Sunday, July 12, 2020

The new deal is a bad old deal

The initial banking panic began in November 1930 in Tennessee when a correspondent network in Nashville collapsed after the Bank of Tennessee closed its doors, forcing over 100 institutions to suspend operations.

The Bank of the United States in New York in December was followed by a new banking crisis in Chicago the following June, this time involving real estate.

With a fundamentally weak global banking system, over-leveraged and virtually guaranteed to collapse as current financial and economic conditions deteriorate, a new banking failure could make the first wave of bank failures in 1930 Nashville look like a vicar's tea-party.

In another potentially fatal error, following the Lehman crisis the G-20 agreed new rules designed to ensure that the costs of future bank failures are to be carried by bond holders and large depositors as well as shareholders, and not governments.

Putting the bail-in uncertainty to one side, instead of a series of bank failures between 1930-33 today's global banking interdependence suggests one major crisis is more likely, which arguably has already started given the liquidity injections that have taken place since last September, commencing in the repo market.

Depositors queueing up to withdraw their funds in old fashioned bank runs cannot be ruled out, but today failing banks find funds transferred from them far more swiftly by electronic means, particularly from larger account balances lacking depositor protection.

All that's needed is for bank bond holders and large depositors to wake up fully to the risks to their capital for the banking crisis to become public.

No comments: