VERDICT: No Confidence
The Market Ticker ® - Commentary on The Capital Markets
Posted 2009-02-23 11:28
by Karl Denninger
 

A picture is worth 1,000 words.

If you're an investor (or soon-to-be-retiree) with a 401k or IRA, here's what the market thinks about the Obama Administrations' latest missives on banks and how they intend to deal with the banking system mess:

The market calls all bluffs.  In this case it took less than 24 hours.

How many times do we need to see this - Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, Lehman and now every publicly-traded bank in America - before the government stops this crap, formulates a plan and comes out with a clear statement on exactly what they intend to do, then shuts up and does it?

Will it be before or after the banks all crash to fifty cents a share, triggering international bank runs and forcing immediate FDIC intervention, which by the way the FDIC cannot support without explicit Congressional backstop as the FDIC has some $35 billion in cash but there are several trillion residing in insured deposits!

(How's that for leverage - some 100:1?)

Consolidating the banking system's debt on the government's balance sheet, which this would cause de-facto if not in name, would more than double the national debt overnight.

This in turn would cause an instantaneous sovereign debt downgrade and spike interest rates.

Into a $1.5 trillion deficit and over $100 billion of supply being pushed out on a monthly basis by the government this in turn would result in the inability to cover the coupon and threaten a sovereign default.

Wake up Washington DC - your usual game-playing routine has run out of time and ability to cover.  You have lied too often and sat back while the "capitains of Wall Street" have done so as well, costing investors trillions in losses as a direct and proximate consequence of the lies for which they cannot recover.

Either stop it - right now - or America as a nation is threatened with the imminent failure of both its banking system and political structure.

We didn't need terrorists to destroy our nation.

We're doing it to ourselves, and the guilty parties are found within the boundaries of Washington DC.

Wouldn't it be something if Barack Obama is the first black President - and the last President.

Impossible? 

No.  Quite possible, and the probability is rising literally by the hour.

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