Tuesday 13 April 2010

Did The Fed Just (Surreptitiously) Bail Out Europe?

April 13, 2010

No, not just Greece – all of Europe.  Without Congressional authorization or notice, of course.

Hattip to a nice emailer….

Did The Fed Just (Surreptitiously) Bail Out Europe? TOTLL Max 630 378.serendipityThumb

Or if you prefer it on a one-year time scale…

Did The Fed Just (Surreptitiously) Bail Out Europe? totll 1 year.serendipityThumb

That nice little vertical line is a gain of $421.8 billion dollars of outstanding loans and leases in one week’s time.

WHERE THE HELL DID THAT MONEY GO AND WHAT COLLATERAL WAS TAKEN AGAINST A FOUR HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR INCREASE IN OUTSTANDING LOANS?

You won’t find anything like that in the records – because it’s never happened before.  That’s beyond unprecedented, it’s ridiculous, and assuming it’s also accurate, someone has some ’splaining to do on what clearly appears to be some sort of back-door game being run.

Update: It has been suggested that this may be related to the FASB changes and securitized loans coming back on the balance sheet.  If so, where’s the alleged memorandum items on the other side and the footnote on FRED?  The latter is missing, but the necessary data on FRED to confirm that is not yet updated.

Nonetheless, if this is the case, it’s still bad (just not catastrophic) as this will directly hit capital ratios.  Or, put another way, where’s the additional capital that “should” be there to support what is now on balance sheet and was previously off (never mind that it was crooked as hell to have it off in the first place!)