Tag Archives: Bear Stearns

It was one of those signals which mattered more than the seemingly trivial details surrounding the affair. The name MF Global doesn’t mean very much these days, but for a time in late 2011 it came to represent outright fear. Some were even declaring it the next “Lehman.” While the “bank” did eventually fail, and the implications of it came to be systemic, those overly melodramatic descriptions actually served to downplay the event in public imagination. The world...

It used to be that at each quarter’s end the repo rate would rise often quite far. You may recall the end of 2018, following a wave of global liquidations and curve collapsing when the GC rate (UST) skyrocketed to 5.149%, nearly 300 bps above the RRP “floor.” Chalked up to nothing more than 2a7 or “too many” Treasuries, it was to be ignored as the Fed at that point was still forecasting inflation and rate hikes. Total financial resilience otherwise. Yesterday was,...

The eurodollar era saw not one but two credit bubbles. The first has been studied to death, though almost always getting it wrong. The Great Financial Crisis has been laid at the doorstep of subprime, a bunch of greedy Wall Street bankers insufficiently regulated to have not known any better. That was just a symptom of the first. The housing bubble itself was more than housing. What was going on in the shadows wasn’t...

For me, the defining characteristic of the late nineties wasn’t the dot-coms. Most people were exposed to the NASDAQ because, frankly, at the time there was no getting away from it. It had seeped into everything, transforming from a financial niche bleeding eventually into the entire worldwide culture. We all remember the grocery clerks who became day traders. Behind all that was some darker evolutions. It was a period...

Accounts of the financial crisis leave out the story of the secretive deals between banks that kept the show on the road. How long can the system be propped up for? - Click to enlarge It is a decade since the first tremors of what would become the Great Financial Crisis began to convulse global markets. Across the world from China and South Korea, to Ukraine, Greece, Brexit Britain and Trump’s America it has shaken...

Summary: Policy outlook is clear: ECB and BOJ review next month, FOMC still looking for opportunity. Inventory cycle making quarterly US GDP forecasting difficult, but it looks like re-acceleration still the more likely scenario than recessions. Why didn’t European bank stress tests results have more impact? The drip-feed of high frequency economic data from the major economies slows in the week ahead. The data...

During the months of March and April of 2016 we released a series of proprietary research reports indicating signficant weakneses that we found in the European banking system and released it for sale through the blockchain (reference The First Bank Likely to Fall in the Great European Banking Crisis). This was performed by the same macro forensic and fundamental analysis team that first warned about the pan-European sovereign debt crisis in 2009 and 2010 (reference Pan-European...

It’s official, I’m calling a banking crisis in Europe. Things didn’t go well the last time I did this. Of course, many will say, “But the rating agencies have learned their collective lessons. They would most assuredely warn us if the European banks are close to going bust, right?!!!”. Yeah, right! Reference our past research note on so-called trusted parties in private blockchains for banks. Those interested in purchasing the 22 page report on what is likely the first major bank to fall...

It's official, I'm calling a banking crisis in Europe. Things didn't go well the last time I did this. Of course, many will say, "But the rating agencies have learned their collective lessons. They would most assuredely warn us if the European banks are close to going bust, right?!!!". Yeah, right! Reference our past research note on so-called trusted parties in private blockchains for banks. Those interested in purchasing the 22 page report on what is likely the first...

I attended a panel discussion on private blockchains in banking at UBS in NYC last night. There were two overarching misconceptions that appeared to permeate the discussions: Counterparties can be trusted, hence you can build reliable systems with trusted parties, and; Capital markets are, and always will be predicated upon the legacy, highly centralized hub and spoke model that we know today. Basically, the influential gatekeepers that control access to a centralized, authoritative...