THURSDAY, JULY 1, 2010
July 1 2010: The End of the Age of Credit
On the road with her family one month from South Dakota. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California
Ilargi: The picture becomes increasingly clearer as Washington lifts its veil. A financial overhaul that was supposed to be a momentous effort has finally been voted in, only to reveal that none of the Wall Street banks will be effectively affected until 2022, which is the sort of number that you can read as meaning: "never". At the same time, Capitol Hill has thrown out a proposal to provide emergency support for millions of Americans who remain unemployed for more than 26 weeks, while those who haven't found a job for 99 weeks or more are in the indefinite doghouse.
It truly is a matter of bail the banks and screw the people. What remains to be seen is how those people will react. All the more so when they find out that those same Wall Street banks will soon come calling again for more bailouts, which is now inevitable and guaranteed to happen. Our fine leaders may try to find a creative way to do it, one that won't attract too much attention, but you can bet there’ll be more taxpayer money flowing to Lower Manhattan, while for "ordinary" citizens services will be cut, taxes raised, and jobs disappeared.
Nor is this an exclusively American phenomenon. European countries face the same fate, even though it's not as easy over there as a Republican filibuster to condemn citizens to abject poverty.
The options are dead(ly) simple. We will find out over the next few months that our banks are screamingly underfunded, and that not bailing them out will lead to bank runs and panics. How bad the situation already is becomes obvious through for instance Reuters' James Saft, who writes that in the next three years,
Global banks face $5 trillion rollover
Banks around the world must refinance more than $5 trillion of debts in the coming three years[..]
For banks in the UK, according to the Bank of England Financial Stability Report, the refinancings amount to about $1.2 trillion by the end of 2012. If banks in Britain raise funds at the same pace they have been this year, they will only collect half of their needs in time. [..]
U.S. banks have issued $230 billion of debts in the first five months of the year, about 60 percent of the rate they need to achieve over the three year period. Euro zone banks have issued $133 billion, or about 70 percent of their needed run rate. One easy to see consequence is that, all things being equal, the cost for banks to issue debt should rise, as should competition among banks for consumer deposits. [..]
The track record of the past three years tells us one thing is likely: the banks will get their money, courtesy of government support if needed. Unless there is a profound sovereign debt crisis, we can count on governments taking the needed steps to see that the banking system does not fall over for lack of funding. So, if liquidity or support schemes need to be extended or invented anew, they will be.[..]
The BOE used an assumption that for every 7 basis points of additional lending spread charged by banks should create a 0.1 percent permanent reduction of GDP. On their estimates upping capital in banking by one percent then equates to present value cost of about 4.0 percent of UK GDP. This puts into perspective not just how challenging it will be to create growth going forward, but just how artificially growth during the boom was goosed by very loose and easy lending.
For the UK and for Europe, this will be happening at the same time that fiscal austerity programmes will be dampening growth. Something has to give, and it will probably be monetary policy. Look for extraordinarily low rates for a very long time, and for new and bigger quantitative easing programmes.
Ilargi: In short: banks have enormous funding problems, and even if they can sell debt, they’ll have to pay a lot more to do so, in the same marketplace that's already drowning in sovereign and municipal debt. The ultimate consequence is going to be that not only will your wages, pensions, health care and other services fade and slowly vanish, what's left of your wealth will increasingly be confiscated and handed to a bunch of rich gamblers with political clout.
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