Juggling Dynamite

As banks continue to report strong (although slowing) earnings, a large portion of the “growth” has come thanks to an accounting maneuver that reduces reserves and takes that notional capital back into revenue. The reality is that the current fractional banking system is woefully under-capitalized all over the world. Much higher reserves are needed to restore stability to the system and push risk back on to bankers and their investors and off of the public–customers and taxpayers.

“SitkaPacific Capital Management’s Mike Shedlock, who is also the author of the Global Economic Analysis blog, says the Cyprus fiasco is an example of what can happen in a banking system that really can’t guarantee everything it’s promised. He argues these are issues that exist in the U.S. banking system too.

“The whole idea of insurance when you have lent out 50x more money than you have, is fraudulent,” he says.

Shedlock points to New Zealand, which does not promise to insure depositors, as a better system.

Depositors may be forced to figure out if the banks they put their money in are solvent. Shedlock says the current system creates “moral hazard.”

Here is a direct video link.

Yale University’s Stephen Roach, formerly of Morgan Stanley, talks about why American consumers are not doing as well as everybody seems to think. Here is a direct link.

Not only are Canadian households the most indebted they have been in history, our government debt both provincial and federal has climbed to new highs as well. Federal debt is now over 600 billion and has been rising steadily throughout the past four years of economic “recovery”. See Canada’s National Debt Clock spinning here. Also see this for further historical perspective

“Canada’s federal debt grew steadily between 5% and 10% per year until 1975 when it began to explode; growing for the next 12 years at more than 20% per year. It broke the $100 billion mark in 1981 and the $200 billion mark in 1985. While the growth slowed in 1988, our federal debt continued to climb, breaking $300 billion in 1988, $400 billion 1992, and $500 billion in 1994. It peaked in 1997 at $563 billion.
Escalating debt between 1997 and 2008, it slowly declined to $458 billion. After that, it all changed. Our federal debt grew by $5.8 billion in 2008-09, by $55.4 billion in 2009-10, $34 billion in 2010-11, $31 billion in 2011-12. It’s expected to grow by $21.1 billion in 2012-13. Further, it’s expected to grow until 2015-16. In just three years from 2008 to 2011 all the debt repayment ($105 billion) of the previous eight years was completely wiped out. Canada’s debt re-passed the $500 billion mark at 3:37:16 AM on November 25, 2009.”

Deficit spending continues to erode Canada’s fiscal strength. However, like the rest of the world, it is the interest payments and benefits paid to private banks that continue to compound as the biggest part of our debt today, increasingly absorbing revenues that would otherwise be available to fund valuable investments in infrastructure, innovation, education, research and development. And this is not just in Canada, this is global. Citizens of the world today have to understand that we are funding profits to the banks at the expense of everything else. The financial sector can provide an important utility in support of the real economy. But over the past 20 years, this natural order has been reversed and the real economy has come to serve the financial sector. We will not recover until we get the banking genie back in its bottle. This clip gives some further background worth considering (Direct link).