Stock markets closed lower today, Monday, October 15, 2007
by Alan Hall
Move aside, Long Term Capital Management and Resolution Trust Corporation. Here comes "Super SIV," the brand-new Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit (actually, I think my article title is more appropriate), a consolidation bailout for banks entangled in the sweaty, bad-credit quagmire of Subprime Swamp.
When Long Term Capital Management -- the hedge fund directed (among others) by winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics-- failed in 1997, it lost about $4.6 billion in less than four months. That was chump change compared to the approximate $125 billion in government-subsidized losses of the Resolution Trust Corporation during the Savings and Loan Crisis back in the 1980s. John Kenneth Galbraith called that one "the largest and costliest venture in public misfeasance, malfeasance and larceny of all time."
The S&L Crisis was a whopper. Brookings Institution scholar Martin Mayer called it "the worst public scandal in American history," and said it "makes Teapot Dome and Credit Mobilier seem minor episodes." The S&L Crisis ushered in the huge budget deficits of the early 1990's and contributed to the 1990- 1991 economic recession. Most attribute those events to other causes, rather than to the wave of negative social mood that sank the stock market and uncovered the Iran-Contra affair, the HUD grant-rigging scandal, the lobbying scandal, the EPA controversy, and resulted in hundreds of Reagan and Bush administration officials who quit, were fired, arrested, indicted, convicted and/or pardoned.
S&L may yet be eclipsed. "The cost of the subprime crisis continues to mount on Wall Street. To date, the total stands at nearly $20 billion." (CNNMoney.com) Other estimates go far higher, dwarfing the S&L's $125 billion. "Ultimately, the total cost to ride out the storm would be more than any consortium of banks could afford." (USA Today)
The latest "Super-SIV" emergency financing scheme is an effort to enable the continuation of the credit binge. Some of the world's biggest banks plan to put about $100 billion in a fund that will be used to replace the investors who have stopped buying SIV-affiliated commercial paper.
"Details are still being worked out but the oversight committee of the three banks [Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America] will set criteria for what the new fund, to be called the Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit, will buy." (Wall Street Journal)
If investors don't want the stuff, banks have to put it on their balance sheets and take the loss unless they can find another buyer, which it appears they intend to create.
Mary Shelley would be proud. Where did I leave my pitchfork?
This effort looks eerily similar to 1929, when the Rockefellers and William C. Durant pooled capital to buy large quantities of stocks to demonstrate their confidence in the markets to the public. The crash continued and the market lost $30 billion that week, ten times the annual budget of the federal government and more than the U.S. spent in World War I.
The Treasury Department is all for it, and issued a statement: “This proposal will complement other solutions investors and asset managers may utilize in committing and deploying capital to support more efficient markets.” One credit analyst said the Treasury's blessing of the fund gives it a "veneer of respectability" that smacks of a "P.R. blitz" to "soothe tense investors in the debt market." (New York Times)
A visiting scholar with the conservative American Enterprise Institute said, "I have never seen Treasury play this kind of role." [The banks made] "riskier investments that didn't work out. They should now put it back on their balance sheet." (WSJ)
As the liquidity vise tightens, the great margin call of 2007 will continue to spread, and the markets for mortgages and an alphabet soup of CLO, CDO and SIV investments will constrict further… Never underestimate the power of denial at a Grand Supercycle degree peak. It is so powerful now that financiers, who got where they are today by trusting the wisdom of the market, can turn around and say to their clients with a straight face, “We’ll pay you back later when the market figures out we’re right.” (October Elliott Wave Financial Forecast)
Many people enable their alcoholic relative because both are in denial. It's fascinating to watch society and the government enabling credit addiction... because both are in denial. The fortunate few recognize the disease it for what it is.
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