAIL_IN The Government tells the banks to grab your assets to fill their coffers when they are insolvent, the way they took GREECE money The Banks are going to call YOUR money UNSECURED DEBT Now, Look at the first paragraph: http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/global-bail-in-plan-could-still-leave-taxpayers-holding-the-bag-1073068-1.html

We keep waiting for the bust, the gigantic rollover of oil companies that just plain collapse under their own weight and the $50 price that you get for West Texas Intermediate. It hasn't happened. We keep waiting for the junk bond market that is riddled with $200 billion in oil and gas paper to be crushed by defaults and restructurings. It hasn't been. In fact, the iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bd, the high-yield exchange-traded fund that includes a lot of this suspect paper, is pretty much unchanged for the last three years and has enjoyed a sustained rally...

Last year Austria's largest bank, Erste Bank, sent shudders of Credit Anstalt through the European Banking System. This year it is Austria's 3rd largest bank that is scaring investors senseless. On the heels of the Swiss National Bank's decision to un-peg from the Euro, Raiffeisen Bank's Swiss-Franc-Denominated mortgage worries have resurfaced (along with Russian/Ukraine writedowns) and nowhere is that more evident than the total collapse of the bank's bonds (from over 95c to 65c today). Even after the ECB Q€ (and some apparent intervention to weaken the Swissy) bonds kept free-falling. Perhaps, The Freedom Party's demands for a bailout will...

Over the coming months, I believe we could see an economic meltdown at least six times the size of the 2007 subprime mortgage meltdown... The next financial collapse, already on our radar screen, will not come from hedge funds or home mortgages. It will come from junk bonds, especially energy-related and emerging-market corporate debt. The Financial Times recently estimated that the total amount of energy-related corporate debt issued from 2009-2014 for exploration and development is over $5 trillion. Meanwhile, the Bank for International Settlements recently estimated that the total amount of emerging-market dollar-denominated corporate debt is over $9 trillion. Energy-sector...

video 15:10

My top story is the economy, and I think the Fed and Congress just signaled that something is seriously wrong, and it’s going to get worse. First off, the Federal Reserve just came out and said that it was going to be “patient” when normalizing the monetary policy. I know Wall Street is jubilant and the stock market spiked on the news, but I think this is really ominous, and it is nothing to be celebrated. To me, that means don’t expect the Fed to raise interest rates anytime soon because the economy is much worse than what they are...

Courtesy of the Cronybus(sic) last minute passage, government was provided a quid-pro-quo $1.1 trillion spending allowance with Wall Street's blessing in exchange for assuring banks that taxpayers would be on the hook for yet another bailout, as a result of the swaps push-out provision, after incorporating explicit Citigroup language that allows financial institutions to trade certain financial derivatives from subsidiaries that are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, explicitly putting taxpayers on the hook for losses caused by these contracts. Recall: (more at link)