Yesterday we exposed the globally contagious spread of funding market distress into the credit risk of major US banks, and today it has accelerated, spreading to Europe's banks as their stocks crashed to the lowest in 11 months...
Deutsche Bank is leading European banking's collapse...Image link:
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/2018-03-22_7-03-25.jpgImage link:
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/2018-03-22_7-00-26.jpgCredit risk is breaking out...Image link:
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/2018-03-22_7-07-12.jpgAs Credit diverges extremely bearishly from stocks...Image link:
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/2018-03-22_7-10-18.jpgAnd it's about to get even worse...Image link:
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/2018-03-21_7-19-06_0.jpgAs three-month dollar Libor extended its streak to 32 straight increases, though the rise in the setting is the smallest since March 8. The crucial USD Libor-OIS spread rises to 56.8bp, widest level since May 2009 (as 3M Libor at 2.2856% is the highest since November 2008, vs 2.2711% prior session).
As we noted yesterday, the key is whether rising Libor rates will fuel a funding crisis - something we have been worrying about all year (as we detailed above with the blowout in the Libor-OIS spread)...
“We usually don’t see this kind of divergence in rates without some sort of credit issue,” said Margaret Kerins, head of fixed-income strategy at BMO Capital Markets Corp., referring to Libor’s rise versus OIS.
“At what point does all this become damaging and how far does it go? That is the issue.”
It appears to be damaging now..
“There has been sort of the perfect storm of factors tightening financial conditions,” said Russ Certo, head of rates at Brean Capital in New York.
“Banks do have tremendous liquidity still, but it’s at a higher price.”
But, but, but... "fortress balance sheets"?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-22/funding-stress-contagion-spreads-european-banks-collapse-11-month-lows....
The topic of european banks having liquidity issues or "funding contagions" as they prefer to characterize it, has cropped up in this section a few times in 2017. There have been articles posted about european banks proposing to impose limits on withdrawals with proposals to decrease the total sum to which insurance covers individual depositor accounts.
In some cases, it appears that negative news stories involving european banks may have been scrubbed from google search results. If you remember reading a news article about something bad happening with a european bank in 2017 and try to find the article, it might be difficult to do so.
Anyways I'm certain people are tired of discussing "bitcoin volatility" by now. Thankfully we can now discuss bank volatility instead
and perhaps question why institutions like banks which people rely on to provide economic and financial stability may be less stable than we would like them to be.