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Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse are rumoured to be in "trouble". Both are "too big to fail" but they may also be "too big to bail". Combined with last week's crunch in the UK, the world financial system is looking very shakey.

The problem is not Truss's tax cuts or DB/CS's dodgey loans to Chinese property developers, it is that years of zero interest rates have pumped far too much imaginary money into the world financial system. Reality is, once again, poking its nose in.

Normal course banking is lending money against security in the form of real assets valued fairly. Arguably, that model was pretty much over when the banks were bailed out in 2008. What is a half built condo building in China worth when the "owners" stop paying their mortgages?

Old school banking had "bad loan" provision baked in. Senior management were not unhappy with a manager who ran 1-2% bad loans because it indicated some appetite for risk. This was a model for stability rather than growth.

Bank shares are traded and, back in the day, careful analysts would rate banks using metrics which included broad evaluations of their credit risk profile. In broad terms, who were they lending to, which sectors of the economy?

Big banks went international in the 1960's and, once again, credit risk profiles were created based on the country risk of a bank's international lending activity. Still a system geared towards stability rather than growth.

What changed? My gold bug friends will tell you that the end of the #gold standard in 1971 has led directly to the mess we are in. Certainly it removed a fairly significant discipline from the creation of imaginary money.

That discipline was restored, to a degree, by the Volcker interest rate squeeze in the early 1980s, but once that was done and the recession it produced done, the Reagan supply side economics and the Clinton boom created permanent gov't deficits.

Much the same thing happened in the other G-20 nations. And, in every case, those deficits needed to be financed. Big banking, really big banking, without too much concern for real assets and stability had arrived.

It is a system of collective irresponsibility. Gov'ts spend money they don't have and that money drives real (and not so real) asset prices up so that banks can lend imaginary money based on imaginary asset values.

The trouble is that "events" can destroy these make believe asset values literally overnight. Non-paying Chinese condo owners, backfiring anti-Russia sanctions, the collapse of the green energy illusion in Europe. All of a sudden, there is reality.

One of the unspoken assumptions about the make believe world of big banking is that the larger players "will not be allowed to fail". DB/CS, if they are in trouble, will be bailed out. But will they?

Right at the moment the capacity of European governments to bail out banks this big has to be questioned. The energy shortage and pricing all over Europe are causing factories to close. People have no work. And that is cascading.

When GDP falls and unemployment rises the go to Keynsian response is to borrow a lot of money and "get things going" again. Which will put pressure on the money markets. Adding the costs of big bank bailouts will add to that pressure.

The people who lend in those markets may have behaved like drunken sailors for the last couple of decades but the collapse of one or both of DB/CS will sober them up very quickly. Now their one job will be panicked capital preservation.

All of a sudden bond traders, FX guys, big brokers, big pension fund managers will rediscover the virtues of old school banking. They will demand "marked to market" collateral. It will make 2008 look puny.

More later. Right now the sun is glorious and I need to hop on my Vespa and deposit my rent in a bank which, I hope, will still be open.
https://twitter.com/jaycurrie/status/1576277907886211072
#gielda
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Deutsche Bank i Credit Suisse mają podobno "kłopoty". Oba są "zbyt duże, by upaść", ale mogą być też "zbyt duże, by je ratować". W połączeniu z ubiegłotygodniowym kryzysem w Wielkiej Brytanii, światowy system finansowy wygląda bardzo niepewnie.

Problemem nie są obniżki podatków Trussa, czy podejrzane pożyczki DB/CS dla chińskich deweloperów, lecz to, że lata zerowych stóp procentowych wpompowały w światowy system finansowy zbyt wiele wyimaginowanych pieniędzy. Rzeczywistość po raz kolejny daje o