Bank of International Settlements

Consider that when we include the rest of the PIIGS countries, Deutsche Bank’s “actual” exposure (as downplayed as it might be) is still 35 BILLION Euros, an amount equal to 60% of the banks’ total equity.

The financial world is awash with theories as to how significant the Second Greek Bailout is. I’m far less concerned with this (the Bailout accomplishes nothing of import and only puts off the coming Greek default by a short period). Instead, I think it much more important to ascertain the true exposure to Greek sovereign debt. And what better place to start than the banking system of the one country that is playing hardball with Greece during this latest round of negotiations: Germany.

When Greece defaults, the fall-out will be much, much larger than people expect simply by virtue of the fact that everyone is lying about their exposure to Greece.

According to the Bank of International Settlements, as of June 2011 total over-the-counter derivatives contracts have an outstanding notional value of 707.57 trillion dollars, ( 32.4 trillion dollars in CDS’s alone). Where does this kind of money come from, and what does it refer to? We don’t really know, because over-the-counter derivatives are not transparent or regulated. With regulated economic markets, when an underlying real asset is impaired (i.e. the company in question is bankrupt, the mortgage has defaulted, etc.), market value is assessed, default insurance is paid up to replacement or full value, bond holders and stock holders make claims on remaining value and the account is closed. There is no need for bailouts because order and proportion of compensation has been established and everything is attached to the value of the underlying asset. When the unreal, counterfeit economy intrudes, you now have a situation where a person can put in an unregulated, but recognized, claim to be paid a thousand times over in case of impairment. Say market participants have negotiated for a bankrupt company a 70% payback for bondholders and (36% payback for insurance claims), and I come with not one but rather 1,000 CDS claims demanding to be paid for each CDS.

It was only logical that following its most profitable year in history, the world's most successful hedge fund (by absolute P&L), which generated $77 billion in profit in the past year, would follow up with mass promotions. In other news, it is now more lucrative, and with better job security, to work for the FRBNY LLC Onshore Fund as a vice president than for Goldman Sachs as a Managing Director. Also, since one only has to know how to buy, as the ancient and arcane art of selling is irrelevant at this particular taxpayer funded hedge fund, think of all the incremental equity that is retained courtesy of a training session that is only half as long.

Over the past two years, the one strategy that has elicited the greatest amount of anger in the general population has been the traditional resolution to the "lowest common denominator" strategy of fearmongering or racketeering by the financial elite, any time it was faced with a status quo extinction event. The primary example is the Fed and Clearinghouse Association's threat that should the Fed be forced to disclose the details of its bailout of various banks (as two courts have already ordered it to do), the result would be the greatest run on US banks in history: "If the names of our member banks who borrow emergency funds are publicly disclosed, the likelihood that a borrowing bank's customers, counterparties and other market participants will draw a negative inference is great." This is nothing but the patronizing of the broader population by those who seek to preserve their millions in bonuses, while disguising their hypocrisy in bluster, and hoping that the topic will be promptly forgotten. Curiously one entity that has decided to take on this "fire and brimstone" head on and to warn the general population to ignore the bankers "doomsday scenarios" is the bankers' bank, the BIS. As the FT reports, according to a soon to be released report by the bank's Chief Economic Advisors Stephen Cecchetti, "Banks are exaggerating the economic effects of the regulations they are likely to face in the coming years." While his focus is on the implications of the passage of the Basel III treaty, and to preempt counter lobbying by the bank themselves, his argument can be extended to ever instance in which banks present scenarios of collapse should they not get their way: as Cecchetti points out: "the banks’ “doomsday scenarios” were based on their assuming “the maximum impact of the maximum change with the minimum behavioural change.” This is a huge point, as it means that even the failure of the TBTF banks could have been mitigated in the context of a controlled (and even uncontrolled) bankruptcy, and the only reason they were bailed out was to preserve the equity interests and the existing management team, period. This also means that the Fed and Treasury are nothing but vehicles for perpetuating Wall Street's status quo, as we have claimed from the very beginning.

It's one thing to hear fringe bloggers raving breathlessly against the collision course that the US economy is on. It is something else to see the Bank of International Settlements call for the baseline projection for US debt/GDP to hit over 400% by 2040. And this excludes the bankrupt GSEs, bankrupt Social Security, and the soon to be bankrupt Medicare. In a must read report, the BIS (of the central bankers' central bank) provides the much needed segue to the work of Reinhart and Rogoff, and in not so many words confirms that the entire developed world is now bankrupt on a discounted basis. With Debt/GDP ratios for virtually everyone expected to jump to over 400% in the bank's baseline scenario, it is no surprise why the Dow may well hit 1 quadrillion on nothing but Weimar and Zimbabwean ponzification, before it crashes instantaneously to zero. We exaggerate about the quadrillion, we do not exaggerate about the sovereign default. The current and previous administrations have doomed this country, just as all other administrations of the developed world have done the same, in order to bail out the banking system, in the greatest fatally flawed private-public risk transfer experiment ever attempted. Those who will walk out of it with virtually infinite wealth are about 0.1% of the US population (the same people who tell you now that all is well, and that their bonuses are fully justified). Those who won't, and will end up doing bad things to the aforementioned cohort, is everyone else. And the "everyone else" is getting angrier by the day, as they realize just how massive the wealth transfer scam truly is... if only they could tear themselves away from the iCrap, watching Tiger Woods' nonsensical Nike ads, or glower in schadenfreude as Simon Cowell rips another wanna be singer from head to toe.