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The Resurgence of Risk – A Primer on the Developing Credit Crunch
Stoneleigh, The Oil Drum: Canada
We have been living in inflationary times, for as long as most of us can remember. The money supply keeps expanding and prices increase over time as a result. Central bankers have many tools at their disposal which they can use to tweak the economy – they can raise or lower interest rates, can control reserve requirements for fractional reserve banking and can inject liquidity into the banking system, among other things – and we have become used to thinking that they can prevent the kind of ‘economic accidents’ that previous episodes of excess have led to in the past. Especially in recent years – since the apparently successful containment of the dot com aftermath – we have acted as if risk were a thing of the past. Sliced, diced and spread around Wall Street and the rest of the global financial system, risk has seemed tamed, contained and controlled, until last week that is.
For years, industry insiders and so-called experts have proclaimed the virtues of slicing, dicing, and repackaging risk. They waxed on about how borrowers and savers, and society as a whole, could only benefit from such machinations. They suggested any sort of exposure could be disbursed and dissipated to the point where it essentially disappeared. Some even claimed that the crises of the past would no longer exist.
Yet amid the hype and assurances, few supporters spoke of the dark side of wanton and widespread risk-shifting. They didn’t seem – or want – to acknowledge that by combining complicated risks in unfamiliar and unnatural ways, the end result could be an uncontrollable monstrosity-one that eventually turned on its masters.
Nor did they heed the notion that by scattering risk into every nook and cranny of the global financial system, the vast web of overlapping linkages virtually guaranteed that serious problems in one sector, market, or country would trigger far-reaching shockwaves.
All of a sudden, markets are reeling around the world, deals are unraveling, the mainstream press is talking about a credit crunch and the world’s central bankers are injecting unprecedented amounts of liquidity to calm the markets. Risk has made a comeback, and in that environment the evident concern of the central bankers does not seem very reassuring.
(14 August 2007)
Stoneleigh regularly compiles the TOD:Canada news headlines. -BA
Margin Call
James Howard Kunstler, Clusterf*ck Nation
The seas were a mite choppy off Hedge Fund Island last week after all when the Federal Reserve started tossing life preservers of ready cash to the Big Fund Boyz bobbing and thrashing in the swells. Now, about that “money” — which is, in essence, a bunch of extended lines of credit at the Fed’s artificially-low official interest rate — what actually happens to it? The simple answer is: it disappears into the same ocean of financial woe that the Boyz are drowning in.
The mere $38 billion that the Fed tossed out Friday afternoon, as the Dow was tanking down a few hundred clicks, will be used by banks and investment houses to cover losses in the synthetic securities they themselves created, and have been trading, during this psychotic final blow off of cheap energy capitalism.
(13 August 2007)
