> So, the private banks issue
> these bonds and the a central bank buys them with freshly printed
> paper?
No, they're bonds issued by other entities, particularly the U.S. Treasury, that banks are holding. For, example, U.S. banks have about $8.6 trillion in assets, of which $1.2 trillion are U.S. Treasury and agency securities.
Doug **********
So, the private banks use the Government's cash injections to buy U.S. Treasury and agency securities with money which is just printed out of thin air by the U.S. government and as you wrote, "Essentially the Fed - or any central bank - goes into the markets and buys bonds using money created out of thin air. The sellers are the big commercial and investment banks. The central bank may sell its purchases back into the markets days or weeks later, or they may just keep them and earn interest."
Sounds like more than an iffy proposition to me. No wonder investors are getting nervous about the hedge funds and subprime.
Now this piece of black humour, you posted the other day, makes more cents:
Investment Dealers are excited to announce the newest structured finance product
- Constant Obligation Leveraged Originated Structured Oscillating Money Bridged Asset Guarantees, or COLOSTOMY BAGS. Designed to accommodate the most sophisticated investment strategies, Colostomy Bags contain the equity tranches of Structured High Interest Taxable Derivatives, or SH IT-D, and are leveraged an infinite amount of times through the innovative use of derivatives.
"Its an actively managed, unlimited liability, open ended investment with no maturity date, which pays LIBOR plus 5,000 and has no correlation to traditional investments" said a spokesman for the Investment Dealer who engineered the product. "It's based on a CDO structure, but it's designed to default BEFORE the first coupon payment, which you'll agree has no correlation with stodgy traditional investments and is a perfect fit for portable alpha strategies." Following the default, each month more leverage is added to the structure to pay for the coupon and the Dealer's fees which are set at 80%. "We feel the fees are reasonable, given the adrenaline rush you'll get each month attempting to value the tranches."
The Colostomy Bags carry a AAA+ rating, based on the rating agencies opinion that they are even safer than Treasuries. "You can't use traditional credit analysis to value these babies, no sir-ree" said a spokesman for a rating agency. "Just like Icelandic Banks, we give them the highest rating because you just know that the Fed will bail out all the hedge funds who buy these things..remember like Long Term Capital? And the best part is these structures contain NEGATIVE loss given default assumptions, so by extension we feel that the CDS will trade through Treasuries."
"We've been tinkering with our model, which served us well for Enron and the Telecoms in '02, and our stress testing shows that the probability of loss in the senior tranche is basically zero." The model, constructed of a wishing well, Joseph Jett's trading blotter, and drawings of Unicorns then collapsed in a heap. "Well, back to the drawing board!" he cackled.
A real money investor, huddled on the windowsill outside his office, said he remained optimistic about holding the Colostomy Bags but was a bit concerned with the 95% decline in value on the first day they traded. "We've taken a bit of a haircut on these but I'm waiting to see the first servicer report, which should arrive in a few months. At first I was annoyed that the dealer who sold them to me refused to make a market in them, but that makes my job easier since I'm not tempted to sell."
We located a hedge fund manager at a due diligence meeting in the VIP room at Score's. He said he was skeptical of the structure at first but was dared into buying it by a fixed income salesman. "He said to me, 'what's wrong with you, its quadruple A rated, just buy it.' He also said it was going into 'an index', although he didn't say which one, but I felt that I had to buy it. And that was good enough for me."
Thanks, Mike B)
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