Tag Archives: Debt service

Liquidity Crisis: Wells Fargo & Repo Markets Sound Alarms, by Matthew Piepenburg

If you’re debt is rising at a 45-degree and the wherewithal to pay that debt is only rising at a 25-degree angle, sooner or later you’re going to run out of money. From Matthew Piepenburg at goldswitzerland.com:

Every financial crisis ultimately boils down to a liquidity crisis, namely: Not enough fiat dollars to keep the financial wheels sufficiently greased.

Below, we look at two warning signs from Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) and the reverse repo market which warn of precisely that: a liquidity crisis.

From Debt Binge to Credit Crunch: A Chronicle of Excess

In a world in which consumers, corporations, and sovereigns have falsely confused debt-based growth as actual growth, a liquidity crisis is not a theoretical debate, but a mathematical certainty.

For years, self-serving politico’s, central bankers, Wall Street sell-siders, and a woefully unsophisticated cadre of main stream financial “journalists” have endeavored to downplay this rise-and-“pop” certainty by deliberately ignoring the $280T debt elephant in the global living room.

Of course, that debt, for years, has been “monetized” by increasingly debased currencies and rising money supplies created literally from central bank mouse-clicks rather than productivity, as evidenced by the embarrassing fact that global GDP is less than 1/3 of the global debt.

Needless to say, money (i.e., “liquidity”) created out of thin air, and then justified with even thinner (yet comfortably titled) policies like Modern Monetary Theory has its temporary charms.

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A Million Dollars a Minute, by Andrew P. Napolitano

On present course, at the end of the President Trump’s present terms, 40 percent of tax revenues will be needed just to pay interest on the debt. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Imagine you open the faucet of your kitchen sink expecting water and instead out comes cash. Now imagine that it comes out at the rate of $1 million a minute. You call your plumber, who thinks you’re crazy. To get you off the phone, he opines that it is your sink and therefore must be your money. So you spend it wildly. Then you realize that the money wasn’t yours and you owe it back.

Now imagine that this happens every minute of every day for the next three years. At the end of the three years, you owe back more than $6 trillion. So you borrow $6 trillion to pay back the $6 trillion you owe.

Is this unending spigot of cash reality or fantasy?

I am not speaking of Amazon or Google or Exxon Mobil or Apple. They deliver products that appeal to consumers and investors. They deal in copious amounts of money because they sell what hundreds of millions of people want to purchase and they do it so efficiently that hundreds of thousands want to invest in them. If they fail to persuade consumers to purchase their products and investors to purchase their financial instruments, they will go out of business.

My analogy about all that cash in your kitchen sink that just keeps coming is not about voluntary commercial transactions, which you are free to accept or reject. It is about the government’s spending what it doesn’t have, the consequences of which you are not free to reject.

Government produces no products that consumers are willing to pay for voluntarily, and it doesn’t sell shares of stock in its assets. It doesn’t generate wealth; it seizes it. And when it can no longer politically get away with seizing, it borrows. It borrows a great deal of money — money that it rolls over, by borrowing trillions to pay back trillions to prior lenders, and thus its debt never goes away.

To continue reading: A Million Dollars a Minute

Yes, But at What Cost? from Charles Hugh Smith

Debt can pump up an economy. Invariably, it also takes it down. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

This is how our entire status quo maintains the illusion of normalcy: by avoiding a full accounting of the costs.
The economy’s going great–but at what cost? “Normalcy” has been restored, but at what cost? Profits are soaring, but at what cost? Our pain is being reduced–but at what cost?
The status quo delights in celebrating gains, but the costs required to generate those gains are ignored for one simple reason: the costs exceed the gains by a wide margin. As long as the costs can be hidden, diluted, minimized and rationalized, then phantom gains can be presented as real.
Exhibit One: the US public debt. If you borrow and blow enough money, it’s not too difficult to generate a bit of “growth”–but at what cost?
Exhibit Two: opioid deaths. One of the few metrics that’s climbing as fast as the national debt is the death rate from prescription and synthetic opioids:
Exhibit Three: student loan debt. Here’s a chart of debt that is federally originated but paid by individual students: the infamous student loan debt that has shot up over $1 trillion in a few years.
You see the point: the cost are skyrocketing but the gains are diminishing. The costs of maintaining the illusion of “normalcy”–for example, that going to college is “still affordable”– are soaring, while the gains of a college education are declining as credentials and diplomas are is oversupply. (What’s scarce are the real-world skillsets employers actually need.)
To continue reading: Yes, But at What Cost?

This Has Never Happened Before… by Tyler Durden

Here’s a milestone, if you want to call it that, from Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

With debt ceilings, spending plans, and tax reforms focusing all eyes on Washington, we thought it notable that for the first time in US history, the cost of interest on US government debt has risen above half a trillion dollars

 

Source: @NorthmanTrader

One wonders, given the grandiose spending plans, if we will ever get back below half a trillion dollars?