http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-02-02/putrid-smell-suddenly-emanating-european-banks
( And we can see why the Fed is desperately shoveling money at the banks in Europe - the corpses are coming to the surface again... )
Submitted by testosteronepit on 02/02/2013 20:28 -0500
and....
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-02/how-feds-latest-qe-just-another-european-bailout-vehicle
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/02/2013 17:48 -0500
( And we can see why the Fed is desperately shoveling money at the banks in Europe - the corpses are coming to the surface again... )
The Putrid Smell Suddenly Emanating From European Banks
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
By now we should have gotten used to the odor emanating from banks—bailouts, money laundering, Libor rate-rigging, the other misdeeds. But in Europe over the last few days, it was particularly dense.
A nauseating whiff came from Barclays today, when it leaked out that it has been under investigation by the Financial Services Authority and the Serious Fraud Office in Britain for illegal fundraising in 2008. Allegedly, the bank secretly loaned £5.3 billion ($8.4 billion) to one of Qatar’s sovereign wealth funds, which then turned around and with great public fanfare pumped that money back into Barclays—a scheme to raise capital on paper to escape a government takeover during the financial crisis.
Then Crédit Agricole, France’s third largest bank, announced €3.8 billion ($5 billion) inwrite-downs, mostly of “Goodwill” due to the “present macro-economic and financial environment.” Goodwill reflects money paid out for certain items in excess of their value—an expense that, by a quirk of accounting, is temporarily parked as an asset on the balance sheet to be expensed eventually. After the write-off, the bank will still have about €14 billion of Goodwill clogging up its balance sheet, and more write-offs are to come. It already wrote off €2.5 billion last year, when it agreed to sell its stake in the Greek bank Emporiki for €1, which it had acquired with impeccable timing in 2006 for €2.2 billion.
Greek banks... oh my! They’re being investigated by Greek financial crime prosecutors for €232 million in loans that they handed out to the ruling parties, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ New Democracy and the Socialist PASOK. “Suspected crimes against the state,” a court official called it.
The state funds political parties based on their share of the vote, and both parties pledged hoped-for state funding as collateral for these loans. But during the election last June, New Democracy’s share of the vote dropped from 33% to 29% and PASOK’s from 43% to 12%. With it, state funding suddenly collapsed, and some of the loans are turning sour.
Bitter irony: teetering Greek banks, hoping at the time to get bailed out by taxpayers in other countries, funded Greek political parties that then negotiated the bank bailouts with the EU for the benefit of bank investors [likewise, Proton Bank got bailed out in 2011 though it engaged in fraud, embezzlement, and money laundering, when a bomb exploded.... European Bailout Fund For Greek Money Laundering And Fraud]
Still on Friday, SNS Reaal, fourth largest bank in the Netherlands, was bailed out again—after already having been bailed out in 2008. This time, it was nationalized. The €10 billion package would cost taxpayers initially €3.7 billion. Stockholders and junior debt holders lost out too, but holders of senior debt and covered bonds were made whole.
There is never an alternative to bailouts. A collapse “would have unacceptably large and undesirable consequences,” according to Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloemsaid. As brand-spanking new President of the Eurogroup, he thus confirmed: bank bailouts will be the norm in the Eurozone.
They’re worried that letting even a smallish bank fail could take down the electron-thin confidence in the entire financial system—just when the debt crisis has been officially declared “over.” And so, based on the operative set of rules, the Dutch government shanghaied its strung-out taxpayers, whose belts are already being tightened by austerity, into paying, once again, for the misdeeds of the bankers.
In Italy, a billowing scandal got new fuel. It kicked off with a criminal investigation into Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Italy’s third largest bank, for alleged market manipulation, false accounting, obstructing regulators, and fraud. The bank used derivatives to hide losses during the financial crisis, but these losses are now seeping from the woodwork. So Standard & Poor’s just cut the bank’s credit rating, fearing that the announced losses may just be the tip of the iceberg.
That form of financial engineering came to light when new management took a gander at the books. Now a government bailout is in the works. Because there is never an alternative. Taxpayers tighten your belts!
And on Thursday, Deutsche Bank waded deeper into its quagmire of “matters,” among them the Libor rate-rigging scandal, which might cost it €2.5 billion, and the carbon-trading tax-fraud scandal that broke with a televised raid by police on its headquarters. So, more write-downs are due, and the bank announced a €2.2 billion loss for the fourth quarter. “In 2013,” said co-CEO Jürgen Fitschen reassuringly, “we will be confronted with more developments in these and other matters.”
And other matters! More revelations to come. Already, there are estimates that these misdeeds would eventually amount to €10 billion. Now suddenly: “Building capital is our top priority,” said the other co-CEO Anshu Jain. He wants to do it without diluting current stockholders. “But in this uncertain world, I cannot exclude anything,” he mollified his audience.
Turns out, the bank intends to get rid of €16 billion in high-risk credit default swaps by end of March. It might boost its core Tier 1 capital ratio from 8% to 8.5%. More such sales are planned—a wholesale dumping of its credit correlation book, an outgrowth of the financial engineering it used to hide whatever needed to be hidden.
The bitter irony of the financial crisis is just how common the putrid smell has become since. And how routine it has become for these inscrutable institutions with their opaque financial statements to transfer risks and losses to the people. In the US, too, thesmell refuses to evaporate. And nothing indicates that this will change anytime soon.
Weary of all this, the French—whose economy is spiraling deeper into crisis—expressed disdain for their political class; they’re dreaming of authoritarian leadership, a “real leader” who would clean up the mess and “reestablish order.” Read.... Could 87% of the French Really Want A Strongman To Reestablish Order?
and....
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-02/how-feds-latest-qe-just-another-european-bailout-vehicle
How The Fed's Latest QE Is Just Another European Bailout
- AIG
- American International Group
- Ben Bernanke
- Ben Bernanke
- Bond
- CDS
- Excess Reserves
- fixed
- Monetization
- Nikkei
- Reality
- St Louis Fed
Back in June 2011 Zero Hedge broke a very troubling story: virtually all the reserves that had been created as a result of the Fed's QE2, some $600 billion (which two years ago seemed like a lot of money) which was supposed to force banks to create loans and stimulate the US (not European) economy, ended up becoming cash at what the Fed classifies as "foreign-related institutions in the US" (or "foreign banks" as used in this article) on its weekly update of commercial banks operating in the US, or said simply, European banks.
And while many, primarily the British press,demonstrated how simple it is to confuse cause and effect, and suggested, incorrectly, that the surge in cash was due to arbing the Fed's IOER (it wasn't, as otherwise all excess reserves would have migrated to European banks due to the open-ended arbitrage instead of merely tracking the ebb and flow of the Fed's reserves), what we showed was that there aone to one correlation between the surge in foreign bank cash assets courtesy of the Fed, and the EURUSD exchange rate, a proxy for European stability, not to mention a key signal for virtually every ES correlation algo.
As the chart above shows, there was a clear and definite correlation, if not causation, between the $500 billion that the Fed added as cash to European foreign banks, and the nearly 2000 pip move in the EURUSD, at which point everyone was pronouncing the European crisis over. It also resulted in a wholesale surge in risk assets. Just like now (incidentally, a topic we covered last night).
So with the Fed's open-ended QE in place for over 3 months now, or long enough for the nearly $200 billion in MBS already purchased to begin settling on Bernanke's balance sheet, we decided to check if, just like during QE2, the Fed was merely funding European banks' US-based subsidiaries with massive cash, which would then proceed to use said fungible cash to indicate an "all clear" courtesy of Bernanke's easy money. Just like in 2011.
The answer, to our complete lack of surprise, is a resounding yes.
* * *
First, some basics.
While there is much theoretical confusion over what excess reserves are, which are merely the fungible cash-equivalent liabilities created on the Fed's balance sheet whenever Ben Bernanke has to monetize the US deficit by purchasing Treasurys or MBS, and thus needs to create offsetting money-equivalent liabilities, especially by academics whose only job day and night is to debate endlessly just what constitutes "money" as their value added in any other field is negative, from a practical standpoint the answer is and has always been one and the same. Cash.
And because there is always confusion on this matter, especially by the monetary intelligentsia-cum-philosopshers club, here is the evidence. Excess reserves = bank cash. Bank cash = excess reserves.
In the chart above, the black line is the surge in Fed excess reserves since September 2009 (source: St Louis Fed), while the shaded area chart shows the break down of bank cash between small domestic, large domestic commercial banks and foreign banks (source: H.8). The two are identical.
So that should remove any of the the confusion of where the the Fed's main de novo created liability ends up as an asset on commercial banks operating in the US - both domestically-chartered and foreign ones.
But the focus of this post is the foreign banks. And it is foreign banks that have seen their cash soar by some $207 billion in the past four weeks (and $216 billion using not seasonally adjusted numbers). This is the second highest monthly surge into "foreign-related" institutions since the bailout of AIG, and is even less on a running 4-week basis than the maximum $171 billion posted in the spring of 2011 when the Fed was injecting some $500 billion into foreign banks as well.
Another exhibit showing just how generous the Fed has been to foreign bank is a chart of cash compare to all non-cash assets. After nearly hitting 100% as a result of QE2, the ratio has once again soared from 60% to just over 80% in the span of four weeks, or since the settlement of MBS monetizations started hitting the Fed's balance sheet.
Perhaps all of this soaring cash is merely the result of a massive inflow of deposits (a liability) into foreign banks without a matching increase in loans (the much discussed previously excess deposits over loans topic), which only leaves cash? The answer is no, as excess deposits over loans at foreign banks has kept flat over the past year, at between $200 and $300 billion.
And in case the big picture is still not obvious, here is the chart that ties it all together: a comparison of the spike in Fed excess reserves and the cash held by foreign banks. Thank you open-ended QE, and Fed Chairman, for injecting over $200 billion in US Dollars into foreign banks operating on US soil.
What is interesting about the chart above is that while cash and small domestic banks has barely budged since 2009 and has been flat at just over $200 billion, and that cash at Large US Domestic banks, or those that hold the bulk of US financial assets, has also been relatively flat in the $500-600 billion area, it is the foreign banks that any new incremental reserves created by the Fed always inevitably end up at ever since QE2.
As shown above, cash held by foreign-related branches operating in the US has surpassed that of domestic banks only for the fourth time in history, the first being the end of QE2 when Europe was again "fixed" (just before it broke), the second was just before the coordinated central bank bailout of Europe in November 2011, the third was May 2012 just before Spanish spreads soared to record highs, and now.
With all of the above, anyone who was wondering where all those hundreds of billions in Fed cash created out of thin air were going now knows the answer: straight into the coffers of mostly European banks operating in the US.
* * *
The only answer that is still missing is precisely what these foreign banks are using said cash for. Because remember that as JPM's CIO showed, a bank can "indicate" it has cash on its books, when in reality it is using said fungible asset for anything: funding one's prop operations, including selling IG9 CDS in a borderline illegal attempt to corner the entire corporate bond market. Or it can perhaps buy the USDJPY, in the process sending the Nikkei soaring and "indicating" that Abe's reflation plan is working. Or it can simply buy the EURUSD as it did in the spring of 2011, crushing the USD and sending the S&P500 soaring, as can be seen on the chart below showing the correlation between the cash on foreign banks and the recent surge in EURUSD.
And while we are confident that the "British press", which is now reliant on Wall Street banks to help it find the highest bidder to which it can sell itself, will promptly come up with contrarian theories all of which will be wrong as they were in 2011, the reality is simple, and can easily be tracked in real time.
We urge readers to check the weekly status of the H.8 when it comes out every Friday night, and specifically line item 25 on page 18, as we have a sinking feeling that as the Fed creates $85 billion in reserves every month to offset its other key task - the ongoing monetization of the US deficit, it will do just one thing: hand the cash right over straight to still hopelessly insolvent European banks to push the EURUSD higher, until, as in the summer of 2011 it goes far too high, crushes German, and any other net European exports, and precipitates yet another wholesale bailout of Europe by the global central bankers. Just as the Fed did in 2011.
Because remember: it is never different this time.
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