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The Dollar Pegs are Next
Posted on January 18, 2015 by Martin Armstrong
Dollar-Peg

The next crisis will be the currency pegs against the dollar. Here we have pegs from Hong Kong to the Middle East. We will have the same problem for as the dollar is driven higher, thanks to the implosion in the Euroland, these nations will import DEFLATION from a rising dollar. This will break their backs and force pegs to collapse around the world. Keep in mind that this will unfold probably after September 2015 and help to spiral the world economy into the worst depression in centuries. Start preparing for a rainy day.

These idiots are raising taxes when they should be lowering them as even Keynes suggested. Unfortunately, we are in a major crisis because of their insane mismanagement of the economy. There is nothing they will not steal. They are the type of people who are pocketing soap on the cart of the maid as they leave the hotel room. This level of corruption is turning into a feeding frenzy, which is our doom.

The rise in the dollar, will be the key to breaking the post-war economy. It was the flight of capital from Euroland into the Swiss that broke that peg. We will see in the months ahead the same crisis unfold in the Middle East and in Asia. This will be accelerated by the emerging economies who have issued $6 trillion in dollar debt since 2007. As the dollar rises, they will be forced into the same position as Greece – unable to pay their debts because the debt keeps rising in cost.

a recent update from gains, pains and capital.

China Just Threatened a Currency War If the Fed Doesn’t Stop Printing

The tension between Central Banks that we noted yesterday continues to worsen. This time it was China and the EU, not just Germany, that fired warning shots at the US Fed.

A senior Chinese official said on Friday that the United States should cut back on printing money to stimulate its economy if the world is to have confidence in the dollar.

Asked whether he was worried about the dollar, the chairman of China’s sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corporation, Jin Liqun, told the World Economic Forum in Davos: “I am a little bit worried.”

“There will be no winners in currency wars. But it is important for a central bank that the money goes to the right place,” Li said.

Speaking at the same session, French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici voiced concern that the euro was becoming overvalued as a result of quantitative easing and other stimulus actions taken by other nations’ central banks.

“Certainly, the level of the euro is high and creates some problem,” he said, attributing the single currency’s recent gains partly to the return of confidence created by the European Central Bank and euro zone governments in starting to overcome Europe’s debt crisis.

Source: Reuters.

So first Germany begins pulling its Gold reserves from the US, and now China and the EU are saying publicly that the Fed’s policies are damaging confidence in the US Dollar.

This does not bode well for the financial system. The primary role of Central Banks is to maintain confidence in the system. If the Central Banks begin to turn on one another it is only a matter of time before the system breaks down.

Remember, every time the Fed debases the US Dollar it forces the Euro and other currencies higher, hurting those countries’ exports. The Fed has recently announced it will be printing $85 billion every month until employment reaches 6.5% (obviously the Fed is ignoring the mountains of data that indicate QE doesn’t create jobs).

How long will the other Central Banks tolerate this before they initiate a currency war? Both Germany and China have fired warning shots at the Fed. And we all know that just beneath the veneer of goodwill, tensions are building between the primary players of the global financial system.

Watch 1.3837.

If Chinabot doesn’t show up right beneath there then look for 1.3693

Again from ZeroHedge
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/12/2011 08:43 -0400

One of the key catalysts for Wednesday’s market rout which originated in Europe came following news that Chinese banks had cut down on their credit lines to Europe, which highlighted the key threat to the European banking system: access to liquidity. The Chinese reaction is merely a symptom of a much deeper underlying ailment: the increasing lack of counterparty confidence across various funding markets, both traditional and shadow, which has continued to accelerate over the past week, a development summarized effectively by the latest report in the International Financing Review which uses some powerful words (of the type that European bureaucrats hate) to explain where Europe stands right now: “credit taps run dry for European lenders, setting scene for liquidity crisis.” For those strapped for time the take home message is that: “with bond markets shut and investors unwilling to buy asset-backed securities, the repo market – for some banks the sole remaining source of private funding – has become the most recent tap to run dry, with some investment banks pulling credit lines worth tens of billions of euros in recent weeks.” This is very disturbing as with liquidity windows shut, Europe’s bank have no recourse on how to roll the €4.8 trillion in wholesale and interbank funding which expires in the next two years. End result: the only recourse is the ECB, which unlike the Fed, is not suited to be a lender of last resort and has been morphing into that role over the past year kicking and screaming. And when that fails, there are the Fed’s liquidity swap lines. Too bad that the liabilities in the European banking system are orders of magnitude bigger than in the US, and should this liquidity crisis transform into its next and more virulent phase, even the Fed will find it does not have enough capital to prevent a worldwide short squeeze on the world’s carry trade funding currency (once known as the reserve currency).

First, IFR summarizes briefly how the last ditch liquidity conduit, repo, has now run out. The fact that even shadow banking system aggregates, or those entirely off the books, are being withheld, is very disturbing:

Bankers who once ran the now-defunct repo facilities for mid-sized European banks say the credit lines were withdrawn after risk managers became concerned about their own exposure to the enfolding sovereign debt crisis, leaving some clients now solely reliant on central banks for cash.

“Given what’s going on in the markets, there are big question marks surrounding some of these clients,” said one banker who has closed such lines. “The appetite from investment banks is fading. There is a great deal of concern about financing wrong-way collateral.”

“Many of the wholesale banks are starting to rethink these credit lines,” added the global markets chief of one European investment bank heavily present in the repo markets. “Things can turn pretty nasty if you get these things wrong.”

This is further distressing since the traditional venue of capital raising in Europe, covered bond issuance has ground to a halt, with not “a single publicly announced European covered bond deal since June.”

The culprit for the market freeze is quite simple to anyone who recalls the state of the markets in late 2008 and early 2009, when the Fed and the central bank cartel will had the option of backstopping the global financial system.

“Everyone has been cutting off their exposure,” said the head of another European investment bank. “It started with Greece, then Spain and now Italy. People don’t want to do business with these banks. Many of them have good underlying businesses but they are stuffed.”

At his point however, the global central bank intervention has not already occurred but is actively priced in at any given moment. There is no step function of additional liquidity that the central bankers can provide, which is why the status quo is scrambling so hard to avoid a quantum leap in the risk perception of European banks.

Another indication of the unwillingness to participate in the market is the complete elimination of crap collateral from tri-party repo lines:

The latest repo markets survey by the International Capital Market Association indeed shows a marked pick-up in the use of riskier assets in European tri-party repo deals. Though small as a proportion of the region’s entire €5.91trn repo market, the use of assets with a rating of below BBB– accounted for 5.1% of all transactions in December, up from 1.2% a year earlier.

That has now largely stopped, say bankers once heavily involved in such deals. Previously, they were able to hedge their exposures to such collateral – or repackage the collateral on behalf of clients to sell off in chunks to fund managers. But growing investor concern, and a rush towards safer assets, has meant that neither investment banks nor investors want to go near the stuff.

“We’ve attempted to do some trades with illiquid assets on behalf of peripheral banks, but we haven’t managed to syndicate deals,” said one senior banker that helped repackage some past deals. “Anything slightly peripheral-orientated is completely out of the question right now.”

What is, however, bad for banks, is perfectly good for the ECB, which will gladly hand over 100 cents on the dollar for the most worthless collateral it is stuffed with. There is one problem with this: Lehman did precisely this in the days and weeks before it filed. It did not help.

So with the ECB now happy to be Europe’s not-bad but thourughly toxic bank, how long until everyone realizes that the ECB is massively undercapitalized and its existence (yes, that includes its ability to print money), purely a factor of continued German good will.

Total use of the ECB’s main refinancing and long-term refinancing facilities – both part of the open market operations – are now close to €500bn, up from about €400bn in the spring.

According to Goldman Sachs, although such levels are well short of the almost €900bn used in 2009, the uptick is worrying. “This is a substantial figure, reflective of the strains in the banking system,” analysts wrote.

But banks’ use of the ECB open markets operations remains dependent upon them having ample quality assets on their books. Under the terms of the operations, the central bank will only provide liquidity against certain assets – generally those rated BBB– and above, with some exceptions.

If ECB eligible collateral runs out, banks will have little option but to sell off assets in a final fire sale, say bankers. That will depend on whether there are willing buyers for such assets, much of which were accumulated pre-2007 as retail, commercial and wholesale loans.

And as Germany has indicated, it is getting fed up with the ECB pledging what is effectively an ever increasing portion of its GDP either directly, by accepting worthless collateral, or indirectly, by funding an ever greater portion of the AAA-rating constrained EFSF. When does Germany find that the trade off between its sovereign risk and the fate of the EUR no longer makes practical sense.

So what is the conclusion:

“The financial wreckage at many of these banks is along the lines of World War Two,” added the global markets chief. “There is so much detritus. But a lot of them don’t want to sell at these current prices, they know there will be a capital hit if things are properly priced.”

Bottom line: 3 years after Lehman blew up we are in precisely the same position, only this time the culprits are European banks. This is to be expected as absolutely nothing has changed in that time period, and the end result, by implication, will be absolutely the same.

From Porter Stansberry in the S&A Digest

Porter Stansberry: The next stage of the crisis is starting now
Monday, June 20, 2011

We’re about to see a return to crisis-like conditions in the world’s credit markets. This will devastate financial stocks. It should also hit commodity prices and commodity-related stocks hard. In today’s Digest, I’ll show you why I believe this will happen.

As longtime readers know, I write Friday’s Digest personally. In general, I try my best to teach our subscribers something useful. I’ve always run my research company with a few simple principles in mind. Among them, I strive to provide you with the information I would expect if our roles were reversed. You should know… abiding by this principle often requires me to share information with you before I can be 100% certain it’s correct.

That’s the case with today’s Digest. I want to show you the warning signs as I see them, right now. I want to guide you through my thinking process. And while I’ll give you my predictions about what these things mean, I hope you’ll realize that, as Yogi Berra famously said, predictions are tough – especially about the future.

The next stage in the ongoing global financial crisis will feature the collapse of both the Spanish and the Italian economies. This should occur within the next six months. Concurrently, I believe the “Chinese miracle” will be unmasked as mostly a fraud powered by a huge increase in bad lending from state-controlled banks.

Ironically, the coming wave of financial trouble will probably force people back into U.S. dollars. Gold will also do well. In the currency markets, I believe the euro will collapse in the second half of this year, as will the Australian dollar, which serves as a proxy for the Chinese economy.

I expect this next “down leg” in the world’s markets to be more severe than the crisis of 2008, because the balance sheets of the Western democracies are now less prepared to manage the losses.

Finally, I believe the euro will simply cease to exist.

The first thing I want to show you is the share price of UniCredit. You have probably never heard of UniCredit, but it is a major European bank, with significant operations in eastern and southern Europe. UniCredit is based in Italy. I’ve been keeping my eye on UniCredit for years, for reasons I’ll explain below. UniCredit is the ultimate “canary in the coal mine” of the world’s global currency system.

Most people don’t know that UniCredit is the direct descendent of Oesterreichische Credit-Anstalt, the largest bank in Eastern Europe before World War II. Translated the name means: Imperial Royal Privileged Austrian Credit-Institute for Commerce and Industry. It was a Rothschild bank. The family founded it 1855, and it became one of the most important banks in Europe.

Credit-Anstalt held assets and took deposits from all over Europe. In 1931, the bank failed as a direct result of the U.S.’s Smoot-Hawley tariff. The act crippled Germany’s economy and led French investors to redeem all the capital they’d lent to the bank. The failure of Credit-Anstalt caused Austria to abandon the gold standard, which set off a series of economic dominoes. Germany left gold… then Great Britain… and finally, in 1933, so did America.

The failure of Credit-Anstalt is what really kicked off the Great Depression. I have long been convinced the failure of its successor bank – now called UniCredit – would presage the next global monetary collapse.

I first began warning investors about UniCredit’s likely collapse and its historic role in the world’s monetary history back in March 2010. Since then, the bank’s shares have grown weaker and weaker. And since March, the shares have fallen off a cliff, hitting lows not seen since March 2009.

The sudden weakness in UniCredit’s shares (down 21% in the last several weeks) indicates to me that big trouble is brewing in Europe. I don’t believe efforts to stop the crisis in Greece will work. The austerity measures undertaken in Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Greece have severely weakened these economies, causing loan losses to banks like UniCredit.

And if there’s a run on UniCredit (and I believe there will be), the losses will be too large for Italy to manage without a huge international bailout. UniCredit has borrowed $300 billion from other European banks. And Italy’s government already owes creditors more than 120% of GDP. There aren’t any easy solutions to this problem.

Another warning comes from a friend who is a senior executive at a major Wall Street bank. He sees more high-yield bond deals than just about anyone else in the world. He told our Atlas 400 group last weekend that credit markets around the world were suddenly shutting down. Yields were moving up. Spreads (the cost to borrow above the sovereign rate) were getting wider for the first time since March 2009.

Why? Because the market knows that the U.S. Federal Reserve is going to stop buying $85 billion-plus per month of U.S. Treasury debt. But the Treasury is going to continue to issue more debt. In total, 61% of the entire federal debt will mature within four years. That means roughly $10 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds will have to be sold, plus whatever the total deficit adds up to over the next four years – maybe another $6 trillion.

It’s difficult to imagine this amount of Treasury issuance won’t have a big impact on the world’s credit markets because these bonds always sell first and at the lowest yields. As these yields “back up” because of the large issuance, they should drain liquidity away from other issues, causing other bond prices to fall. This will reduce liquidity and make issuing debt more expensive across the credit spectrum.

China’s boom since 2009 was fueled by massive domestic debt issuance, which was unsustainable and is reversing. In addition, one Chinese company after another is being revealed as a fraud – and then crashing. These are not isolated events. I have studied Chinese companies for more than a decade. Out of all the stocks I’ve analyzed closely, I’ve only seen a handful I didn’t believe were fraudulent.

So far, none of the major Chinese banks have come under serious scrutiny. But I believe they will… and I believe major fraud will be discovered. Take the recent weakness in the shares of China Life Insurance (LFC), for example. This isn’t a minor company. It’s a $90 billion life insurance company. As fraud allegations spread into major Chinese financials, the entire underpinning of the Chinese boom will fall apart. It has all been fueled by debt and fixed-asset investments (land, buildings, equipment, and machinery). Consider just a few of these facts…

Fixed-asset investment remains greater than 50% of GDP in China, for the 12th year in a row. No other country has ever had more than nine years of this kind of sustained fixed-asset investment.

In the first five months of 2011, fixed-asset investment grew by 25.8% according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. That’s $1.39 trillion worth of investment.

Jim Chanos, the famed short seller, says China is currently building 30 billion square feet of commercial real estate. That is enough to provide every person in China with a five-square-foot cubicle.

Jeremy Grantham, one of the world’s most astute investors, points out that China has been purchasing gigantic quantities of raw materials. The scale of these purchases makes them impossible to sustain. China makes up 9.4% of the world’s economy, but it is currently consuming 53% of the world’s cement, 47% of the world’s iron ore, and 46.9% of its coal.

A massive increase in China’s domestic debt fueled this investment. In 2010, for example, Chinese banks extended $55 billion in loans – up 95% from the year before. Now, banking regulators are increasing reserve requirements, greatly reducing the amount of available credit. In May, lending was down 25% versus last year.

With Europe’s crisis heating back up, with credit tightening in the U.S. (thanks to the end of quantitative easing), and with China’s boom unraveling… it’s time to be extremely cautious. I don’t know when it will start… but we’re entering another period of soaring volatility, increasing interest rate spreads, and falling stock and bond prices. How the authorities deal with these problems will set the stage for what happens next. If they try to paper over these continuing crises again – with new money-printing programs from the Federal Reserve – you can expect a massive inflation and what I call The End of America.

Our best hope for more stability and a return to prosperity is for people to realize that bailing out banks doesn’t solve these problems. It only makes them worse. But… I’m not optimistic. In the June issue of my newsletter, Stansberry’s Investment Advisory, I detail my best two new ideas to profit from the next stage of this crisis.

IMF warns US, eurozone deficits a threat to stability

The International Monetary Fund warned that Washington and debt-ridden European countries are “playing with fire” unless they take drastic steps to reduce their budget deficits.

The warning came as the IMF cut its growth forecast for the US and said the risks facing the global economy have increased since April.

It said the euro area’s worsening crisis, signs of economic weakening in the US and overheating in the developing world all pose fresh threats to global stability.

“The global economy has turned the corner from the Great Recession. However, securing the transition from recovery to expansion will require a concerted effort at addressing diverse challenges,” the IMF said in its World Economic Outlook update.

World growth this year is expected to be 4.3pc, a downgrade from 4.4pc in April, prompted predominantly by a sharp reduction in America. US GDP is now forecast to grow at 2.5pc this year and 2.7pc in 2012, compared with its prediction in April of 2.8pc and 2.9pc respectively.

“For the US, it is critical to immediately address the debt ceiling and launch a deficit reduction plan that includes entitlement reform and revenue-raising tax reform,” it said.

Jose Vinals, director of the IMF’s monetary and capital markets department, added: “If you make a list of the countries in the world that have the biggest homework in restoring their public finances to a reasonable situation in terms of debt levels, you find four countries: Greece, Ireland, Japan and the United States.

“You cannot afford to have a world economy where these important decisions are postponed because you’re really playing with fire.”

The IMF had already downgraded its forecasts for UK growth to 1.5pc from 1.7pc in April, which was itself a downgrade from 2pc in November.

It added: “Downside risks due to heightened potential for spillovers from further deterioration in market confidence in the euro area periphery have risen since April. Market concerns about possible setbacks to the US recovery have also surfaced.

If these risks materialize, they will reverberate across the rest of the world–possibly seriously impairing funding conditions for banks and corporations in advanced economies and undercutting capital flows to emerging economies.”

from zero hedge

All those who were hoping global stock markets would surge tomorrow based on a ridiculous rumor that China would revalue the CNY by 10% will have to wait. Instead, China has decided to serve the world another surprise. Following last week’s announcement by PBoC Governor Zhou (Where’s Waldo) Xiaochuan that the country’s excessive stockpile of USD reserves has to be urgently diversified, today we get a sense of just how big the upcoming Chinese defection from the “buy US debt” Nash equilibrium will be. Not surprisingly, China appears to be getting ready to cut its USD reserves by roughly the amount of dollars that was recently printed by the Fed, or $2 trilion or so. And to think that this comes just as news that the Japanese pension fund will soon be dumping who knows what. So, once again, how about that “end of QE” again?

From Xinhua:

China’s foreign exchange reserves increased by 197.4 billion U.S. dollars in the first three months of this year to 3.04 trillion U.S. dollars by the end of March.

Xia Bin, a member of the monetary policy committee of the central bank, said on Tuesday that 1 trillion U.S. dollars would be sufficient. He added that China should invest its foreign exchange reserves more strategically, using them to acquire resources and technology needed for the real economy.

And as if the public sector making it all too clear what is about to happen was not enough, here is the private one as well:

China should reduce its excessive foreign exchange reserves and further diversify its holdings, Tang Shuangning, chairman of China Everbright Group, said on Saturday.

The amount of foreign exchange reserves should be restricted to between 800 billion to 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars, Tang told a forum in Beijing, saying that the current reserve amount is too high.

Tang’s remarks echoed the stance of Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of China’s central bank, who said on Monday that China’s foreign exchange reserves “exceed our reasonable requirement” and that the government should upgrade and diversify its foreign exchange management using the excessive reserves.

Tang also said that China should further diversify its foreign exchange holdings. He suggested five channels for using the reserves, including replenishing state-owned capital in key sectors and enterprises, purchasing strategic resources, expanding overseas investment, issuing foreign bonds and improving national welfare in areas like education and health.

However, these strategies can only treat the symptoms but not the root cause, he said, noting that the key is to reform the mechanism of how the reserves are generated and managed.

The last sentence says it all. While China is certainly tired of recycling US Dollars, it still has no viable alternative, especially as long as its own currency is relegated to the C-grade of not even SDR-backing currencies. But that will all change very soon. Once the push for broad Chinese currency acceptance is in play, the CNY and the USD will be unpegged, promptly followed by China dumping the bulk of its USD exposure, and also sending the world a message that US debt is no longer a viable investment opportunity. In fact, we are confident that the reval is a likely a key preceding step to any strategic decision vis-a-vis US FX exposure (read bond purchasing/selling intentions). As such, all those Americans pushing China to revalue, may want to consider that such an action could well guarantee hyperinflation, once the Fed is stuck as being the only buyer of US debt.

paraphrased from the Daily Crux…(I think).

The World’s Third-Largest Bank is Bust

The Fed is a bank with $2.55 trillion of assets. Only BNP Paribas, and Royal Bank of Scotland are larger. It’s way too big to fail.

When it goes bust, it will be bailed out. And Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, will have no choice but to fire up the printing presses all over again.

However, first let’s examine exactly how banks make money. And how they go bust…

How banks make money

Let’s start with the balance sheet. A bank’s assets are mainly loans made to individuals, businesses, even governments. Loans are assets because they are money owed to the bank.

Now let’s talk about the other side of the balance sheet – the liabilities. Most of the money a bank lends to customers comes from money that the bank itself borrows. It can borrow from you and me through the savings we deposit. It may also borrow from companies that place cash on deposit. And the bank may borrow from investors – insurance companies, pension funds, even other banks. All of these are liabilities – debts the bank owes to someone else.

The other main item on the liabilities side is capital. Suppose the bank collected all the money owed by the borrowers. And then repaid all the money it owes. Capital is the money left over. It is the bank’s true value.

The balance sheet must always balance. So capital + debt = assets.

Banks make money by lending at higher interest rates than they pay to borrow. Borrowers want long-term loans, usually at fixed interest rates. On the other hand, depositors want easy (short-term) access. And depositors often prefer variable interest rates.

So this is the crucial role banks play in the economy. They take short-term variable rate savings, and recycle them into longer-term, fixed-rate loans.

And this is where the problems of the world’s third-largest bank start.

How a bank goes bust

From the point of view of a bank, when interest rates rise, the value of a fixed-rate loan falls. The bank receives less income from that fixed-rate loan than it could now get elsewhere.

And interest rates on US ten-year government bonds have indeed been rising. Since last August, they’ve risen by about one percentage point.

Now, accounting rules dictate what happens next. Under certain conditions, banks must mark down the value of these loans. That’s called ‘marking to market’. And when it happens, capital also falls – otherwise the balance sheet doesn’t balance any more.

But the Fed, the world’s third-largest bank, doesn’t follow the same accounting rules as every other bank. It refuses to restate the value of its assets. That’s why they’re surely worth less than the reported figure. In fact, if I’m right, the bank has no capital left. It has zero value. It’s bust.

I can’t prove this. But here’s why I think I’m right.

$1.14 trillion (45%) of the Fed’s assets are fixed-rate loans of ten years or more. Let’s suppose the ten-year bonds pay interest of 4%. If the yield rises to 5%, the price falls by about 8% (bond prices fall as yields rise). If yields rise to 6%, the price falls by 16%.

I don’t know exactly when the Fed made these loans. So I don’t know the current yields or prices. But I do know that US government bond yields have risen by one percentage point since last August. And I think they’ll keep going up.

So it’s a fair bet that the Fed’s ten-year loans are worth less than it paid for them. An 8% loss on $1.14 trillion is $91 billion. And that excludes any losses on the $1.41 trillion of shorter loans that it holds, which are also affected.

The Fed has been lending like the credit crunch never happened

Of course, bank capital (as well as loss reserves) is designed to cushion against such losses. Since the credit crisis, most banks have reduced their lending, boosted reserves and raised more capital.

But not the Fed. It carried on lending like the crisis never happened. Worse still, it has no loan loss reserves. And it’s not raised a cent of extra capital.

Want to guess how much capital the Fed holds against its $2.55 trillion in assets? $53 billion. That’s just 2% of total assets. So a 2% fall in the value of those assets would wipe out every last dollar of capital. So it may already be insolvent. If not, it soon will be.

The US Federal Reserve Bank is bust – and that’s not just my opinion

This is serious. It may be the US central bank, but it’s still a bank like all the rest.

Most of its assets are US government bonds, bought as part of its quantitative easing (QE) programmes.

Its liabilities include about $1 trillion of notes and coins in circulation. There are also $1.4 trillion of deposits owing to US commercial banks, which are required to hold reserves at the Fed. There are also some deposits owed to the US Treasury. And there’s $53 billion in capital.

So the Fed can go bust just like any other bank. And I’m not the only one saying it. William Ford, a former president of the Atlanta Federal Reserve, one of the 12 member banks of the Fed itself, broke ranks to warn about it on 11 January.

Ford points out that the Fed can hide insolvency because it does not mark its assets to market. So we’ll only know that it’s bust when it sells some bonds. Only then would it have to take the losses from selling them for less than it paid.

Of course, the Fed going bust would be very embarrassing. So you can be sure it will be quietly bailed out behind closed doors. In fact, if the bail-out is timed to coincide with the losses, we might not even notice.

Who will bail out the Fed?

Why does this matter to you? Well, guess who would rescue the Fed? The US Treasury, a department of the US government, would have to inject extra capital to restore solvency. But the US government is not exactly flush these days.

So how would they get the money? They’d issue more bonds. And the Fed would buy them as part of its QE programme.

So let’s be clear. The Fed goes bust. So it lends money to the US government (i.e. it buys US bonds), and the US Treasury gives it back to the Fed as capital. So the Fed is printing money to bail itself out. What do you think this will do for investor confidence in the US government and the dollar?

I’m pretty sure that the value of US Treasury bonds and the dollar will be worth less afterwards. And that’s why you should have 8-12% of your portfolio in gold. It is sound money in an era when most currencies are not. It is insurance against further debasement of paper money.