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"Banks are worried about their exposure," warns one warehousing source, "there is a scramble for people to head down there at the minute and make sure that their metal that they think is covered by a warehouse receipt actually exists." The rehypothecated catastrophe that we discussed in great detail here (copper financing), here (all commodities), and here (global contagion) appears to be gathering speed as the China's northeastern port of Qingdao has halted shipments of aluminum and copper due to an investigation by authorities after they found "there is a discrepancy in metal that should be there and metal that...

The Tera Group Inc. said Monday it had finalized the terms for a multi-million dollar bitcoin swap agreement between two U.S. institutions, but declined to name the parties involved. Such transactions are currently unregulated, Tera said. The company said it has reached out to the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission in order to work on a regulated bitcoin swap. The CFTC hadn’t responded to a request for comment as of writing this post. “The goal is for us to bring this to the bitcoin community because there are many commercial entities that want to take bitcoin in but have concerns...

The Wall Street Journal on February 25th published a story about December’s messy corporate divorce between Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erianas, co-Chief Investment Officers at Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO), the world’s largest bond fund with almost $2 trillion in assets.  The article focused on the prickly personality of Gross and foul language complaints by El-Erian during a period of stress last summer when the firm was suffering market losses and clients were withdrawing billions.  But despite a carefully crafted image of a traditional conservative bond manager for “serious” money, PIMCO has magnified returns by making trillions of dollars in high-risk...

the bogey man known as “systemic risk” to gain advantage over the other creditors . ... In order for the OTC casino to work, the derivatives contracts had to be given special priority in bankruptcy. Speculative derivative instruments such as credit default swaps (CDS), which caused the failure and government bailout of American International Group, could never exist in significant size were in not for the safe harbor from bankruptcy for derivatives created by Congress in the 1980s and 1990s. Members of Congress from both parties were paid very well for their treachery. ... The intellectual author of the “systemic...

Some of the most respected prognosticators in the financial world are warning that what is coming in 2014 and beyond is going to shake America to the core. Many of the quotes that you are about to read are from individuals that actually predicted the subprime mortgage meltdown and the financial crisis of 2008 ahead of time. So they have a track record of being right. Does that guarantee that they will be right about what is coming in 2014? Of course not. In fact, as you will see below, not all of them agree about exactly what is coming...

Ambitious plans for an EU-U.S. free-trade agreement may be put in jeopardy by Washington’s failure to finalize a deal coordinating rules in the $630 trillion derivatives market, the EU’s financial markets chief has warned. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission agreed in July this year on a common position with the European Commission and other global regulators that aimed to iron out differences in how they police derivatives trading worldwide. But in the months since that agreement was struck in principle, the parties have failed to sign off on the details of the arrangement. The CFTC, under pressure to adhere...

Thirteen big banks colluded to shut out competition from the multi-trillion euro derivatives market, according to an investigation by the European Commission. The EU’s executive arm said that its investigation, which began in 2011, had uncovered anti-competitive practices during the 2008-9 financial crisis. The commission investigation focuses on the credit default swap (CDS) market which allows banks and businesses to hedge against possible losses. However, more controversially, they were used by Goldman Sachs and others to speculate on the probability of a Greek debt crisis in 2010. There are almost 2 million active CDS contracts with a joint notional amount...

The 441 TRILLION Dollar Interest Rate Derivatives Time Bomb By Michael Snyder June 24th, 2013The Derivatives Time BombDo you want to know the primary reason why rapidly rising interest rates could take down the entire global financial system? Most people might think that it would be because the U.S. government would have to pay much more interest on the national debt. And yes, if the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt rose to just 6 percent (and it has actually been much higher in the past), the federal government would be paying out about a trillion dollars a...

We wrote earlier about the recent move by bankers — and the politicians who serve them — to unreform the derivatives market, to return it to its pre–Dodd-Frank, pre–Crash-of-2007 state. This is a serious move by banks and bank lobbyists, and it could well happen soon. The seven bills in the House package of “tweaks” — as the House Agriculture website dishonestly puts it — have cleared the committee with Democratic support and are headed to the House floor. In the meantime, there are companion bills in the Senate. What will happen in the Senate? Well, Dick Durbin (always an...

We are to blame for this because we failed to demand and enforce a stop to this crap of un-margined derivative exposure that is "off book" and unsupervised on a daily basis, unlike positions in the futures and stock markets. I have been calling for "pulling the fuse" on this bomb since I started The Ticker for this very reason. The banks have hundreds of trillions of "gross" exposure in these instruments and while that grossly overstates the actual risk the fact of the matter is that these institutions have not and cannot post margin against these positions as they...

I wrote Tuesday about the hypocrisy and perhaps vindictiveness of the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against ratings agency Standard & Poor’s for rating toxic mortgage-backed securities and their derivatives highly before the housing bubble popped. Apparently I wasn’t tough enough on … the DoJ. Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil explains why the lawsuit isn’t just ill-considered, but downright silly: Oh, the poor suckers at Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., fooled about the stench of their own garbage by those sneaky credit raters at Standard & Poor’s.The U.S. Justice Department made some peculiar allegations in its lawsuit this week against S&P...

In charges filed late Monday in Los Angeles federal court, the Justice Department said S&P gave high marks to mortgage-backed securities that later went sour, even though it knew they were risky. The government said S&P misrepresented the risks because it wanted more business from the banks. The case is the government's first major action against one of the credit rating agencies that stamped their seals of approval on Wall Street's mortgage bundles. It marks a milestone for the Justice Department, which has been criticized for failing to make bigger cases against the companies involved in the crisis. "Put simply,...

When Mario Draghi (now ECB President), had oversight of the Italian bank system as Bank of Italy Governor, the Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena (Italy's third largest bank) hid information on the derivatives transactions between 2006 and 2009. This information is just now out, and shares of the bank have plunged 22% in a few days. Mario Draghi ought to be under fire, but he says it's a "Matter for the Italian Authorities". The Mish translation is "It's a Matter for the Italian Authorities, to Sweep Under the Rug". With that backdrop, let's take a look at the...

Goldman Sachs And The Big Hedge Funds Are Pushing Leverage To Ridiculous Extremes By Michael, on January 14th, 2013 As stocks have risen in recent years, the big hedge funds and the "too big to fail" banks have used borrowed money to make absolutely enormous profits. But when you use debt to potentially multiply your profits, you also create the possibility that your losses will be multiplied if the markets turn against you. When the next stock market crash happens, and the gigantic pyramid of risk, debt and leverage on Wall Street comes tumbling down, will highly leveraged banks...

There is much debate whether when it comes to the total notional size of outstanding derivatives, it is the gross notional that matters (roughly $600 trillion), or the amount which takes out biletaral netting and other offsetting positions (much lower). We explained previously how gross is irrelevant... until it is, i.e. until there is a breach in the counterparty chain and suddenly all net becomes gross (as in the case of the Lehman bankruptcy), such as during a financial crisis, i.e., the only time when gross derivative exposure becomes material (er, by definition). But a bigger question is what...

Imagine a situation in which the world’s banks have to find as much as $30 trillion to comply with just one new regulation. That might be something of a stretch, given that the gross domestic product of the United States is only $15.8 trillion, and the world’s 10 largest banks hold only $25 trillion of assets. Yet a banking industry group recently looked into a new rule and sketched out a possibility in which banks were forced to come up with as much as $30 trillion in cash. The potential cash call is outlined in a letter the International Swaps...

The NFA is collusion with the Banksters, government and judiciary have achieved their goal. The entire concept of "customer segregated funds" is officially, completely, legally dead. Guys, it is OVER. I know that many of you are still cowering in normalcy bias, unable to deal with reality, unable to face the world as it is, but you have GOT to snap out of it. The marketplace is DESTROYED. You CANNOT be in these markets. All legal protections are now officially gone. Do you remember how I told you about the Ponzi scheme that imploded in 2007 called "Sentinel Management Group"...

Recently, JP Morgan made national headlines when it announced that it was going to take a 2 billion dollar loss from derivatives trades gone bad. Well, it turns out that JP Morgan did not tell us the whole truth. As you will see later in this article, most analysts are estimating that the losses will eventually be far larger than 2 billion dollars. But no matter how bad things get for JP Morgan, it will not be allowed to fail. JP Morgan is the largest bank in the United States, so it is essentially the "granddaddy" of the too big...

The Obama administration plans to arm Italy’s fleet of Reaper drone aircraft, a move that could open the door for sales of advanced hunter-killer drone technology to other allies, according to lawmakers and others familiar with the matter. The sale would make Italy the first foreign country besides Britain to fly U.S. drones armed with missiles and laser-guided bombs. U.S. officials said Italy intends initially to deploy the armed drones in Afghanistan. Lawmakers who question the planned deal say the decision to “weaponize” Italy’s unarmed surveillance drones could make it harder for the U.S. to deny similar capabilities to other...

Last week, Jamie Dimon, CEO of the nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, revealed that the bank had made a $2 billion-plus trading mistake. The bank has more than $2 trillion in assets and made a profit of about $20 billion last year. So it lost one-tenth of 1 percent of its assets and an amount equal to about 10 percent of its income for last year. No big deal, despite all the hand-wringing of the political and media class. Predictably, Sen. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat and arguably the most irresponsible member of Congress, immediately issued a press release calling for...