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The Telegraph
The financial crisis spreading like wildfire across the former Soviet bloc threatens to set off a second and more dangerous banking crisis in Western Europe, tipping the whole Continent into a fully-fledged economic slump. Currency pegs are being tested to destruction on the fringes of Europe’s monetary union in a traumatic upheaval that recalls the collapse of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

“This is the biggest currency crisis the world has ever seen,” said Neil Mellor, a strategist at Bank of New York Mellon. Experts fear the mayhem may soon trigger a chain reaction within the eurozone itself. The risk is a surge in capital flight from Austria – the country, as it happens, that set off the global banking collapse of May 1931 when Credit-Anstalt went down – and from a string of Club Med countries that rely on foreign funding to cover huge current account deficits.

The latest data from the Bank for International Settlements shows that Western European banks hold almost all the exposure to the emerging market bubble, now busting with spectacular effect. They account for three-quarters of the total $4.7 trillion £2.96 trillion) in cross-border bank loans to Eastern Europe, Latin America and emerging Asia extended during the global credit boom – a sum that vastly exceeds the scale of both the US sub-prime and Alt-A debacles.

Europe has already had its first foretaste of what this may mean. Iceland’s demise has left them nursing likely losses of $74bn (£47bn). The Germans have lost $22bn. Stephen Jen, currency chief at Morgan Stanley, says the emerging market crash is a vastly underestimated risk. It threatens to become “the second epicentre of the global financial crisis”, this time unfolding in Europe rather than America. Austria’s bank exposure to emerging markets is equal to 85pc of GDP – with a heavy concentration in Hungary, Ukraine, and Serbia – all now queuing up (with Belarus) for rescue packages from the International Monetary Fund.

Exposure is 50pc of GDP for Switzerland, 25pc for Sweden, 24pc for the UK, and 23pc for Spain. The US figure is just 4pc. America is the staid old lady in this drama. Amazingly, Spanish banks alone have lent $316bn to Latin America, almost twice the lending by all US banks combined ($172bn) to what was once the US backyard. Hence the growing doubts about the health of Spain’s financial system – already under stress from its own property crash – as Argentina spirals towards another default, and Brazil’s currency, bonds and stocks all go into freefall.

Broadly speaking, the US and Japan sat out the emerging market credit boom. The lending spree has been a European play – often using dollar balance sheets, adding another ugly twist as global “deleveraging” causes the dollar to rocket. Nowhere has this been more extreme than in the ex-Soviet bloc. The region has borrowed $1.6 trillion in dollars, euros, and Swiss francs. A few dare-devil homeowners in Hungary and Latvia took out mortgages in Japanese yen. They have just suffered a 40pc rise in their debt since July. Nobody warned them what happens when the Japanese carry trade goes into brutal reverse, as it does when the cycle turns.

The IMF’s experts drafted a report two years ago – Asia 1996 and Eastern Europe 2006 – Déjà vu all over again? – warning that the region exhibited the most dangerous excesses in the world. Inexplicably, the text was never published, though underground copies circulated. Little was done to cool credit growth, or to halt the fatal reliance on foreign capital. Last week, the silent authors had their moment of vindication as Eastern Europe went haywire. Hungary stunned the markets by raising rates 3pc to 11.5pc in a last-ditch attempt to defend the forint’s currency peg in the ERM.

It is just blood in the water for hedge funds sharks, eyeing a long line of currency kills. “The economy is not strong enough to take it, so you know it is unsustainable,” said Simon Derrick, currency strategist at the Bank of New York Mellon. More

Ilargi
The Automatic Earth
US home prices have a record drop, and foreclosure filings have a record surge, to 10.000 every day. James Lockhart says the Freddie and Fannie debt is explicitly guaranteed by the US government, while the September 7 legal document that outlines the takeover of Fannie and Freddie explicitly denies any such guarantee. Meanwhile, the FDIC claims that the US government will start guaranteeing bad mortgages. That may seem nice and all, but is it really such a great idea for the US taxpayer to start buying up grossly overvalued real estate, that will keep on losing value regardless?

Bond markets are busy preparing for a collapse by Argentina, Pakistan, Hungary or another country on a by now long list of crash candidates. Belarus was added to the list today, and filed for IMF funds. Depending on which country falls first, and on the size of its economy, a sovereign debt default event could lead to unpredictable panic.

Hedge funds as an industry may be a relic of the past, but they will not go quietly. On the one hand to need to get rid of leverage, and therefore sell their assets, including lots of gold. That’s why the demand for gold soars, while its price plummets. On the other hand, the funds are circling above countries in distress. Betting against the Hungarian forint looks like a money maker. And Pakistan may have more people than Russia, it still is a small enough economy to make shorting it attractive.

Alan Greenspan needs to be arrested, for fraud and treason. The fact that this man, who has deliberately gutted the US economy over the past 20 years, is hardly under any sort of serious scrutiny, and is not only allowed to remain out of prison, but gets the chance to go public with ever more lies about his actions, points to troublesome inadequacies in the political system that some still refer to as a democracy. The same goes for Hank Paulson, who can’t just walk free, but was even appointed dictator over Washington.

And that is why Nouriel Roubini predicts war. More

Source: The Telegraph
Thousands of hedge funds are on the brink of failure as the global economy contracts with unexpected severity, according to the chief executive of GLG, Europe’s biggest hedge fund. Emmanuel Roman, of GLG Partners, said 25pc-30pc of the world’s 8,000 hedge funds would disappear “in a Darwinian process”, either going bust or deciding meagre profits are not worth their efforts.

“This will go down in the history books as one of the greatest fiascoes of banking in 100 years,” said Mr Roman, who co-runs London and New York-based GLG, a former division of Lehman Brothers Holdings with assets of $24bn (£14.8bn). “There need to be some scapegoats, and the regulators are going to go hunt people. That will be good in the long run.” His views were echoed by Professor Nouriel Roubini, a former US Treasury and presidential adviser known for his accurate prediction of financial crises, who estimated that up to 500 hedge funds would fail within months.

Both men were speaking at the same hedge fund conference in London on Thursday, and Prof Roubini said he would not be surprised if the US and other countries soon had to close their stock markets for more than a week to halt descent into “sheer panic”. The economist warned that the world is heading for a protracted recession that will end the US’s financial dominance. “It’s the beginning of the decline of the US financial empire. The Great Depression ended in a massive war. I hope that’s not going to happen but it’s pretty ugly now,” Prof Roubini said.

He added that turmoil over world trade, currency markets and debt is likely to cause geopolitical tensions between the Western world and emerging superpowers such as Russia, China and “a bunch of unstable oil states”. The conference saw analysts, economists and hedge fund managers discussing the possibility that global recession could now last two years on fears that government bail-outs and nationalisations have failed to stop the markets slumping.

“We’re now paying the price for the biggest asset and credit bubble in history,” Prof Roubini said, advising investors to stay clear of risky assets and keep their money in cash. “The bail-outs have not worked because the markets are no longer rallying, and the policy-makers have run out of options.” The global financial meltdown accelerated this month, with the UK and US governments being forced to take stakes in some of the world’s biggest banks. Stock markets around the world have fallen sharply this month as investors’ concern switches to the impact on the wider economy.

“It’s like we’re walking blind in a minefield,” said Prof Roubini. ” Every situation has become risky and no one can trust each other. The banks are too big to be allowed to fail, but they’re also too big to be saved.” He said that the problems were not just caused by the US sub-prime market, but all kinds of risky lending the world over – from mortgages and cars to student and commercial loans.

Research from Hedge Fund Intelligence (HFI) shows that despite one of the worst months on record for credit funds, US hedge funds alone still have $1.7 trillion (£1 trillion) in assets. “Hedge funds usually thrive in such turbulence, but this time [have] had to manoeuvre in chaotic markets with a lack of leverage, jittery investors and an inability to short the best stocks,” HFI’s analysts said. “But in aggregate, hedge funds are still managing to stay afloat.”

Bloomberg via RGE Monitor
Hundreds of hedge funds will fail and policy makers may need to shut financial markets for a week or more as the crisis forces investors to dump assets, New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini said. “We’ve reached a situation of sheer panic,” Roubini, who predicted the financial crisis in 2006, said at a conference in London today. “There will be massive dumping of assets,” and “hundreds of hedge funds are going to go bust,” he said. Group of Seven policy makers have stopped short of market suspensions to stem the crisis after the U.S. pledged on Oct. 14 to invest about $125 billion in nine banks and the Federal Reserve led a global coordinated move to cut interest rates on Oct. 8. Emmanuel Roman, co-chief executive officer at GLG Partners Inc., said today that as many as 30 percent of hedge funds will close. “Systemic risk has become bigger and bigger,” Roubini said at the Hedge 2008 conference. “We’re seeing the beginning of a run on a big chunk of the hedge funds,” and “don’t be surprised if policy makers need to close down markets for a week or two in coming days,” he said. More

The Independent
Some of the world’s biggest hedge funds – SAC Capital, Lone Pine and Tiger Global – all revealed they were sitting on double-digit losses this year. September’s falls wiped out any profits made in the rest of the year. Polygon, once a darling of the London hedge fund circuit, last week said it was capping the basic salaries of its managers to £100,000 each. Not bad for the average punter but some way off the tens of millions plundered by these hotshots during the good times. But few will be shedding any tears. The complex and opaque derivatives markets in which these hedge funds played has been dubbed the world’s biggest black hole because they operate outside of the grasp of governments, tax inspectors and regulators. They operate in a parallel, shadow world to the rest of the banking system. They are private contracts between two companies or institutions which can’t be controlled or properly assessed. In themselves derivative contracts are not dangerous, but if one of them should go wrong – the bad 2 per cent as it’s been called – then it is the domino effect which could be so enormous and scary.

Most markets have something behind them. Central banks require reserves – something that backs up the transaction. But derivatives don’t have anything – because they are not real money, but paper money. It is also impossible to establish their worth – the $516 trillion number is actually only a notional one. In the mid-Nineties, Nick Leeson lost Barings £1.3bn trading in derivatives, and the bank went bust. In 1998 hedge fund LTCM’s $5bn loss nearly brought down the entire system. In fragile times like this, another LTCM could have catastrophic results.

That is why everyone is now so frightened, even the traders, who are desperately trying to unwind their positions but finding it impossible because trading is so volatile and it’s difficult to find counterparties. Nor have the hedge funds been in the slightest bit interested in succumbing to normal rules: of the world’s thousands of hedge funds only 24 have volunteered to sign up to a code of conduct. More

nytimes.com
When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on Monday, it became the latest but surely not the last victim of the subprime mortgage collapse. Lehman owned more than $600 billion in assets. Financial institutions around the world have already reported more than half a trillion dollars of mortgage-related losses and that figure will most likely double or triple before the crisis exhausts itself. But there is a bigger potential failure lurking: the American International Group, the insurance giant. It poses a much larger threat to the financial system than Lehman Brothers ever did because it plays an integral role in several key markets: credit derivatives, mortgages, corporate loans and hedge funds. More

The International Forecaster
Well, it’s in. It is now official. Q2 GDP was 3.3%. And if you believe that, we will be happy to sell you that bridge in Brooklyn that we have for perpetual sale to the incredibly gullible and naive. This structural icon is a magnificent piece of US Americana and infrastructure that everyone should own. It can be yours for a cool million bucks, which is a bargain considering the tolls you could impose. And never mind that we already sold it to the people who believed the NIST’s report on Building 7 of the former World Trade Center. As you know, it is perfectly OK to sell property you don’t own. If you don’t believe us, then ask all the bullion banks who sell the gold and silver they have leased from central banks and precious metals ETF’s.

The real figure for GDP is of course negative. To be charitable, let’s call it minus 1%. The reason for the ludicrously higher GDP figure, aside from the bogus government accounting practices, which are used to calculate official GDP, is that the official GDP deflator is about one third of actual. That results directly from the fact that official inflation is one third of the actual inflation you experience when you purchase goods and services. That way our corporatist, fascist government can rip off retirees on their social security benefits and give people an excuse to remain in denial about the destruction of our economy via hyper-stagflation. Note that GDP was negative despite a 160 billion dollar stimulus package, which stimulated nothing, and despite substantially increased US exports due to the weakness of the dollar. Yes, it is that bad, and it is going to get a lot worse.

The dollar continues to bounce around between 76 and 77.5 on the USDX, as the PPT continues to put on a show for the benefit of the incumbent scum while the reprobates and sociopaths, who pass themselves off as our political leaders, cause us to puke with their corn-ball theatrical performances at the Jackass and Dumbo Follies, which some dare to call political conventions. Aside from direct collusion and intervention by central banks, dollar support has resulted from several “cutesy” moves. When the SEC decided to enforce the law against naked-shorting, albeit only for the “Magnificent 19,” this caused a huge short-squeeze that put many hedge funds under water. The troubled funds were forced to bail themselves out, and that meant selling their winners in long oil contracts, which in turn collapsed the price of oil. This sharp drop in oil prices then wiped out a huge hedge fund that was long oil big-time, causing oil prices to collapse even further.

Dollars had to be purchased to acquire the liquidated oil contracts, thus supporting the dollar, and these dollar proceeds were then used to pay down margins at big commercial and investment banks, which then used the margin-covering funds to purchase treasuries not only to make a return, but also to absorb the dollars that had been flushed out by the collapse in oil prices. More

Michael Swanson
We are at a critical point in the economic history of the United States. I know of no other way to put it. The events of last week were of a character that we’ve never seen before. On Friday mortgage lender IndyMac Bancorp became the second largest federally insured financial company to fail after it got hit by a bank run. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took it over. That news may be a big story, but is totally overshadowed right now by the teetering collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both are in danger of going under and the Bush administration, Federal Reserve, and Treasury Department are now meeting on a daily basis to figure out what to do.

There is no news that would be worse than the collapse of these two institutions and such an event if it happens will have ramifications for the economy and stock market for years to come. Fannie and Freddie buy mortgages and then package them into bonds, which they guarantee. They then sell the bonds to investors, including mutual funds, hedge funds, pensions, annuities - just about any institutional investor you can think of. Odds are that if you own a mutual fund or annuity that you indirectly own a security backed by one of these two institutions. The two of them combined own half of America’s twelve trillion in outstanding mortgages and their failure would be the implosion of the entire financial system. More