I found money really fascinating bc its so obscure but also so central, this strange occult object always in your blind spot
Democratic donors on Wall Street and in big business are preparing to sit out the presidential campaign fundraising cycle — or even back President Donald Trump — if Sen. Elizabeth Warren wins the party’s nomination.
In recent weeks, CNBC spoke to several high-dollar Democratic donors and fundraisers in the business community and found that this opinion was becoming widely shared as Warren, an outspoken critic of big banks and corporations, gains momentum against Joe Biden in the 2020 race.
“You’re in a box because you’re a Democrat and you’re thinking, ‘I want to help the party, but she’s going to hurt me, so I’m going to help President Trump,’” said a senior private equity executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity in fear of retribution by party leaders. The executive said this Wednesday, a day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would begin a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump.
You may remember Hank Paulson running around Europe in the early fall of 2007 trying to drum up support for something called the Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit (MLEC) or more simply the Super-SIV. He was trying to address the problem that structured vehicles called SIVs were blowing up left, right, and center at the time.
These vehicles were essentially ways for banks to create capital. Here’s how:
According to a Bear Stearns report at the time, 43% of the assets in the SIVs were bank debt, and commentators a the time make it clear that the kind of bank debt in the SIVs was a special kind of debt that was acceptable as capital for the purposes of bank capital requirements because of the strong rights given to the issuer to forgo making interest payments on the debt.
The liability side of a SIV was comprised of 4-6% equity and the rest senior liabilities, Medium Term Notes (MTNs) of a few years maturity and Commercial Paper (CP) that had to be refinanced every few months. Obviously SIVs had roll-over (or liquidity) risk, since their assets were much longer than their liabilities. The rating agencies addressed this roll-over risk by requiring the SIVs to have access to a liquidity facility provided by a bank. More precisely the reason a SIV shadow bank was allowed to exist was because there was a highly rated traditional bank that had a contractual commitment to provide funds to the SIV on a same-day basis in the event that the liquidity risk was realized. Furthermore, triggers in the structured vehicle’s paperwork required it to go into wind down mode if, for example, the value of its assets fell below a certain threshold. All the SIVs breached their triggers in Fall 2007.
Those with an understanding of the credit creation theory of banking would recognize immediately that the “liquidity facility” provided by the traditional bank was a classic way for a bank to transform the SIV’s liabilities into monetary assets. That’s why money market funds and others seeking very liquid assets were willing to hold SIV CP and MTNs. In short, a basic understanding of an SIV asset and liability structure and of the banks’ relationship to it would have been a red flag to a regulator conversant with the credit creation theory that banks were literally creating their own capital.
Good god. Madness.
Bitcoin fixes this.
[nasal 'nerd' voice]The Hawala way of transferring money is very simple and very clever. It kind of reminds me that story (dunno if it's true) about the US spending millions developing a pen that could write in space while the Russians just used a pencil. Hawala is the pencil of international money transfer I guess.