The Fed Hasn’t Solved Anything… All It’s Done Is Set Up an Even Bigger Crisis

Saturday, May 23, 2015
By Paul Martin

by Phoenix Capital Research
ZeroHedge.com
05/22/2015

The 2008 Crisis was caused by too much debt/ leverage, particularly in the form of illiquid derivatives (mortgage backed securities get the most attention, but the derivatives market was well over $800 trillion at the time of the crisis).

To combat the financial crisis, the Fed did three things:

1) Cut rates to zero.

2) Abandon accounting standards.

3) Engage in Quantitative Easing/ QE.

None of these policies represented “solutions” to the crisis. In fact, you couldn’t even accurately argue that they represented “containment.” What the Fed did was permit the very cancerous securities that nearly imploded the Wall Street banks to spread beyond from the private sector onto the public’s balance sheet.

You cannot cure cancer by letting it spread from one area of the body to the next. You cannot solve a termite problem by letting the termites move somewhere else in a house. So how could one argue that you could solve a financial crisis by letting the problems spread elsewhere in the financial system?

Consider mere leverage levels. Going into the 2008 crisis, the investment banks sported leverage levels in the 30-40s. Lehman was leveraged at 31 to 1. Morgan Stanley was leveraged at 30 to 1. Merrill Lynch peaked out in the low 40s.

Today, the Fed’s has $57.6 billion in capital and $4. 4 TRILLION in assets. That represents a leverage level of 75 to 1.

The Rest…HERE

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