zero hedge - on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero Sat 2010-09-25 09:47 EDT

Chris Whalen On The Upcoming "Worst Economic Contraction Since WWI (Forget WWII)"

Chris Whalen at Institutional Risk Analytics

The erosion of the profitability of the U.S. banking industry over the past two years under the glorious Summers-Geithner-Bernanke rescue scheme is the proverbial fly in the ointment for both major political parties. Democrats and republicans alike are going to be fed into the meat grinder over the next several years as the banking sector deals with literally hundreds of billions of dollars in direct and indirect expenses from the deflation of the mortgage bubble. For the economy, this slow process of muddle along championed by Summers and Geithner will ensure that Barack Obama becomes the Herbert Hoover of the Democratic Party. The economic carnage that will causes these losses, as we described in a recent post in Reuters, "Double Dip or Global Deflation?," is going to represent the worst economic contraction since WWI. Forget WWII. Think "shrinkage" to use the Gilded Age description for economic deflation. And frankly nothing that either the Fed or Treasury does in the near-term can change this basic economic fact of restructuring...the economic situation at BAC and among all of the legacy zombie banks continues to worsen. No amount of bullshit from Washington changes the fundamental economic situation inside the largest U.S. lenders.

Chris Whalen; dropped; Forget WWII; long; survival rate; Timeline; upcoming; worst economic contraction; WWI; zero; Zero Hedge.

zero hedge Wed 2010-02-03 16:00 EST

Russia Urged China To Dump Its Fannie, Freddie Holdings Before GSE Bailout

This is how the cold war will look like in the post-Lehman era (when all the debt risk is held on the public balance sheet): one country urging another to sell a third's bonds. According to Hank Paulson's soon to be released memoir, Russia had urged China to sell its GSE holdings in August 2008 "in a bid to force a bailout of the largest U.S. mortgage-finance companies." China refused... That time. Of course, what has transpired since is that China, through the Fed custodial account, has rotated a vast majority of its GSE holdings into Treasuries, in essence doing just what Pimco's Bill Gross has been doing since the beginning of 2009: offloading hundreds of billions of Fannie and Freddie bonds straight to the Federal Reserve.

Dump; Fannie; Freddie Holdings; GSE bailout; Russia Urged China; Zero Hedge.