Dear CIGAs,
Happy Saturday morning in the "Mother of all Crises" that few understand and only a very few care about.
Consequences cannot be eliminated, adjusted or spun away.
I have seen many tries at explaining this as just another bailout. Both the media and politicos are telling the public to buy toxic paper, failed mortgages and so on.
Has anybody stopped for a moment and asked specifically WHAT IS THE PLAN other than to give the Treasury the right to tell the Federal Reserve to issue $700 billion dollars from their endless blank checking account, so far without checks and balances and free from any litigation from anywhere by everyone.?
Think deeply about this!
OTC derivatives have a measured life wherein more OTC derivatives have to be written to accommodate changes in the interest rate market, assumed risk, creditworthiness of either counter-party and many other variables. Eventually there will not be a number big enough to define the size of the notional value of all written OTC derivatives.
Where did anyone get the idea that those endless equations will in fact ever recover from the ashes?
Keep in mind in bankruptcy of one side of the arrangement (I can't call it a transaction because it isn't yet) notional value becomes real value.
Where did the $700 billion number come from? How was it calculated?
US Economy: Even Hank Paulson's bail-out plan cannot detox global banking
Can the rescue package really halt our slide into a new Depression, asks Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 3:30AM BST 27 Sep 2008
Even if Congress backs the Paulson bail-out, the $700 billion blast cannot save the US, Britain or the world from the deepest economic slump since the Thirties. If Congress balks, God help us. The credit system is suffering a heart attack. Inter-bank lending is paralysed. Funds are accepting zero interest on US Treasury notes for the first time since Pearl Harbour, because no bank account is safe.
Wherever you look – dollar, euro, sterling Libor (the rate at which banks lend to each other), or spreads on credit derivatives – the stress has reached breaking point. If borrowers cannot roll over the three-month loans that are the lifeblood of business, they will default en masse.
“Money markets are imploding. If no action is taken very soon, there is a significant risk that the global economy will collapse,” says BNP Paribas. Almost every trader says much the same thing. So does US treasury secretary Hank Paulson, who as Toby Harnden reports, literally dropped on bended knee to beg help from Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Republican refuseniks – defying their president – have a grim responsibility if they now tip America over the edge, setting off the “adverse feedback loop” that so terrifies the US Federal Reserve. Like players in a Greek tragedy, they seem determined to repeat the “liquidation” policy that led to the Great Depression – and to Democrat ascendancy for years.
Lehman Brothers’ collapse showed the chain of inter-connections that can cause mayhem across a clutch of different markets. That was just one bank – albeit with $630 billion or so in liabilities.
More…
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
What is in the $700 billion brown paper bag?
Breakthrough Reached in Negotiations on Bailout
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders and the Bush administration reached a tentative agreement early Sunday on what may become the largest financial bailout in American history, authorizing the Treasury to purchase $700 billion in troubled debt from ailing firms in an extraordinary intervention to prevent widespread economic collapse.
Officials said that Congressional staff members would work through the night to finalize the language of the agreement and draft a bill, and that the bill would be brought to the House floor for a vote on Monday.
The bill includes pay limits for some executives whose firms seek help, aides said. And it requires the government to use its new role as owner of distressed mortgage-backed securities to make more aggressive efforts to prevent home foreclosures.In some cases, the government would receive an equity stake in companies that seek aid, allowing taxpayers to profit should the rescue plan work and the private firms flourish in the months and years ahead.
More…
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
But they still keep writing this garbage. Financial TV quotes the number as an index of risk to a situation. Is that not complete and unadulterated greed driven madness while Henny Penny is falling from the sky?
Behind Insurers Crisis, Blind Eye to a Web of Risk
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Published: September 27, 2008
It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions.
--Joseph J. Cassano, a former A.I.G. executive, August 2007
Two weeks ago, the nations most powerful regulators and bankers huddled in the Lower Manhattan fortress that is the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, desperately trying to stave off disaster.
As the group, led by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., pondered the collapse of one of Americas oldest investment banks, Lehman Brothers, a more dangerous threat emerged: American International Group, the worlds largest insurer, was teetering. A.I.G. needed billions of dollars to right itself and had suddenly begged for help
More…
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Conservatorships are usually done when your crazy uncle is throwing family money into the river.
Senate sends big spending bill to Bush
Bill lifts offshore drilling ban, aids Gulf Coast disaster victims
The Associated Press
Updated 12:57 p.m. PT, Sat., Sept. 27, 2008
WASHINGTON - Automakers gained $25 billion in taxpayer-subsidized loans and oil companies won elimination of a long-standing ban on drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as the Senate passed a sprawling spending bill Saturday.
The 78-12 vote sent the $634 billion measure to President Bush, who was expected to sign it even though it spends more money and contains more pet projects than he would have liked.
The measure is needed to keep the government operating beyond the current budget year, which ends Tuesday. As a result, the legislation is one of the few bills this election year that simply must pass. Bush’s signature would mean Congress could avoid a lame-duck session after the Nov. 4 election.
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the bill "stands as a reminder of the failure of the Democratic Congress to fund the government in regular order." But, he said, it "puts the United States one step closer to ending our dependence on foreign sources of energy" by lifting the offshore drilling ban and opening up huge reserves of oil shale in the West.
The Pentagon is in line for a record budget. In addition to $70 billion approved this summer for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department would receive $488 billion, a six percent increase. The spending bill also offers aid to victims of flooding in the Midwest and recent hurricanes across the Gulf Coast.
More…
