Monday, September 29, 2008

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #282: eRuns

The bank runs won't be televised.

And when they are, it will be too late to get any cash.

This is from Nouriel Roubini's blog: The US and global financial crisis is becoming much more severe in spite of the Treasury rescue plan. The risk of a total systemic meltdown is now as high as ever
The next step of this panic could become the mother of all bank runs, i.e. a run on the trillion dollar plus of the cross border short-term interbank liabilities of the US banking and financial system as foreign banks as starting to worry about the safety of their liquid exposures to US financial institutions; such a silent cross border bank run has already started as foreign banks are worried about the solvency of US banks and are starting to reduce their exposure. And if this run accelerates - as it may now - a total meltdown of the US financial system could occur. We are thus now in a generalized panic mode and back to the risk of a systemic meltdown of the entire financial system. And US and foreign policy authorities seem to be clueless about what needs to be done next. Maybe they should today start with a coordinated 100 bps reduction in policy rates in all the major economies in the world to show that they are starting to seriously recognize and address this rapidly worsening financial crisis.

Emphasis added by me.

There's a factor I never considered. Who will have first priority on funds by virtue of being fastest? Those ginormous banks. And we won't even know that such runs have taken place. Until it's too late.

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