I keep seeing a bunch of articles about Blackrock buying up a bunch of real estate and the most popular theory is they’re trying force people into being permanent renters for their creepy NWO plan. But, I believe they’re expanding their real estate holdings by buying property 20-30% above asking price to hold as collateral in an attempt to delay margin calls.
Guest Post by Jesse
As you know I am on the lookout for a ‘trigger event’ that might spark another financial crisis, given the composition of the economy and the financial markets.
In the last financial crisis 2008, it was the failure of the two Bear Stearns hedge funds that exposed the grossly mispriced risks in mortgage backed financial assets, and the generally flawed nature of the market’s collateralized debt obligations. This led to a cascade of failures in fraudulently priced assets, and resulted in increasingly large institutional failures, including the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
One can draw some parallels with the financial crisis before that, which was the gross mispricing of risk and inflated values of internet-related tech companies that had grown to obviously epic proportions by 2000. A failure of several key tech bellwethers to make their numbers, and some negative results in the economy, showed the flaws in the underlying assumptions in what was clearly an asset bubble. And once the selling started, it was Katy-bar-the-door.
The failure of two relatively minor hedge funds was not a great event. The failure of a tech bellwether to make its quarterly numbers is not either. But their interconnectedness to the other portions of the world markets through the financial institutions on Wall Street, and more importantly, the fragile nature of the entire pyramid scheme of fraudulently constructed and mispriced risk of financial assets, caused an inherently shaky system to fall apart. What was most shocking was how quickly it happened once the dominos started falling.
Continue reading “Fragility: What Has the Watchers Worried In the US Debt Markets”
NEW YORK (Project Syndicate) — A paradox has emerged in the financial markets of the advanced economies since the 2008 global financial crisis. Unconventional monetary policies have created a massive overhang of liquidity. But a series of recent shocks suggests that macro liquidity has become linked with severe market illiquidity.
Policy interest rates are near zero (and sometimes below it) in most advanced economies, and the monetary base (money created by central banks in the form of cash and liquid commercial-bank reserves) has soared — doubling, tripling, and, in the United States, quadrupling relative to the pre-crisis period.
This has kept short- and long-term interest rates low (and even negative in some cases, such as Europe and Japan), reduced the volatility of bond markets, and lifted many asset prices (including equities, real estate, and fixed-income private- and public-sector bonds).
This combination of macro liquidity and market illiquidity is a time bomb. So far, it has led only to volatile flash crashes and sudden changes in bond yields and stock prices.
And yet investors have reason to be concerned. Their fears started with the “flash crash” of May 2010, when, in a matter of 30 minutes, major U.S. stock indices fell by almost 10%, before recovering rapidly. Then came the “taper tantrum” in the spring of 2013, when U.S. long-term interest rates shot up by 100 basis points after then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke hinted at an end to the Fed’s monthly purchases of long-term securities.