The Fed has taken its foot off the gas pedal. We’ve been watching this for a couple of weeks now. Crunch time is almost here.…
The Fed’s massive bailout of Primary Dealers and its alphabet soup loan programs for all other big financial players, have now made moral hazard permanent and structural. Why worry about risk when you know that the Fed will always take you off the hook when the shit hits the fan?
How can we know how this will play out? How can we know if these loans can ever be repaid? Will they be repaid through inflation, perhaps hyperinflation? Or will the borrowers simply default if the markets and economy recover too slowly?
Then who will be on the hook for the Fed’s guarantees when the Fed must assume the losses? Who pays? Taxpayers? Depositors? Everyone, again through massive inflation?
Of course, there’s always a chance that everything turns out just fine. The world returns to normal in a few months. The economy bounces back, and all the trillions lent by the Fed gets repaid timely, with no financial price to be paid.
We don’t know, but there will be telltale signs in the weeks ahead that will give us a heads up.
We expected the worst, and we’ve gotten it. But that does not mean that things will get better. The revenue trends had been strong. Now they’re awful, and spending is unimaginable. How can this be sustained? In this report, I’ll show you the data, and discuss how to handle what’s to come.
I warned about it last week when the Fed’s POMO schedule first showed a reduced purchase rate. The Fed is taking its foot off the…
Federal tax collections are collapsing but the US Treasury now has $827 billion in cash in its bank account at the Fed. This is double…
Treasury issuance will go through the roof over the next 5 days while the Fed has decided to cut back its support. That’s a bad…
Macro liquidity measures have absolutely gone through the roof, blown the lid off, set off a tsunami, as US government spending skyrockets to the moon and worlds beyond. US bank deposits aren’t just soaring, they are exploding. These deposits are backed mostly by US Treasury paper, future claims on American taxpayers. These claims for which there’s no reasonable expectation of repayment, other than with severely depreciated dollars. Your stocks may soar, and they may still be worthless.
As the stock market began to rebound, one indicator shows the banks started buying shit like crazy. Like the South Park’s Kyle, the kid who always believed in Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo, the banks believe in Mr. Powell.
It worked well in theory and in practice for a dozen years. But at what is likely to be the most important juncture in our lives, if not in modern history, this indicator failed to warn us. Here’s why that’s terrifying.
We also take a look at the foreign central bank issue and tell why that’s also frightening.
$321 Billion
That’s how much cash the Fed will pump into Primary Dealer accounts this week. Guess how much new Treasury issuance there will be over the same period. If you guessed $321 billion, you would be all but correct. It’s $328 billion.
That’s right. The Fed is buying all of the COVID19 rescue financing. It’s inventing imaginary money to pay Primary Dealers for that new supply. The Fed is printing the money to pay for the economic bailout.
And it’s not stabilizing the financial markets. Here’s why, and what it means
The Fed injected around $600 billion into the markets and the banking system last week. That’s about $2,000 for every American, and it was just…
