Tuesday, April 26, 2022

"Fed Chair Powell Telegraphs the Perfect Storm for Wall Street’s Megabanks: Rapid Rate Hikes Hitting $234 Trillion in Derivatives"

"Fed Chair Powell Telegraphs the Perfect Storm for Wall Street’s
Megabanks: Rapid Rate Hikes Hitting $234 Trillion in Derivatives"
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Excerpt: "The Federal Reserve (the Fed) is the central bank of the United States. It sets monetary policy, including control of the benchmark short-term interest rate known as the Federal Funds rate, or in Wall Street jargon, the “Fed Funds” rate. This is a key rate because it signals the rate at which overnight loans are made between financial institutions and the direction of interest rates in general.

Unfortunately, over time, the Fed has also been granted a supervisory role by Congress over Wall Street’s megabanks alongside its ability to bail them out when its crony brand of supervision fails. There was an epic failure in the Fed’s supervision of the Wall Street megabanks in the leadup to the 2008 financial crash and the September 2019 repo blowup. In both cases, the Fed made trillions of dollars in cumulative loans at below-market interest rates to the trading units of these megabanks in order to resuscitate them and cover up its own failure to properly supervise the banks.

The convulsions the stock market experienced last Thursday and Friday, that investors will continue to witness in the days ahead, are inextricably tied to the failure of Congress to strip the Fed of a supervisory role over these global megabanks.

There is no better snapshot of the Fed’s failure as a banking supervisor than this one fact that is called out every quarter in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s "Report on Bank Trading and Derivative Activities." Table 14 of this report (see page 19) shows that the 25 largest bank holding companies in the U.S. are sitting on $234 trillion notional (face amount) in derivatives but just five bank holding companies are responsible for $200.18 trillion of that exposure or 86 percent of the total. Those mega bank holding companies are: JPMorgan Chase (ticker JPM), Citigroup (C), Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS) and Bank of America (BAC).

The table also clearly shows that the most dangerous form of these derivatives – the same credit derivatives that blew up Wall Street in 2008 – are also concentrated at those same five bank holding companies."
Please view this complete article here
Related:
"The Largest Market Crash Will Burst This Year; 
David Rosenberg’s Last Warning"
"It seems like everyone in the market right now is really frightened about the coming change in monetary policy. This will be the first time in over a decade that the market will have to say goodbye to all that excess liquidity that made indexes skyrocket to one record high after the other. And don't be mistaken: this loss of liquidity in the market caused by a hawkish Fed will hit more than just winning tech stocks. They aren't the only one leveraged by excess liquidity - the entire market is. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand the consequences. The market is likely to crash by up to 90% when the Fed finally removes all of that easy money from the market. Right now, bubbles are already popping everywhere, showing that intrinsic value matters after all. All signs are there for people to see, and we must start acting before it's too late."
A market crash of far less than 90% will trigger a tsunami of margin calls of 
the $2.4 QUADRILLION derivatives, absolutely bankrupting everyone. 
Everyone...

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