The SLR exemption is ending! The SLR exemption is ending! Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? There has been rampant speculation the last few weeks about the fate of the exemption the Fed provided banks a year ago with regard to the Supplemental Leverage Ratio that allowed them to ignore Treasuries and reserves. The banks themselves warned that [...]
A few have asked, so I’ve written up what is actually a shorter piece on this SLR business is all about. First, SLR stands for Supplementary Leverage Ratio (and it’s not SLF, as I managed to leave two of the same typos in the main article referenced below, to the point the mistake made it into the headline). Parts of [...]
November 2008 was an extremely busy month for authorities in the US. The financial markets had just undergone panic the month before, but rather than dissipate there were lingering indications that all was not yet over. On November 23, 2008, the Treasury Department, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve issued a joint statement on Citigroup. The first two had agreed [...]
On February 23, the equivalent yield for the 4-week US Treasury bill was just 39 bps. That was almost 11 bps (counting full pips) below the so-called money rate floor, to which T-bills are a near enough equivalent to count in that view. It was also 36 bps below IOER, which at one time was thought to be a huge [...]
The most basic link in finance is that between risk and reward. Just like alchemists who once sought a path to gold from lead, a great deal of modern finance was built around finding a shortcut between them. Discovering the great asymmetry where risks would be low but rewards sky high was the Holy Grail of later 20th century mathematics. [...]
It may sound overly basic, but the times being what they are there is a very well deserved need to be elementary about certain things again. That starts with banks and really defining what is and is not one. When money was money, banking was a very simple procedure, though not quite so stylized and rudimentary as it is often [...]
Throughout Milton Friedman’s (and Anna Schwartz) seminal book A Monetary History he tries to make the case that suspension of convertibility would have alleviated much of the suffering of the Great Depression. It had in the past worked in that sort of capacity, choking off the suffering of systemic runs just enough so that emotion could die down and cooler [...]
Where do we go from here? If the monetary system is broken, how do we fix it so that the global economy can be mercifully released from the “dollar’s” gripping vise? The short answer is that it is too complicated to contemplate in this setting. A better answer is that I don’t know because there is a great deal that [...]
Despite the fact that the FDIC is largely charged with regulating small, community banks, it’s mixed-in deposit guarantee “insurance” brings the agency into contact with all manner of banks. This includes, of course, the largest firms that dominate in financial areas that have very little to do with banking in its most monetary form. The FDIC’s area of responsibility, in [...]
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