Thursday evening update on the global financial collapse
Posted: 10/10/2008 - 09:46 AM
Author: Bill Lindo
Panic has engulfed the financial world as stock market after stock market fell day after day for the past seven days. Today the U.S. Dow Jones industrials fell some 678.91 points (down nearly 40% for this year) dragging down bank shares, auto manufacturers (General Motors’ valuation is now below 1929) and even Exxon Mobil.
Yesterday, according to the Telegraph, even Queen Elizabeth II of Britain was worried. “Prime Minister,” she said. “One’s money is invested in Coutts. Is it safe? My parents, grandparents, even Queen Victoria put their savings in Coutts. Prime Minister, one’s bank is now part of the Royal Bank of Scotland.”
The Prime Minister of Iceland, Geir Haarde, sent shivers through the global financial system when he asserted that Iceland can not, and will not pay the foreign liabilities of its banking sector and that the interests of Iceland will have first priority.
Yesterday, Haarde told a press conference: “The point is this. The total indebtedness is such that there is no way that the Icelandic population can take responsibility for the debt these private companies have incurred. It happens everyday in bankruptcies, that some are burnt.”
British PM Gordon Brown calls Iceland’s behavior “totally unacceptable” and warned of legal action to recover the US $ 1.74 billion loss in Iceland, especially after the Icelandic government this week passed this week emergency legislation to deal with the banking collapse. Unlike the British or U.S. plans, this was not a bank “rescue” plan but legislation that gave the government the authority to seize any bank or financial company, put it through a bankruptcy or other procedure that would put the interests of the Icelandic nation over that of the banks.
Next door to us, Mexico’s peso lost 24% of its value against the US dollar, making its imports of wheat, corn, beans, milk, and rice 24% more expensive. The Peasant Association reported yesterday that remittances for the month of September fell 29.6%, causing panic in Mexico. Remittances from the U.S. are Mexico’s second highest earner of foreign exchange.
On the other side of the world, the financial meltdown that started on Wall Street is now hurting farmers in Siberia, threatening a Russian agricultural revival that the United Nations says is needed to help avert a world food shortage. Cash-strapped Russian banks have cut funding to a sector already reeling from plummeting grain prices and soaring borrowing costs. The collapse of the Russian stock market has closed off the other main money source for Russian agricultural companies, which produce nine percent of the world’s wheat.
The speculators are not fools. The efforts of US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his Plunge Protection Team are being overwhelmed, as the largest volume of financial bets in world history crushes their bailout efforts, which are unprecedented in scope, but are nevertheless puny in comparison to the “tumor” they are trying to save.
Driving all of this is the global “casino” known as the derivatives markets, a market which dwarfs the world’s mortgage, bond and stock markets - combined. While mortgages, stocks and bonds are measured in the trillions of dollars, the derivatives market is measured in quadrillions, or thousands of trillions of dollars. Today the Derivative Association said that the size of the over-the-counter market is about $ 675 trillion. Putting a number to the size of the derivatives market is virtually impossible, but putting a number to the value of the derivatives market is easy — zero!
Derivatives were the great financial innovation of the Greenspan era, in which casino-style bets on the price movements of currencies, bonds and stocks replaced the ownership of those items as a way to make money. The bets thus placed soon far outstripped the levels of the markets upon which they were nominally based, as derivatives became the prime source of “profit” for the financial markets. That these “profits” were entirely fictitious, a fancy form of casino-floor betting chips (securitization), was considered irrelevant as long as the market was growing and the “funny money” was pouring in. Last year August, however, the global financial system died, sealing the doom of the derivatives game.
Today, the collapse of the derivatives market is crushing the international financial system, as the speculators fight to save the fictitious “profits” through the largest bail-out attempt in history.
According to the most recent data for June 30, 2008 released today by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the three largest American bank holding companies, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citicorp, had current outstanding derivatives contracts totaling $179.4 trillion dollars. The three banks combined have total assets of just under $5.6 trillion!
Now do you see why the bail-out is not working? And can not work — there isn’t enough money in the world to cover all these virtual bets, and the efforts by the central banks to print that money, is fuelling a hyperinflationary bomb which will wipe out not only the remnants of the global financial system, but also the governments, national economies and the means of existence for most of the world’s population. Hyperinflation will destroy the value of the US dollar itself, wiping out pensions, savings, bank accounts, stock portfolios, and all other monetary values, bankrupting households, businesses and governments, leaving all the nation-states destroyed, and, effectively, no longer nation-states.
It is essential that the bailout of the derivatives bubble be stopped immediately. All derivatives trades should be declared null and void, and wiped off the books of the speculators. Any financial instrument containing a derivative should also be declared null and void, and wiped off the books. This unregulated, insanely leveraged casino should be shut down, and all claims arising from derivatives bets nullified, as Iceland has done.
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