The American population is finally awakening to the steep losses various institutions have suffered in the last year. We have seen bank runs that have quickly finished off three regional banks. We have seen the Swiss virtually force the demise of Credit Suisse into UBS (thereby keeping the Americans and British from unearthing and further revealing some of the dark secrets of the Swiss banking system).
The wheels have come off the American banking system due to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. This is more significant than the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers back in 2008.
Lars has previously worried about how liquidity was disappearing from various corners of the global Capital Markets (see 2022-12-07 WILT). This weekend it is the smaller banks being discussed and closely examined. Just wait a few days and weeks for the market discussions to turn to the smaller pension funds that reached for yield in 2018-2022!!
Lars Toomre now is virtually certain the American economy is tipping over into a deep recession. The key to how deep the 2023 recession will be has always been the mighty American consumer. Will the broad American population continue to spend in face of the COVID outbreak in the Far East, the steep rise in the US Treasury yield curve, the 2023-2024 European energy crisis in Europe, and …??
Things are going to get very rough over the next few days and weeks (and months). This article from today's New York Post speaks to the coming sh*t storm traveling across the flyover part of America will entail.
Over the horizon of the Hudson river (a reference to a famous New Yorker cartoon about a New York City resident's perspective of America from Ninth Avenue), temperatures in America's core are plunging [Due to global warming? Ha! The joke is on you deep-pocketed taxpayers.]
As some are aware, Lars Toomre is the Managing Principal of a FinTech “skunkworks” group that goes by the name BRC FinTech Corporation (“BRCF”). [Nota Bene: If one follows the URL links to www.brcfintech.com, Google and some other search engines report that the BRCF website is a security risk.
Many eyes are focused on Washington DC as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives try to wrap up a "lame duck" session before recessing for the Christmas holidays. The Republican Party will be taking over the majority of the House of Representatives with the start of the 118th Congress on January 2nd, 2023.
Liquidity, less liquidity, liquidity (or suddenly very much less), very little liquidity... and suddenly major institutional investors cannot get their money out of highly illiquid, generally private, investment vehicles because they are "gated" - investment withdrawals limited to cash available and with very high redemption fees!!
Lars Toomre has been extremely consumed with his Object Management Group ("OMG") technology standards work this week. Lars is the chair of the OMG Government Domain Task Force ("GOVT DTF") that focuses on topics like RegTech, Compliance, Central Bank Digial Currencies ("CBDCs"), Government Statistics, and Secure and Trustworthy Elections. As always, Lars is dealing with a plethora of acronyms and various defined phrases, so OMG even has a working group focused on that topic too, Vocabularies for Community of Interest ("VCOI")! .
These are crazy, confusing times with low broker/dealer liquidity, I keep reminding myself. How else does one explain the Dow up +737 points after Federal Reserve Jerome Powell repeated what he said four weeks ago? In short, the Fed is going to continue raising the Fed Funds rate until it gets above the intermediate-term inflation rate (around five percent give or take a percentage point), and then it is going to keep it there for a considerable period to shake inflationary expectations.
As a result of the 2022-11-28 WILT post, a former Capital Markets client inquired about what Lars was going to do professionally in 2023. We then had a long conversation in which we:
