THE HAMMER OF THOR… AND LIZ AND BARBRA AND GEORGE AND KAMALA
Lately, I’ve returned to my roots in investigative journalism. I’m trying to get to the bottom to a recurrent episode of collective madness where every four years a marauding posse of celebrities, media figures, and supreme court justices go rampaging through the political landscape w...
We are in the beginnings of the collapse of a fiat currency. Actually, it's the collapse of a type of credit that has been treated as though it was currency, but it's rise and fall closely mimics the natural history of fiat currencies. Back in the 19th century banks would issue their own currency, backed by government bonds that would be held as security by the Treasury Department. Starting in the 1990s, financial institutions began doing something like this again, although this time around the currency has been the triple-A rated tranches of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO). And, while our forbears in the 19th century could assure themselves that a bank note was supported by the credibility of the U.S. government, this new currency was backed by the paid-for opinion of the rating agencies.
Assured by Triple-A ratings that these instruments were money good and completely liquid, bankers thought they had discovered the philosopher's stone -- a risk-free, high-yielding asset -- and this new credit/money has found its way into every corner of the financial system from teacher's pensions to commercial paper to money market funds. Moreover, once the printers of this new fiat currency realized that there was an appetite for their product among yield-starved institutional investors, they did what every unrestrained ruler with a printing press has done since the dawn of money: they began minting more of it.
In this case, credit/money was inflated through the re-securitization of already securitized assets. The Mugabes of hyperinflation in this case were the rocket scientists in structured finance, and the Zimbabwian extreme are so-called synthetic CDOs, arcane confections which invest in tranches of CDOs. These "innovations" leverage the underlying subprime assets to dizzying multiples so that tens of billions of dollars in subprime originations might ultimately support of a trillion dollars in CDO tranches. At the tail end of this whip, tiny variances from the assumptions about the performance of the underlying assets can vaporize the value of these supposedly rock solid assets.
This new fiat currency exploded during the period of skyrocketing home price appreciation, but it should be noted that almost everything worked during that period. What securitizers and holders are discovering, however, is that a fiat currency rests on nothing more than the willingness of someone else to accept it. And, now that the market, most ominously the vast commercial paper market, has discovered that credit is not money, the contraction has begun. The question of the moment is whether anything can be done to slow it, much less stop it?
Eugene linden
[ Huffington Post ran this in Aug. 2007. I put it up now because Sheila Bair has just suggested the solution proposed in the last paragraph]
If the Federal Reserve lowers rates, it risks a precipitous fall in the dollar and a big rise in long term rates, which would only worsen the situation for over-indebted consumers and homeowners. Similar risks accompany other Fed strategies by which they might inject liquidity (the only reason that the euro did not fall more after the ECB's massive liquidity injection was that central bankers around the world were all doing the same thing).
Most likely, the best we can hope for is an orderly blood-letting with pain apportioned where it is deserved. The device that might help accomplish that might be a public-private corporation (largely funded by the big banks that promoted and profited from this mess) set-up to exchange currently illiquid CDO/MBS tranches for tradable notes in the enterprise. This will not solve the many other problems attending this credit contraction (including counter-party risk in the CDS market), but it will buy time, and time is everything when bills come due. We've done this before (Felix Rohayton's creation nicknamed Big MAC calmed markets during New York City's financial crisis in the 1970s), and it will help supply liquidity and price transparency in this vast market. A fix like this won't much reduce the pain for either investors or overstretched homeowners, but it could reduce the growing risk of panic, paralysis and systemic collapse. It will also minimize moral hazard by doling out financial punishment mostly to those who deserve it.
The American Meteorological Society names Fire and Flood its book of the year for 2023, awarding it the Louis J Batton Author's Award.
"Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.
Starting with the 1980s, Linden tells the story, decade by decade, by looking at four clocks that move at different speeds: the reality of climate change itself; the scientific consensus about it, which always lags reality; public opinion and political will, which lag farther still; and, arguably, most importantly, business and finance. Reality marches on at its own pace, but the public will and even the science are downstream from the money, and Fire and Flood shows how devilishly effective monied climate-change deniers have been at slowing and even reversing the progress of our collective awakening. When a threat means certain but future disaster, but addressing it means losing present-tense profit, capitalism's response has been sadly predictable.
Now, however, the seasons of fire and flood have crossed the threshold into plain view. Linden focuses on the insurance industry as one loud canary in the coal mine: fire and flood zones in Florida and California, among other regions, are now seeing what many call climate redlining. The whole system is teetering on the brink, and the odds of another housing collapse, for starters, are much higher than most people understand. There is a path back from the cliff, but we must pick up the pace. Fire and Flood shows us why, and how." From Catalog Copy
