by Chris Black
This time, the central bankers, the banks, and the bank regulators have lied to all dollar holders and depositors.
This isn’t your typical fractional reserve situation. The problem is that there isn’t enough in the banks on a mark-to-market basis to cover withdrawals.
They knew this through all of last year, and communicated it internally in their coded language.
It’s the central banks, the banks, and the banking regulators all knew a huge crash was coming — the phrase is “unrealized losses”.
But they never notified you, the depositor.
Instead the regulators allowed banks to hide their literal insolvency in footnotes, until one guy figured it out.
It’s Uncle Sam Bankman Fried.
Just like SBF used your deposits to buy shitcoins, using accounting tricks to fool himself and others into using the money, so too did the banks.
They all used the deposits to buy the ultimate shitcoin: long-dated US Treasuries.
And they all got rekt at the same time, in the same way, because they bought the same asset from the same vendor who devalued it at the same time: the Fed.
Specifically, as NYT admitted, banks “binged” on enormous amounts of Treasuries and other long-term bonds in 2021 when the flood of printed money cut off their typical demand for loans, and because they thought the Fed would keep interest rates low forever.
And they had good reason to believe this. Powell said he’d be “patient” on rate hikes as late as Nov 3 2021.
Then he got renominated on Nov 22 2021, and hiked rates much faster than anyone had expected — which even Yellen and the FDIC admit caused the current banking crisis.
Why did Powell delay?
Probably for political reasons.
Presidents don’t like rate hikes, especially running into the election year of 2022. And Powell thought he could wait and just be like Paul Volcker, who was “firm” and then defeated inflation.
But the world isn’t an 80s rerun.
Hiking from ten years of near zero interest rates in the 2010s was a surprise attack on every dollar holder.
Economics isn’t politics – the kind of insane flip flops you see in politics don’t work when there are actual contracts involved.
So anyone who bet on long-term Treasuries got killed in 2021.
And now, anyone who bets on short-term Treasuries is going to get killed in 2023. The absolute worse place you can be is to have large amounts of assets locked up in three month treasury bills.
The ~5% interest rate offered by big banks (G-SIBs) is a trap.
Most fiat bank accounts are now a trap, for those countries whose central bankers followed the Fed.
The system is set up to be intentionally opaque, to hide what they’re doing from public view.
But now you can see the printing going vertical. t.co/9rUUjvX42C pic.twitter.com/VaSS1uujac
— Balaji (@balajis) March 20, 2023
Discount window is already beyond 2008 levels. Every hesitation is gone. t.co/h2Nqo1ATKC pic.twitter.com/8O65cvvKKi
— Balaji (@balajis) March 20, 2023