Monday, October 17, 2011

The central bank shell game

Per David Rosenberg, h/t www.patrick.net

Banks pump and dump bad debt on to securitization markets (with the help of greedy fee-earning Wall Street banks and whoring ratings agencies)… bad debt spreads to banks across the face of the Earth, destabilizing financial markets… central banks buy up bad debt to hide it on their opaque balance sheets…  sovereign governments back the bad debt purchased by the central banks… commercial banks in the meanwhile load up on sovereign bonds to have some assets on their balance sheets while consumers and businesses are not doing a lot of borrowing… and, mirabile dictu, the sovereigns start to wobble and the commercial banks are back where they started from….

Thanks Richard Nixon, for putting the world on fiat money.  Thanks Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke for saying there’s no loan that can’t be made.

If the Republicans win the White House, we will have fiscal contraction that will precipitate a second financial crisis as the bad debt pigeons come home to roost (not to mention the trillions of dollars of derivative bets that were made by institutions collecting “free money” by selling un-backed “protecition” on sovereign debt and all manner of other hideous paper out there….

Out of options – David Rosenberg

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