Bank of America: Flash Crash in 2018, War to Follow

 

In its analysis for the first half of 2018, Bank of America is warning investors of a “flash crash” the likes of 1987, 1994, 1998. And  it warns that the central bank policies that have created the current conditions can’t be reversed, leading to an inevitable war to follow the crash.

In 1987, known as “Black Monday,” global stock markets lost huge portions of their valuations, ranging from 60 percent in New Zealand to 23 percent in the U.S. In 1994, the Great Bond Massacre saw global bond markets collapse, starting in the U.S. and Japan, resulting in treasury rates skyrocketing through the first nine months of the year.

Deutsche: The Fed Has Created “Universal Basic Income For The Rich” And Now It Can’t Get Out

 

Two weeks after Aleksandar Kocic highlighted the moment in 2012 when the market stopped caring about newsflow and reality, and, in a word “broke” with pervasive complacency setting in regardless of macro uncertainty…

… Deutsche Bank’s post modernist master of stream-of-consciousness narrative is back with a new essay dissecting his favorite topic, the interplay between the Fed and markets, the so-called “umbilical limbo” that connects the two in the form of ultraeasy monetary policy and QE in general, and more importantly, the narrative that the Fed has spun over the past ten years, which while supportive of risk assets, has concurrently resulted in what Kocic calls a “permanent state of exception” from normalcy as a result of the Fed decision to defer the financial crisis indefinitely.

Bank of America: “The Most Dangerous Moment For Markets Will Come In 3 Or 4 Months”

 

Two weeks after BofA’s Michael Hartnett previewed (and timed) not only the “Great Fall” of stocks, but also explained that the Fed and global central banks are now in the business of making the “rich poorer“, he is out with a new note which looks at the Fed’s latest U-turn, which has unleashed the latest market buying spree, warning that “further upside in risk assets will create problems later in the year” (for three reasons he lists out), and concludes that “ultimately, we believe the extremely strong performance by equities and bonds in H1 is very unlikely to be repeated in H2.” Hartnett then goes back to his original thesis that the Fed will no longer pursue its primary mandate of pushing stocks (i.e. wealth effect and confidence) higher because it is “now politically unacceptable for the Fed and any other central bank to stoke a bubble on Wall St.”

As a result, “monetary policy will have to tighten to raise volatility, reduce Wall St inflation, and reduce inequality. There are two ways to cure inequality: you can make the poor richer, or you can make the rich poorer. The Fed will reduce its balance sheet in the hope of making Wall St poorer.“

A New Financial System is Being Born

 

If Bitcoin blew you away when you first discovered it, and continues to do so to this day, Spiral Dynamics can help explain why. Bitcoin was an expression in the physical world of the newly emergent leading-edge integral level consciousness. It drew lessons from history and attempted to take the best of orange and green worldviews and incorporate them into an entirely new form of money. We see the clear presence of free markets and individualism, as well as the intentional separation of the system from dominator hierarchies (bureaucratic government meddling), which had corrupted all money before it. Its greenness is evident in the fact that by design no individual or company controls the network. Global, decentralized, revolutionary technology. This is perhaps the perfect example of integral consciousness operating on our planet at this time from an economics standpoint, and why it has captured the imagination of so many, while at the same time being violently rejected by so many others.

…
Although I had heard about it much earlier, I didn’t truly start investigating Bitcoin until the summer of 2012. The more I learned the more my mind was blown away, and for a while I couldn’t think about anything else. What truly solidified its real world usefulness to me was when I discovered it had been used by Wikileaks to accept payments in the midst of a financial services blockade against the renegade publisher. This realization inspired my first Bitcoin related post in August 2012 titled, Bitcoin: A Way to Fight Back Against the Financial Terrorists? 

Financial Weapons Of Mass Destruction: Top 25 US Banks Have 222 Trillion Dollars Derivatives Exposure

 

The recklessness of the “too big to fail” banks almost doomed them the last time around, but apparently they still haven’t learned from their past mistakes.  Today, the top 25 U.S. banks have 222 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.  In other words, the exposure that these banks have to derivatives contracts is approximately equivalent to the gross domestic product of the United States times twelve.  As long as stock prices continue to rise and the U.S. economy stays fairly stable, these extremely risky financial weapons of mass destruction will probably not take down our entire financial system.  But someday another major crisis will inevitably happen, and when that day arrives the devastation that these financial instruments will cause will be absolutely unprecedented.

During the great financial crisis of 2008, derivatives played a starring role, and U.S. taxpayers were forced to step in and bail out companies such as AIG that were on the verge of collapse because the risks that they took were just too great.

“It Was A Deer In Headlights Moment”: Japan Dumps Most US Treasuries Since May 2013

 

With the December monthly TIC data due out this week, bond traders will be closely watching if the selling of US Treasuries by foreign accounts, and especially central banks, which as we have repeatedly shown for the past several months has hit record levels…

However, this time the surprise may not be China, but its nemesis across the East China Sea, Japan.

FDIC: Bank of America owes us half a billion dollars

Bank of America is being accused of stiffing the FDIC, the government agency that insures people’s deposits against a bank failure.

The FDIC filed a lawsuit in federal court on Monday demanding that Bank of America pay $542 million it owes to the regulator’s deposit insurance fund.

“Because Bank of America refuses to pay, the FDIC seeks relief from this Court,” the suit in federal court in Washington said.

The subprime mortgage is back: it’s 2008 all over again

State income loans, otherwise known as “liars loans”.

 

Apparently the biggest banks in the US didn’t learn their lesson the first time around…

Because a few days ago, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and many of the usual suspects made a stunning announcement that they would start making crappy subprime loans once again!

I’m sure you remember how this all blew up back in 2008.

Banks spent years making the most insane loans imaginable, giving no-money-down mortgages to people with bad credit, and intentionally doing almost zero due diligence on their borrowers.

The Fed Sends A Frightening Letter To JPMorgan, Corporate Media Yawns

 

Yesterday the Federal Reserve released a 19-page letter that it and the FDIC had issued to Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on April 12 as a result of its failure to present a credible plan for winding itself down if the bank failed. The letter carried frightening passages and large blocks of redacted material in critical areas, instilling in any careful reader a sense of panic about the U.S. financial system.

A rational observer of Wall Street’s serial hubris might have expected some key segments of this letter to make it into the business press. A mere eight years ago the United States experienced a complete meltdown of its financial system, leading to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. President Obama and regulators have been assuring us over these intervening eight years that things are under control as a result of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. But according to the letter the Fed and FDIC issued on April 12 to JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank with over $2 trillion in assets and $51 trillion in notional amounts of derivatives, things are decidedly not under control.

US banks not prepared for another financial crisis, say federal regulators

We also shouldn’t forget that the FDIC is helpless and broke itself, which compounds the problem and shows a double standard on their part. They FDIC will ironically be the one raiding the banks during the next crisis but like to heap burden on them because passing blame is the game today.

 

Five out of eight of the biggest US banks do not have credible plans for winding down operations during a crisis without the help of public money, federal regulators said on Wednesday. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters

 

Some of the US’s biggest banks still lack a proper plan for bankruptcy, in the event of another major financial crisis, US regulators said on Wednesday.

In the wake of the great recession banks were required to come up with “living wills” to prove they had a credible plan for bankruptcy that would not require another bailout from the taxpayers.

What Happens When the U.S. Dollar Is No Longer A Hedge Fund Hotel?

Risks for a further squeeze lower for the greenback, says Bank of America.

In the wake of last week’s dovish decision from the Federal Reserve, investors have been throwing in the towel on the U.S. dollar.

But Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s proprietary positioning data suggests there’s still another major shoe to drop for the greenback. In a note to clients, FX Strategists Myria Kyriacou and Athanasios Vamvakidis illustrate that hedge funds’ long position in the U.S. dollar remains substantial relative to the past 12 months and to other investors.

The War On Paper Currency Begins: ECB Votes To “Scrap” 500 Euro Bill

Please see the source for all relevant charts and “tweets”.

 

Update: in case there was any doubt about the ECB’s true intentions, we just got the official “denial”:

• DRAGHI: ANY ECB ACTION ON EU500 NOTE IS NOT ABOUT REDUCING CASH

Translation: the ECB action is only about reducing physical cash, some 30% of it to be specific.

JPM: “Things Have Gotten Out Of Control: People Have More Confidence In Gold Than In Paper Money”

Please see the source for the video.

 

Following the biggest one-day surge in the price of gold since 2009, it is understandable that suddenly everyone who until recently was predicting the price of gold in the triple digits, or laughably explaining why “gold is doomed” wants to talk about the “pet rock.” As we showed earlier, already Goldman and Bank of America have opined with new and upwardly mobile “price targets”, while the scramble to obtain gold in a world drowning not only in negative rates but soon, cash bans, has already been unleashed.

Mass Layoffs To Return With A Vengeance

Remember the mass layoffs of 2008-2009? The US economy shed millions of jobs quickly and relentlessly, as companies died and the rest fought for survival.

Then the Fed and the US government flooded the banks and the corporate sector with bailouts and handouts. With those giga-tons of liquidity sloshing around, as well as taking on massive amounts of new cheap debt, companies were able to finance their working capital needs, hire workers back, and even buy-back their shares en mass to make themselves look deceptively profitable. The nightmare of 2008 soon became a golden era of ‘recovery’.

Well, 2016 is showing us that that era is over. And as stock prices cease to rise, and in fact fall within many industries, layoffs are beginning to make a return as companies jettison costs in attempt to reduce losses.

A Chinese Banker Explains Why There Is No Way Out

Over the past year, we have frequently warned that the biggest financial risk (if not social, which in the form of soaring worker unrest is a far greater threat to Chinese civilization) threatening China, is its runaway non-performing loans, which at anywhere between 10 and 20% of total bank assets, mean that China is one chaotic default away from collapsing into the post “Minsky Moment” singlarity where it can no longer rollover its bad debt, leading to a debt supernova and full financial collapse. And as China’s total leverage keeps rising, and according to at least one estimate is now a gargantuan 350% of GDP (incidentally the same as the US), the threat of a rollover “glitch” gets exponentially greater.