The Buzz Is Growing That World Leaders Will Fire Off A Globally Coordinated Bazooka!
- Yes people, the helicopters are just over the horizon. Global QE implies currency debasement. A global currency crisis is coming! Got physical gold yet?
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The Buzz Is Growing That World Leaders Will Fire Off A Globally Coordinated Bazooka!
by Simone Foxman, http://www.businessinsider.com/
As we noted last week, analysts have been tittering over a new potential policy response to risks associated with a global slowdown—most particularly the crisis in Europe.
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World leaders are worried, as evidenced by the conference call between G7 finance ministers and central bankers this morning. And with fears about bank runs in Spain escalating, some analysts expect some kind of coordinated central bank action similar to that which we saw announced last November to lower dollar swap rates between banking systems.
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That program lowered the rate at which the Federal Reserve loans dollars out in exchange for foreign currency and gets them back at the same exchange rate plus interest. Central banks currently pay 50 basis points above the rate at which U.S. banks can hedge against currency risk, but lowering this premium could help struggling banks to meet dollar funding demands.
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“I think [coordinated action] is a lock, so I would expect they will announce it at the next opportunity,” Andrew Hofer, Head of Fixed Income at Brown Brothers Harriman told Business Insider Monday. And it’s likely that an expansion of the dollar swap program—and not quantitative easing—would have a much more important effect on the global economy.
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“We can deal with unemployment, but at this point we can’t have banks collapsing in Europe as Lehman Brothers did in 2008,” said Larry McDonald, author of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense—The Inside Story of the Collapse At Lehman Brothers and Senior Director of Credit Sales and Trading at Newedge, in a phone interview.
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He continued, “We don’t know if behind the scenes if there’s a struggling eurozone bank in ‘critical condition.'” I think the Fed expanding swap lines to the ECB and banks in Europe could happen any time Bernanke sees a bank failing in Europe. This would be done not to prevent a bank from falling but to control the spread of systemic risk.”
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MacDonald added that investors have probably underestimated the impact of a similar intervention last fall, lumping all the credit on the European Central Bank’s two 3-year LTROs.
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Those actions have helped make typical indicators for systemic funding risk deceivingly low. That’s because they are a composite of lending rates for many other banks. Take a look at the 3-month EURIBOR—the benchmark rate at which a sample of banks borrow for a fixed term—which is near 3-year lows:
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