It is official. We all just work for the banks now.
There is no other conclusion to draw from Fed chief Ben Bernanke asking Wall Street to tell him how much debt the Fed should buy. The consensus — at least $1 trillion worth, possibly two.
This is how Zero Hedge nut-shelled it:
And, incidentally, since the “independent” Treasury will be forced to issue more debt to fill all the demand for $2 trillion over the next 12 months, as there is not enough debt in the pipeline to fill $2TN worth of demand and prevent the entire curve pancaking at zero (i.e., the 30 year yielding precisely 0.001%) it also means that the government will be forced to come up with more deficit programs, which also means that primary dealers will now also determine US fiscal policy.
Which begs the question, why is anyone pretending that the political vote on November 3 matters at all?
Below are the 18 banks that, in a completely separate vote, will henceforth rule America, regardless of what particular puppets end up in the Congress and Senate:
BNP Paribas Securities Corp.
Banc of America Securities LLC
Barclays Capital Inc.
Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.
Citigroup Global Markets Inc.
Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC
Daiwa Capital Markets America Inc.
Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.
Goldman, Sachs & Co.
HSBC Securities (USA) Inc.
Jefferies & Company, Inc.
J.P. Morgan Securities LLC
Mizuho Securities USA Inc.
Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated
Nomura Securities International, Inc.
RBC Capital Markets Corporation
RBS Securities Inc.
UBS Securities LLC.
The kicker for Charlotte is that none of this guarantees that BAC does not end up in de facto FDIC receivership, depending on exactly how Fed funny-money lands and how aggressive wronged parties are in demanding closure for their Countrywide wounds. It is clear, however, that actual policy prescription to fix all this is nothing more than using the Fed and the Treasury to mask trillions in losses by the money center banks with the hope that somehow this leads to renewed “economic growth.”
