Tag Archives: safe assets

Silvergate Bank died yesterday. Its parent, Silvergate Capital Corporation, posted an obituary notice (click for larger image):Silvergate Bank bled to death after announcing significant delay to its 10-K full-year accounts and warning that it might not be able to continue as a going concern. We will never know whether it could have recovered from the bank run after the failure of FTX. The bank run after the announcement was far, far worse. The exit of its major crypto customers sealed...

This is the story of a bank that put all its eggs into an emerging digital basket, believing that providing non-interest-bearing deposit and payment services to crypto exchanges and platforms would be a nice little earner, while completely failing to understand the extraordinary risks involved with such a venture. On 1st March, Silvergate Capital Corporation announced that filing of its audited full-year accounts would be significantly delayed, and warned that its financial position had...

Proof of reserves is all the rage on crypto platforms. The idea is that if the platform can prove to its customers' satisfaction that their deposits are fully matched by equivalent assets on the platform, their deposits are safe. And if the mechanism they use to prove this uses crypto technology, that's even better.  Crypto tech solutions have surely got to be much more reliable than traditional financial accounts and audits - after all, FTX passed a U.S. GAAP audit. No, they aren't. Proof...

 It's been evident for some years now that those selling risky crypto products to risk-averse investors like to have federal branding on their snake oil. Tether claimed to have 100% actual dollar backing for its stablecoin. Various exchanges and platforms claimed that customer deposits were FDIC insured. The New York Attorney General showed that Tether didn't have 100% dollar backing or anything like it. And now the FDIC has sent cease & desist orders to FTX, Voyager and several other...

 Stablecoins aren't stable. So-called algorithmic stablecoins crash and burn when people behave in ways the algorithm didn't expect. And reserved stablecoins fall off their pegs - in either direction. A stablecoin that does not stay on its peg is unstable. Not one of the stablecoins currently in circulation lives up to its name. Don't believe me? Well, here's the evidence. Exhibit 1, USDT since the end of April:Exhibit 2, USDC over the same time period:(charts from Coinmarketcap)Both coins...

In a lecture presented at the 2011 IMF Annual Research Conference, Hyun Song Shin of Princeton University argued that the driver of the 2007-8 financial crisis was not a global saving glut so much as a global banking glut. He highlighted the role of the European banks in inflating the credit bubble that abruptly burst at the height of the crisis, causing a string of failures of banks and other financial institutions, and economic distress around the globe. European banks borrowed large...

Global appetite for US Treasuries as "safe assets." This is a primary function of a reserve currency as a saving vehicle that is regarded as a safe haven.EconomonitorCurrent Account Deficits and Safe Assets Joseph P. Joyce

The chart below comes from Silver Watch on Twitter. I haven't been able to identify the original source, but it illustrates perfectly the point I have been trying to make for quite some time now. Pension funds are not taking on more risky investments because the risk premium has fallen, but because the risk-free rate has fallen: In fact, as the chart shows, the risk-free rate has been falling steadily for over thirty years.  This is not a post-crisis blip. It is a secular trend. Yet pension...

In a new paper*, Michael Woodford has reimagined the famous “Schroedinger’s Cat” thought experiment. I suspect this is unintentional. But that’s what happens when, in an understandable quest for simplicity, you create binary decisions in a complex probability-based structure.Schroedinger imagined a cat locked in a box in which there is a phial of poison. The probability of the cat being dead when the box is opened is less than 100% (since some cats are tough). So if p is the probability of...

This is a silly chart: Why is it silly? Just look at what it implies for government and investor behaviour - and the future of the ratings agency that issued it.S&P forecasts a serious shortage of safe assets by 2050 if the developed nations, in particular, do nothing to adjust their fiscal finances in the light of ageing populations. Clearly, therefore, the price of sovereign bonds in the three "A" categories will rise significantly. S&P doesn't indicate which nations would be the...