What in the World’s Going on with Banks this Week? Emergency Meetings, Summits, Crashing EU Banks…
by David Haggith •
- The Federal Reserve Board of Governors just held an “expedited special meeting” on Monday in closed-door session.
- The White House made an immediate announcement that the president was going to meet with Fed Chair Janet Yellen right after Monday’s special meeting and that Vice President Biden would be joining them.
- The Federal Reserve very shortly posted an announcement of another expedited closed-door meeting for Tuesday for the specific purpose of “bank supervision.”
- A G-20 meeting of finance ministers and central-bank heads starts in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, too, and continues through Wednesday.
- Then on Thursday the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund meet in Washington.
- The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta just revised US GDP growth for the first quarter to the precipice of recession at 0.1%.
- US banks are expected this coming week to report their worst quarter financially since the start of the Great Recession.
- The press stated that the German government will sue the European Central Bank if it launches a more aggressive and populist form of quantitative easing, often called “helicopter money.”
- The European Union’s new “bail-in” procedures for failing banks were employed for the first time with Austrian bank Heta Asset Resolution AG.
- Italy’s minister of finance called an emergency meeting of Italian bankers to engage “last resort” measures for dealing with 360-billion euros of bad loans in banks that have only 50 billion in capital.
Analysts say it has been the worst start to the year since the financial crisis in 2007-2008 and expect poor first-quarter results when reporting begins this week…. Analysts forecast a 20 percent decline on average in earnings from the six biggest U.S. banks, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S data. Some banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N), are expected to report the worst results in over ten years. (Reuters)
Could that have had anything to do with the flurry of bank meetings in the US. I have no idea, but I do have to wonder, with so much smoke everywhere in the banking industry, is there a fire we need to know about? You can be sure, we’ll be the last to know, and any announcement of what’s really going down will hit like Bear Sterns or Lehman Brothers. One day, all the central bankers are talking like things are fine. The next day a major vertebrae is knocked out of the nation’s financial spine.
Or maybe presidents and central bankers are just making sure things generally hold together through the election cycle. Such a bad-news week for banks around the world certainly doesn’t sound like all is well as our smiling central bankers, president and V.P, say it is. I don’t know any top secrets to reveal, but the smoke is killing me. By David Haggith, The Great Recession Blog
DYI Comments: How long is it possible for the economy to dance on the head of a pin between slow growth and recession is anyone's guess. My best guess for some time for trouble with the banks will begin in Europe as their indebtedness is on a scale developed by a madman. With the stock and bond markets in a bubble looking for a pin Europe may just be it!
Nothing has changed with my model portfolio; remains very defensive except for a modest gold mining position.
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