Guest Post by Bill Bonner
Back in the Day …
The stock market paused to draw breath on Wednesday. The Dow ended up more or less where it started. Not a bad day. Not a good day either. There was no bounce after Tuesday’s dizzying slide.
September 15, 2008, was a really bad day on Wall Street. Lehman Brothers sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Dow plummeted more than 500 points.
Putnam Investments shut a $12.3 billion money-market fund. Mizuho Trust & Banking cut its profit forecast in half. And the New York Stock Exchange halted trading in Constellation Energy, after its stock dropped 57%.
But this was just the start, not the end …
Lehman Brothers is carried out feet first …
Photo credit: Linda Nylind / Guardian
The Day the Cash Disappeared
The following Thursday, the Federal Reserve noticed an odd and alarming trend: Cash was disappearing. Outflows from money market accounts topped $550 billion in less than two hours.
If that had continued, Representative Paul Kanjorski of the 11th congressional district of Pennsylvania recalled:
“The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped $105 billion into the system. And it quickly realized it could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close down the operation… to close down the money accounts. […]
If they had not done so, in their estimation, by 2 p.m. that day $5.5 trillion would have been withdrawn. That would have collapsed the US economy. Within 24 hours, the world economy would have collapsed.
We talked at that time about what would have happened. It would have been the end of our economic and political system as we know it. People who say we would have gone back to the 16th century were being optimistic.”
Neel Kashkari, the man fellow Goldman Sachs alum Hank Paulson appointed to oversee the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), elaborated. He was talking about what didn’t happen in 2008:
“Literally your ATM wouldn’t work. You type in your code and no money comes out. You get your paycheck; you can’t cash it.”
“The money was so tight that ATMs could have stopped working. It could have really gotten out of control,” adds Lawrence McDonald, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman.
This could have happened …
Photo via ricksdailytips.com
“I Want You to Go to the ATM …”
Few people grasped what was happening: For the first time in history, a credit-based financial system was melting down. And those who understood it least were those in control of it. Announced then Fed chairman Ben Bernanke on June 10, 2008:
“The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.”
Although Bernanke had no idea what was going on, some people did. One of them knew what to do, too:
“On Friday night, I called my wife and I said, “Brooke, I am not coming home this weekend. I will call you on Monday. Tonight, I want you to go to the ATM, and I want you to draw out everything it will let you take. And I want you to go tomorrow, and I want you to go again Sunday.”
Richard Burr, US senator from North Carolina, was convinced, he said, “that if you put a plastic card in an ATM the last thing you were going to get was cash.” Every financial system must encounter stress from time to time. The shock of 2008 was severe. But it never got to the level that Senator Burr feared. Next time, we predict it will. And then some.
Because the tensions, imbalances, distortions and malinvestment that caused the 2008 meltdown are much worse today than they were then. And the same clueless people are still in charge.
Senator Burr: better safe than sorry
Photo credit:Bloomberg
Vanishing Cash
By some measures, the US stock market is more overvalued than it was in 2008. There are bubbles in auto loans, student loans, biotech stocks and corporate bonds. And there is $8 trillion more in public and private debt in the US alone.
What’s more, the Fed has already played the ace up its sleeve. It has sucked up roughly $4 trillion in Treasury bonds as well as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae mortgage bonds. And it has held short-term interest rates on the floor for the last six years.
And there they have stayed, doing nothing but further enriching the rich and further distorting an already grotesque and unnatural economy. Next time a crisis comes, millions of people will take the advice Senator Burr gave to his wife…
They will rush the ATMs. And dollars – old-fashioned paper greenbacks – will vanish. More to come …
Federal student loans – a major bubble-within-the-bubble – via Saint Louis Federal Reserve Research, click to enlarge.
The above article is taken from the Diary of a Rogue Economist originally written for Bonner & Partners. Bill Bonner founded Agora, Inc in 1978. It has since grown into one of the largest independent newsletter publishing companies in the world. He has also written three New York Times bestselling books, Financial Reckoning Day, Empire of Debt and Mobs, Messiahs and Markets.
Lay in a supply of cash now. $20 FRN’s and smaller. I would aim for several months of expenses worth. There will one or more short periods of time going forward where cash will be in high demand and low supply among the sheople. Don’t be caught wanting.
We switched to a cash existence well over a year ago. I avoid 100’s and 50’s and we commit to only spending 20’s and saving 10’s, 5’s and 1’s. The small notes pile up quick! I advise storing in a fire safe or a secure metal container. If a fire happens, even ashes can be returned to the BEP for replacement.
Off topic ….IS …remember the idea you had about saving small bills and coins every day.Well I counted our bills out today and we had over 1200 dollars worth of ones , fives and tens.I went to Sam’s club and got little bb favorite
Food :white Alaskan tuna and smoked salmon.Little bb says thank you. He say now I eat better then you do sucker.Ha ha ha ha .
IS ,little bb gave you a thumbs up.
And what prevented this meltdown from occurring? Uhhhhh……. TARP?
What prevented this meltdown from occurring? Public relations and the complete abdication of accounting standards.
A stack of $20’s gets a wee bit too large if you want to hold onto more than a few grand. And given that gold is breaking down again, that’s not a place to necessarily weather a storm.
This is why the “rich” are screwed. There is no way to “cash out” substantial wealth. It simply isn’t “doable.”
The equalitarians will get their wish: we’ll all be equally poor.
Have Stuff with a goodly percentage of lead.
When I was in my early 20’s and had a delivery business, I had to bust an incredible amount of FRNs every day, mostly so my guys had toll quarters. Every day I would tuck all my dollar bills in one of those purple velvet chivas bags hanging on the back of my bedroom door. Whenever I had enough, I would go buy gold coins, or silver bars and put them in my safe deposit.
There wasn’t a great selection back then, kruggerands, which I disliked because the color is off, and maple leafs. China came out with the panda in 84, they were nice, so I got those regularly. I had 16 of the 84’s. Gold was about 320-325 back then and never moved. I sold all that stuff to finance something along the way. Those 84 pandas are now worth a fortune as collector coins, up to about 8 grand apiece a year or two ago, 5 or 6 grand now. DOHHHHH!
Of course, if you keep a lot of cash on hand, you are “obviously” engaged in criminal enterprise, and the cash may be stolen with impunity by government goons, errr I mean, seized and forfeited in “due process” (ha!). God forbid you also have a gun in the house, you must be some kind of drug lord terrorist child molester.
The monster is going crazy. Try not to be where it falls.