Is The Global Financial System On The Brink Of Collapse?

A reverse repurchase agreement, also called a “reverse repo” or “RRP,” is an open market operation in which the Desk sells a security to an eligible RRP counterparty with an agreement to repurchase that same security at a specified price at a specific time in the future.  LINK…IMF tells regulators to brace for global ‘liquidity shock’ -LINK.

The financial news spin-doctors are attributing today’s abrupt sell-off to a report of a Bloomberg terminal outage and to a report that China has expanded its list of stocks available for shorting.   This explanation for the plunge in stocks globally is so absurd it almost leaves me speechless.

I have been postulating since mid-December that the strange volatility we’ve been experiencing in the markets – combined with the most intensive effort I’ve ever seen by the Plunge Protection Team (the Fed + the Treasury’s Working Group on Financial Markets) to prop up the stock market and keep a manipulative cap on gold – is occurring because there’s is a massive derivatives melt-down going on behind the scenes.  The volatility reflects the turmoil and the market intervention in stocks and precious metals reflects the effort to keep the problem covered up.

But a good friend and colleague showed me graph this morning that shows my thinking about a derivatives collapse may be correct – click to enlarge:

That graph shows the Fed’s Reverse Repurchase Agreement operations with foreign Central Banks and big foreign banks.   A reverse repo is an operation which generally is thought of as being used as a tool to remove short term liquidity from the banking system.  However, as you can see from the timing of the first massive spike up, which occurred in early September 2008, it is an absurd notion to think the Fed would have removed liquidity from the system. (Note:  the second spike up in 2011 coincided with the Fed’s “Operation Twist” which was essentially a huge QE extension disguised with a “twist” – but nonetheless was done to keep the system from collapsing).

You can read the rest of this article here:  Investment Research Dynamics