"There are some who may read the following article from Bloomberg titled "Banks Find Few Signs of Default Distress in Repo, Credit Markets" and be left with the impression that banks find few signs of default distress in repo, credit markets. These same people would then be very surprised by the chart below which shows that the overnight repo rate has more than doubled from 0.055% to 0.115%, or the highest in months, overnight. "Big deal, this is just a small jump" others may say. To those others we will retort that in a market as massively levered as the ON repo, which is a primary source of risk free financial institution funding in conjunction with the Reserve market (via the Fed's IOER rate), a relationship we have discussed extensively before. This simply means that the O/N GC-IOER spread is probably the most levered synthetic "instrument" in the known universe. Apply 100x leverage to the spread and the 0.06% change effectively wipes out capital buffer for an entity that was picking up pennies in front this particular steamroller, and has a firmwide leverage of 16x or a Tier 1 buffer of under 6%. Luckily, that same entity will quietly approach the Fed and using one of a plethora of secret and not so secret rescue mechanism, the Fed will merely transfer more electronic ones and zeroes backed up by future tax receipt claims to said entity's debit account and all shall be well, with nobody but the Chairsatan and the occasional Wall Street CEO knowing just how close we came to yet another systemic implosion..."
at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/overnight-repo-surges-over-100
at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/overnight-repo-surges-over-100
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