Bank Bailout Redux?

as usual: privatize profits, socialize losses

Uh Oh.

Just days after DCReport revealed the New York Fed quietly removed caps on emergency lending, the central bank injected another $34 billion into Wall Street—amid rising turmoil in precious metals markets.

On Sunday evening the New York Federal Reserve made another gigantic infusion of cash into one or more Wall Street banks.

On Monday DCReport revealed that after going more than five years with little to no cash infusions from the New York fed, one or more of the big Wall Street banks has been requiring gigantic infusions of cash since Halloween. On the day after Christmas at 8:00 in the morning there was a $17 billion cash infusion, our economics correspondent James S. Henry discovered.

Things have taken a turn for the worse.

On Sunday December 28th at 5 PM, when banks are closed, the New York Fed infused one or more Wall Street banks with $34 billion of cash.

Soon after, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange tightened requirements to speculate in silver and gold. The CME, as it’s known to traders, said this was a routine action to make sure the silver and gold markets remain liquid and firm.

Cash infusions to banks are a standard operating practice. Sometimes banks get short on cash. But from early July of 2020 until Halloween there were virtually no such deals by the New York Fed helping Wall Street banks.

Then, in a scary move, one or more of the banks got $51 billion of cash on Halloween. The cash infusions from Friday and Sunday also equaled that amount. These huge cash infusions come after the New York Fed lifted the caps on how much the banking industry can get in emergency cash infusions.

The NYFed’s poorly worded Dec. 10 announcement went unreported by major news organizations.

At DCReport we think it’s an ominous sign that the NYFed is expecting more and larger cash calls soon. Why else would it make such a policy change?

Is another bank bailout on the way? Who knows, but the next part of the article sounds even more ominous (bolding and emphasis mine):

The New York Fed does not disclose which banks benefit from these cash infusions, but people who follow precious metals markets and other speculative moves have been pointing for weeks to JP Morgan, the nation’s largest bank. One of JP Morgan’s units disclosed that it sold about 5,900 tons of silver it does not own in what’s known in the trade as a “short sale.”

Just as you can make money by buying something and holding on to it in the hope the price will rise, speculators can also do the opposite.

If you think the price of a commodity or any other assets are going to fall you can sell it at a high price hoping to buy it back at low price and profit off the price drop. The trading desks at the big banks do this by borrowing shares they don’t own or in some cases making “naked” sales of shares they don’t have at all.

The danger in a short sale is that if the price goes up there’s no limit to how much money you can lose.

The last time we saw big cash shortfalls on Wall Street we saw the collapse of the economy in 2008. By some measures the Great Recession was more damaging and more enduring in the harm it caused than the Great Recession that began in 1929.

Families whose head was 35 or younger in 2008 were essentially wiped out financially.  Research by a California business school professor says the effect has been to wipe out the economy – the equivalent of two full years of all the economic activity in the U.S. since 2008. This means America is tens of trillions of dollars behind where it would be but for the misdeeds of Wall Street financiers during the George W. Bush administration, which basically let bankers ignore long established banking practices to minimize risk of systemic failures.

We still haven’t seen a word about this in any major publication that covers Wall Street… We also have yet to hear back from JPMorgan, five of whose spokespeople we reached out to for their side of this story.

Not to get ahead of things, but it seems possible that some yahoo Masters of the Universe at JP Morgan did an oopsie and lost a shit ton of money on silver speculation. So, of course, the taxpayers will bail them out.

It always deeply disturbed me that Wall Street bank and investment firm C-Suiters kept their jobs after they were bailed out in ‘08-’09. It should have been a stipulation of the rescue that existing leadership be held accountable and new leadership take over. The argument from those in charge was essentially, “We are the only ones with the experience to steer our finance system out of the mess we ourselves created.” At the time, I called BS; there were/are plenty of smart, knowledgeable and experienced-enough up-and-comers that we shouldn’t have had any problem finding good people to take over those institutions.

In 2008, JP Morgan Chase received $25 billion from TARP - the Troubled Asset Relief Program created to bail out the banks in 2008 - 2010 (in fairness, it was eventually repaid in full by the bank). JP Morgan Chase also received $391 billion in lending support (mostly liquidity loans) over that time span.

Tell me in what economic system should Jamie Dimon, the then and current CEO of JP Morgan Chase, have been allowed to keep his job?

Lack of consequences/accountability for the “elite” in our economic and political systems is a major reason most of the country is unhappy.

Seems to me this is a great opportunity for Dem leadership and electeds to pound the table for just that - actual and material consequences for those responsible for taxpayer bailouts. We should be shouting about “privatizing profits and socializing losses” from the rooftops…

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