Die Folgen der Liquiditätsflut
Der Investor John Hussman, den wir öfter auch schon direkt aus seinen Newslettern auf diesen Seiten besprochen haben, bringt die aktuellen Probleme im Finanz- und Wirtschaftssystem in einem Beitrag für die FINANCIAL TIMES (FT) auf den Punkt:
- „The recent failure of Silicon Valley Bank combined two ingredients: excess deposits and losses on assets, even in securities such as Treasury bonds that are ordinarily considered ‚safe‘.(…) Emphatically, however, the failure did not occur because there was too little liquidity in the banking system as a whole. It occurred because there was too much.“ – bto: Das ist ein wichtiger Punkt. Erst die Liquiditätsschwemme hat die Grundlage für die Probleme gelegt!
- „At the end of 2022, the US banking system had $18tn in domestic deposits, including an estimated $10tn of deposits insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. That meant there were $8tn of deposits that exceeded the FDIC insurance limit.“ – bto: Das ist die direkte Folge der Geldschaffung der letzten Jahre.
- „Those destabilising excess deposits are there because in more than a decade of ‚quantitative easing‘, the Federal Reserve took $8tn of bonds out of the hands of the public and replaced them with bank reserves.Conceptually, one can think of a customer deposit as being ‚backed‘ either by reserves that the bank holds with the Fed or by assets such as an IOU that the bank received in return for a loan it made.“ – bto: Letztlich hat die Fed langlaufende in kurzlaufende Staatsverbindlichkeiten getauscht und der Nicht-Finanzsektor Anleihen in Cash.
- „By buying trillions of dollars of bonds under quantitative easing, the Fed also in effect pushed trillions of dollars of deposits into the banking system, backed by newly created reserves rather than bank loans. Yet despite the most aggressive monetary expansion in history, the growth rate of US commercial bank loans (business, consumer, real estate) averaged just 3.4 per cent annually between 2008 and 2022, easily the slowest growth rate in data since 1947.“ – bto: Das haben wir in einigen Podcasts besprochen. Wir haben hier also viel Zentralbankgeld, welches geschaffen wurde, aber nicht den Weg in die Wirtschaft gefunden hat, bzw. sauberer formuliert, keine private Geldschöpfung bewirkt hat.
- „Once the Fed created $8tn in base money, it ensured that, in equilibrium, someone in the economy would have to hold it indirectly as bank deposits, indirectly in money market funds or directly as physical currency.“ – bto: Die Gegenbuchung musste also im System bleiben.
- „All of the increased reserves — and associated bank deposits — earned nothing. Someone had to hold them, and nobody wanted to. The moment any holder attempted to put the money ‚into‘ a security, the seller of that security took the money right back ‚out.‘ Long-term securities, including Treasury bonds, were driven to record valuations because yield-starved investors, banks and pension funds could not tolerate the perpetual zero-interest rate world created by central banks.“ – bto: Und es floss in andere Duration-Assets wie PE, Immobilien, etc.
- „(…) by relentlessly depriving investors of risk-free return, the Fed has spawned an all-asset speculative bubble that may now leave investors with little but return-free risk. Investment losses have emerged since early 2022, both because inflation pressures forced the Fed to normalise rates after 13 years of zero-rate financial repression and because extreme valuations are never sustained indefinitely. The Fed can no longer operate monetary policy without explicitly paying interest to banks on the liquidity it created.“ – bto: Damit wächst natürlich auch der Druck auf die Risikoassets, denn diese bringen relative weniger und die risikoärmeren Anlagen werden attraktiver…
- „Sudden banking strains in the US and Europe, the British pension crisis last year, equity market losses — all these are merely symptoms of an unwinding bubble. The Fed itself would technically be insolvent if it was to mark its assets to market value.“ – bto: … aber das muss sie ja nicht machen, siehe auch EZB.
- „(…) enhanced deposit insurance, funded by higher fees, may become necessary for a period of time. It is not the fault of savers that the banking system is drowning in excess deposits. Savers, in aggregate, are captive victims of the Fed’s dogmatic ‚ample reserves regime‘. Until it winds down this misguided experiment, global policymakers will continue their scramble to create new special programs, acronyms and emergency facilities to manage the whack-a-mole world of complications it has produced.“ – bto: Wie die nächste Bank in einer Schieflage diese Woche demonstriert, sind wir noch lange nicht über den Berg. Es beginnt gerade erst.
