How The Federal Reserve Bailed Out The World

[girl gone mad]

How The Federal Reserve Bailed Out The World
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-federal-reserve-bailed-out-world">Zero Hedge

When the financial system almost imploded in the fall of 2008, one of the primary responses by the Federal Reserve was the issuance of an unprecedented amount of FX liquidity lines in the form of swaps to foreign Central Banks. The number went from practically zero to a peak of $582 billion on December 10, 2008. The number of swaps outstanding was almost directly correlated with the value of the dollar (much more on that shortly). A graphic representation of this can be seen below:



The topic of skyrocketing liquidity swaps was in fact the headline feature of one of the numerous grillings of the Chairman by the inimitable Alan Grayson as can be seen in the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0NYBTkE1yQ

And while Bernanke was not very interested in getting caught up in providing actual explanations, the Bank of International Settlements just released a major paper titled "The US dollar shortage in global banking and the international policy response" which goes on to demonstrate just how it happened that Fed chief Ben Bernanke in essence bailed out the entire developed world, which was facing an unprecedented dollar shortage crisis due to the sudden implosion of FX swap lines and other mechanisms which until that point were critical in maintaining the dollar funding shortfall for virtually every foreign Central Bank.

The BIS provides the following big picture perspective:

The funding difficulties which arose during the crisis are directly linked to the remarkable expansion in banks’ global balance sheets over the past decade. Reflecting in part the rapid pace of financial innovation, banks’ (particularly European banks’) foreign positions have surged since 2000, even when scaled by measures of underlying economic activity. As banks’ balance sheets grew, so did their appetite for foreign currency assets, notably US dollar-denominated claims on non-bank entities. These assets include retail and corporate lending, loans to hedge funds, and holdings of structured finance products based on US mortgages and other underlying assets. During the build-up, the low perceived risk (high ratings) of these instruments appeared to offer attractive return opportunities; during the crisis they became the main source of mark to market losses.

How exactly did this improper perception of funding risk manifest itself?

The accumulation of US dollar assets saddled banks with significant funding requirements, which they scrambled to meet during the crisis, particularly in the weeks following the Lehman bankruptcy. To better understand these financing needs, we break down banks’ assets and liabilities by currency to examine cross-currency funding, or the extent to which banks fund in one currency and invest in another. We find that, since 2000, the Japanese and the major European banking systems took on increasingly large net (assets minus liabilities) on-balance sheet positions in foreign currencies, particularly in US dollars. While the associated currency exposures were presumably hedged off-balance sheet, the build-up of net foreign currency positions exposed these banks to foreign currency funding risk, or the risk that their funding positions (FX swaps) could not be rolled over.

Once again, the specter of everyone (and in this case it really means everyone) doing the same trade: sound familiar? This is eerily similar to what happened to basis traders in late 2008 (nothing pretty) when the balance of the trade was so skewed to one side, that there was nobody willing or able to take the opposing side, leading to massive wipe outs for everyone who participated. It is also comparable to the situation prevalent in equity markets currently.

What is now unquestionable, and what will be made clear shortly, is that the dollar trade is precisely what the basis trade, or any other trade, would have ended up being for any and every Central Bank that had a funding mismatch in dollars after the Lehman bankruptcy (all of them), had the Federal Reserve not stepped in and become the lender of last resort to the entire world.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-federal-reserve-bailed-out-world">More...

[JDPriestly]

1. No wonder gold keeps going up in value.

. . . .

And it gets worse: the Fed's printing press single handedly guaranteed the way of life for the UK, the Eurozone and Switzerland with unlimited funding! Whether the Fed was within its rights to bet the American way of life in order to mitigate the stupidity of Europe is a question best left to politicians. And politicians take note: the Fed's actions were to the benefit of "banks around the world including those that have no US subsidiaries or insufficient eligible collateral to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve System."

. . . .

Why is this critical? We are now back at a time when the only gains in the stock market are at the expense of dollar destruction, with a concomittant funding for dollar denominated assets. In one short year since the collapse of Lehman we have gone back to the same dollar funding risk exposure as was on the books in these days before Dick Fuld's empire unravelled. While whether or not the Federal Reserve stepped beyond its bounds in practically bailing out not just Goldman Sachs, but as this paper has proven, virtually the entire world, is not up to us to decide. However, a critical topic is: have we learned anything from the implications of an unprecedented dollar funding gap, which is likely back to record levels once again? What is obvious is that the Fed's current policy of a weak dollar, contrary to its repeated lies otherwise, is simply enhancing the dollar funding moral hazard: and the breaking point will come sooner or later with disastrous consequences.

As the H.4.1 discloses weekly, the Fed's liquidity swaps are now back to almost zero. This means that foreign Central Banks believe they have the FX swap and dollar maturity situation under control. They thought the same before Lehman blew up. And they were wrong. As the DXY continues tumbling ever lower to fresh 2009 lows, the trade de jour is once again the dollar funding one, although unlike before when the Yen was the carry currency of choice, this time it is the dollar itself, positioning banks for the double whammy of not just a dollar funding shock, but one coupled with a potential massive and historic short squeeze. If and when an exogenous event occurs, not even $6.5 trillion in Fed swap lines will be sufficient to bail out the world economy. It is time someone in Congress asks the Chairman all the pertinent questions that evolve from this analysis and how he is prepared to handle its next, much more vicious, and likely terminal, iteration.

. . . .

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-federal-reserve-bailed-out-world

[JDPriestly]

2. I just can't get over this information. So, if we lent dollars to all these overseas banks,

wouldn't they have an incentive drastically to deflate the dollar in order to pay back less valuable dollars than they borrowed? What good is that going to do us? Why was this done? Grayson is right. The Fed just went out like the Lone Ranger and made a decision that clinches the fate of this country for decades if not centuries to come. What hubris. How dare Bernanke do that?

How can any American congressman vote to confirm Bernanke? He is a bulldozer on the loose.