From Truthdig
The main entrance to the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, D.C.
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Although the repo market is little known to most people, it is a $1-trillion-a-day credit machine, in which not just banks but hedge funds and other "shadow banks" borrow to finance their trades. Under the Federal Reserve Act, the central bank's lending window is open only to licensed depository banks; but the Fed is now pouring billions of dollars into the repo (repurchase agreements) market, in effect making risk-free loans to speculators at less than 2%.
This does not serve the real economy, in which products, services and jobs are created. However, the Fed is trapped into this speculative monetary expansion to avoid a cascade of defaults of the sort it was facing with the long-term capital management crisis in 1998 and the Lehman crisis in 2008. The repo market is a fragile house of cards waiting for a strong wind to blow it down, propped up by misguided monetary policies that have forced central banks to underwrite its highly risky ventures.
The Financial Economy Versus the Real Economy
The Fed's dilemma was graphically illustrated in a Dec. 19 podcast by entrepreneur/investor George Gammon, who explained we actually have two economies the "real" (productive) economy and the "financialized" economy. "Financialization" is defined at Wikipedia as "a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production." Rather than producing things itself, financialization feeds on the profits of others who produce.
The financialized economy including stocks, corporate bonds and real estate is now booming. Meanwhile, the bulk of the population struggles to meet daily expenses. The world's 500 richest people got $12 trillion richer in 2019, while 45% of Americans have no savings, and nearly 70% could not come up with $1,000 in an emergency without borrowing.
Gammon explains that central bank policies intended to boost the real economy have had the effect only of boosting the financial economy. The policies' stated purpose is to increase spending by increasing lending by banks, which are supposed to be the vehicles for liquidity to flow from the financial to the real economy. But this transmission mechanism isn't working, because consumers are tapped out. They can't spend more unless their incomes go up, and the only way to increase incomes, says Gammon, is through increasing production (or with a good dose of "helicopter money," but more on that later).
So why aren't businesses putting money into more production? Because, says Gammon, the central banks have put a "put" on the financial market, meaning they won't let it go down. Business owners say, "Why should I take the risk of more productivity, when I can just invest in the real estate, stock or corporate bond market and make risk-free money?" The result is less productivity and less spending in the real economy, while the "easy money" created by banks and central banks is used for short-term gain from unproductive financial investments.
Existing assets are bought just to sell them or rent them for more, skimming profits off the top. These unearned "rentier" profits rely on ready access to liquidity (the ability to buy and sell on demand) and on leverage (using borrowed money to increase returns), and both are ultimately underwritten by the central banks. As observed in a July 2019 article titled "Financialization Undermines the Real Economy":
"When large highly leveraged financial institutions in these markets collapse, e.g., Lehman Brothers in September 2008, central banks are forced to step in to salvage the financial system. Thus, many central banks have little choice but to become securities market makers of last resort, providing safety nets for financialized universal banks and shadow banks."
Repo Madness
That is what is happening now in the repo market. Repos work like a pawn shop: the lender takes an asset (usually a federal security) in exchange for cash, with an agreement to return the asset for the cash plus interest the next day unless the loan is rolled over. In September 2019, rates on repos should have been about 2%, in line with the fed funds rate (the rate at which banks borrow deposits from each other). However, repo rates shot up to 10% on Sept. 17. Yet banks were refusing to lend to each other, evidently passing up big profits to hold onto their cash. Since banks weren't lending, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York jumped in, increasing its overnight repo operations to $75 billion. On Oct. 23, it upped the ante to $165 billion, evidently to plug a hole in the repo market created when JPMorgan Chase, the nation's largest depository bank, pulled an equivalent sum out. (For details, see my earlier post here.)
By December, the total injected by the Fed was up to $323 billion. What was the perceived danger lurking behind this unprecedented action? An article in The Quarterly Review of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) pointed to the hedge funds. As ZeroHedge summarized the BIS' findings:
"[C]ontrary to our initial take that banks were pulling from the repo market due to counterparty fears about other banks, they were instead spooked by overexposure by other hedge funds, who have become the dominant marginal and completely unregulated repo counterparty to liquidity lending banks; without said liquidity, massive hedge fund regulatory leverage such as that shown above would become effectively impossible."
Hedge funds have been blamed for the 2008 financial crisis, by adding too much risk to the banking system. They have destroyed companies by forcing stock buybacks, asset sales, layoffs and other measures that raise stock prices at the expense of the company's long-term health and productivity. They have also been a major factor in the homelessness epidemic, by buying foreclosed properties at fire sale prices, then renting them out at inflated prices. Why did the Fed need to bail these parasitic institutions out? The BIS authors explained:
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