Saturday, October 15, 2011

Hide it, by Releasing it Friday Night.

Any good political operative knows that if you have to release a story, but want it not to be seen, you release it Friday night, which is exactly what the US Treasury as well as Canadian and Australian Finance ministers did late Friday in telling the Europeans that they were opposed to expanding the IMF bailout fund. Rough translation: Europe's problems are Europe's.

G-20 sources said the BRIC countries are open to the idea, however, China just spent billions this week bailing out its own banking sector, not sure they'll be of much help.

In other news the French Finance minister speaking about private Greek bondholder haircuts, up to now supposedly capped at a 21% voluntary loss, in his words, will be "More, that's more or less certain". There is talk that Greek bondholders could take up to 50% losses, but anything above 21%, even 21.0001% is no longer considered "voluntary" be the rating's agencies, which triggers a credit event and CDS (insurance policies against default that banks have been selling and are the latest subject of banking sector problems) kick in, which will cause a multi billion dollar collapse in the banking sector, mostly in Europe. You may remember the news article I brought you this week about Austria's biggest bank, ERSTE, having hid billions of dollars of CDS they had written in the European banking stress tests and will cost the bank 14% of book value right off the bat when forced to mark the CDS to market. This created a bigger panic in questioning how many other banks did the same and what the real amount of undisclosed CDS positions are. When those are forced to be marked to market, the banks will take huge losses, should a credit event be triggered, I'm not sure there's enough money in even an expanded EFSF and IMF combined to hold back the flood waters. This is akin to the next housing bubble, but this time it won't be 2 Wall Street banks that cause a near financial system collapse, but perhaps hundreds of banks.

Friday nights are alright for lying...

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