That is pretty much the operative slogan for what has happened in world financial markets over the last 10 days.
The City of London and Wall Street vultures have received, or have been promised, over $700 billion in bailouts, beginning with the Silicon Valley Bank blowout on March 10 and up through Sunday night’s announcement on March 19 that the Swiss National Bank (SNB) would be ponying up another $216 billion, on top of an earlier $54 billion, to prevent Credit Suisse from bringing down the entire trans-Atlantic financial system on Monday morning. So that’s a cool $270 billion—so far—to prevent a systemically risky bank from going under.
The SNB had the Fed, the Bank of England and the ECB breathing down their neck over the weekend to do the deed. The Fed itself has committed to bailing out all the depositors at Silicon Valley Bank (they held $175 billion in deposits at the end of 2022), Signature Bank ($89 billion), and Silvergate Bank ($14 billion), which potentially adds another $278 billion to the tab. And then there’s First Republic Bank, which, despite the $30 billion in bailout cash from 11 large U.S. banks that the Treasury demanded they provide, is still hanging by a thread. And its total deposits, which the Treasury is considering “making whole,” in complete violation of the law and the FDIC’s authority, could add another $176 billion at any moment.
So any way you look at it, we are already looking at a bailout that is in the range of $720 billion … and counting. Such numbers aside, how much time do these emergency actions buy, before the fuse on the $2 quadrillion financial derivatives bomb is lit? Tick, tick, tick…
