Whether the US government will permit them to go under, or whether it will attempt to kick the can further into the future like it did in 2008, is the only real question. This is a very good article on The Atlantic addressing how the banks have changed their debt-drug of choice from Collateralized Debt Obligations to Collateralized Loan Obligations. To translate that into English, the U.S. banking system has replaced its fragile foundation of homeowner debt with corporate debt:
After the housing
crisis, subprime CDOs naturally fell out of favor. Demand shifted to a
similar—and similarly risky—instrument, one that even has a similar name: the
CLO, or collateralized loan obligation. A CLO walks and talks like a CDO, but
in place of loans made to home buyers are loans made to
businesses—specifically, troubled businesses. CLOs bundle together so-called
leveraged loans, the subprime mortgages of the corporate world. These are loans
made to companies that have maxed out their borrowing and can no longer sell
bonds directly to investors or qualify for a traditional bank loan. There are
more than $1 trillion worth of leveraged loans currently outstanding. The
majority are held in CLOs.
Just as easy mortgages fueled economic growth in the 2000s, cheap corporate
debt has done so in the past decade, and many companies have binged on it.
I was part of the group that structured and sold CDOs and CLOs at Morgan
Stanley in the 1990s. The two securities are remarkably alike. Like a CDO, a
CLO has multiple layers, which are sold separately. The bottom layer is the
riskiest, the top the safest. If just a few of the loans in a CLO default, the
bottom layer will suffer a loss and the other layers will remain safe. If the
defaults increase, the bottom layer will lose even more, and the pain will
start to work its way up the layers. The top layer, however, remains protected:
It loses money only after the lower layers have been wiped out.
Unless you work in finance, you probably haven’t heard of CLOs, but according
to many estimates, the CLO market is bigger than the subprime-mortgage CDO
market was in its heyday. The Bank for International Settlements, which helps
central banks pursue financial stability, has estimated the overall size of the
CDO market in 2007 at $640 billion; it estimated the overall size of the CLO
market in 2018 at $750 billion. More than $130 billion worth of CLOs have been
created since then, some even in recent months. Just as easy mortgages fueled
economic growth in the 2000s, cheap corporate debt has done so in the past
decade, and many companies have binged on it.
Despite their obvious resemblance to the villain of the last crash, CLOs have
been praised by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin for moving the risk of leveraged loans outside the banking
system. Like former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, who downplayed the risks posed by
subprime mortgages, Powell and Mnuchin have downplayed any trouble CLOs could
pose for banks, arguing that the risk is contained within the CLOs themselves.
These sanguine views are hard to square with reality. The Bank for
International Settlements estimates that, across the globe, banks held at least
$250 billion worth of CLOs at the end of 2018. Last July, one month after
Powell declared in a press conference that “the risk isn’t in the banks,” two
economists from the Federal Reserve reported that U.S. depository institutions
and their holding companies owned more than $110 billion worth of CLOs issued
out of the Cayman Islands alone. A more complete picture is hard to come by, in
part because banks have been inconsistent about reporting their CLO holdings.
The Financial Stability Board, which monitors the global financial system,
warned in December that 14 percent of CLOs—more than $100 billion worth—are
unaccounted for.
I have a checking account and a home mortgage with Wells Fargo; I decided to
see how heavily invested my bank is in CLOs. I had to dig deep into the
footnotes of the bank’s most recent annual report, all the way to page 144.
Listed there are its “available for sale” accounts. These are investments a
bank plans to sell at some point, though not necessarily right away. The list
contains the categories of safe assets you might expect: U.S. Treasury bonds,
municipal bonds, and so on. Nestled among them is an item called
“collateralized loan and other obligations”—CLOs. I ran my finger across the
page to see the total for these investments, investments that Powell and
Mnuchin have asserted are “outside the banking system.”
The total is $29.7 billion. It is a massive number. And it is inside the bank.
You'll note that I correctly predicted this year's economic crash... although the financial aspect has yet to show up despite an economic contraction of nearly one-third. The CLO meltdown is how the economic crash is most likely to translate to the inevitable financial crash, whether it happens before or after the end of the calendar year.
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-banks-should-collapse.html
