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Nothing ... NOTHING will ever get in the way of scheduled Congressional vacations away from DC -- er, "district work periods."Congress is on Memorial Recess now, but may be recalled on short notice. More precious days to the debt-ceiling deadline wasted.
Meanwhile, very short-term T-Bills yields are acting up, while the dollar is getting stronger. This may be getting complicated and messier.
https://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=UUP&p=D&b=5&g=0&id=p78212751137
I offered this for discussion back in 2020 from the poor swiss website:how is it no one has stumbled on this interesting guy?
https://thepoorswiss.com/updated-trinity-study/
56 million. That by itself is criminal.Marjorie Taylor Greene is worth $56 million, so she probably doesn't ever know what her salary is !
This is called “reciprocal deposits” and it’s having a moment. Stephen Gandel reports at the Financial Times:• 1) I am a regional bank and I’ve got a customer with a $450,000 deposit.
• 2) You are a different regional bank and you’ve got a customer with a $450,000 deposit.
• 3) I am worried that my customer will take out $200,000 of her money and move it elsewhere to get FDIC insurance.
• 4) You are worried that your customer will take out $200,000 of his money and move it elsewhere to get FDIC insurance.
• 5) We trade those $200,000 deposits: I put $200,000 of my customer’s money in your bank, and you put $200,000 of your customer’s money in my bank.
• 6) Now both our customers have $450,000 of insured deposits, and neither of us has lost any net deposits: I lost $200,000 from my customer but got $200,000 back from your customer, and vice versa.
Is this good? The argument for it is, look, the government is pricing this insurance irrationally, so rational bankers should load up on it:Beverly Hills, California-based PacWest’s website says clients can “rest assured” because the bank can offer up to $175mn in insurance coverage per depositor, or 700 times the FDIC cap. … The bank said in its most recent financial filing that it was enrolling more of its customers in “reciprocal deposit networks”, over which hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of banks spread customers’ funds in order to stretch insurance limits.
The biggest of these networks is run by IntraFi, a little-known Virginia-based technology group. ...
Banks can divert large accounts into the networks, where they are parcelled up into $250,000 chunks and sent off to other FDIC-insured banks. The networks match up the parcels so that any bank sending a customer’s deposits into the system immediately receives a similarly sized parcel from another bank.
Crucially, the networks allow banks to increase their level of insured deposits while giving large customers seamless access to their money. Banks pay the network operators a small management fee.
Reciprocal deposits still make up just 2 per cent of the $10.4tn in deposits insured by the FDIC. But they made up a notable 15 per cent of the growth in insured deposits in the first quarter. The share of deposits covered by the federal Deposit Insurance Fund was highest in at least a decade at 56 per cent.
The argument against it is, look, the government is pricing this insurance irrationally and that leads to misallocations of capital:“Banks are using reciprocal deposits aggressively, as they should,” says Christopher McGratty, an analyst who follows regional banks for Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. He said that in the wake of SVB’s collapse, investors wanted banks to reduce their use of uninsured deposits. “It’s a bit of window dressing, but it’s legit,” he said.
The argument against raising the cap on FDIC deposit insurance from $250,000 to infinity is that it creates moral hazard: If you have $20 million to deposit in the bank, we might want you to pay some attention to the creditworthiness of your bank, so that there are some limits on the growth of truly terrible banks. If deposit insurance is synthetically infinite, that has the same problem.Others have been more sceptical. “To the extent that these deposit exchange programs help weak banks attract deposits, it creates instability,” said Sheila Bair, who headed the FDIC during the global financial crisis. She has called out the deposit exchanges for “gaming the system,” in the past. “It increases moral hazard. There are many good banks that use these exchanges but the exchanges also allow weak banks to attract large uninsured depositors who wouldn’t otherwise bank with them.”
Here is a fascinating paper, and a related blog post, by Jared Ellias and Elisabeth de Fontenay about “Law and Courts in an Age of Debt”:The basic question in these cases is: Can you just read the debt documents as craftily as possible, do whatever is strictly allowed by the text, and benefit some creditors at the expense of others? Or is there some background requirement of fairness or “oh come on it can’t have meant that,” so that your craftiest readings don’t actually work? The traditional view is that shareholders are entitled to fiduciary duties — which is why mergers have to be more or less fair to all shareholders — while creditors are entitled only to the letter of their contract. That traditional view has given rise to, you know, all this: a whole industry of distressed-debt cleverness built on structuring transactions to exploit the documents as much as possible. I suppose it is possible to take it too far, though: If creditors get too good at ruthlessly exploiting each other, eventually courts might step in and say “oh come on it can’t have meant that.” If a rule like “creditors are only entitled to what their contract explicitly says” always leads to absurd results, it might stop being the rule.
One interesting thing to think about is whether some of the causation might run the other way: Are highly leveraged firms now commonplace because they allow for more opportunistic behavior? If you are the owner of a company that needs financing, and you are choosing whether to issue more equity or more debt, you will have a series of considerations:Highly leveraged firms are now commonplace in many U.S. industries. Shifting from equity to debt financing is not simply a matter of optimizing a firm’s cost of capital, however. It also has profound implications for the firm’s behavior and investor outcomes.
In Law and Courts in the Age of Debt, we describe one underappreciated feature of the shift from equity to debt, which is that courts resolve disputes among shareholders and among creditors using strikingly different rules and decision frameworks. Shareholder disputes are typically resolved using equitable doctrines such as fiduciary duties, with the explicit goal of reaching a substantively fair result. In creditor disputes, by contrast, courts tend to limit their role to formal contract interpretation and procedural oversight, often reaching results at odds with both market expectations and notions of fairness. For example, a controlling stockholder attempting a minority freezeout faces punishing scrutiny aimed at ensuring fair terms for the minority stockholders, while majority creditor groups today can, and increasingly do, receive judicial blessing for transactions that simply extract wealth from other creditors (an outcome colorfully referred to by practitioners as “lender-on-lender violence”).
This disparate approach is increasingly difficult to justify. We argue that it rests on antiquated paradigms of powerless shareholders, in the one case, and all-powerful banks, in the other. Judges compound this error by incorrectly assuming that creditors can prevent all opportunistic behavior solely through contract language, when they make no such assumption in the case of shareholders.
There is no easy fix for this doctrinal confusion, however. By increasing their leverage, firms have typically also increased the complexity of their capital structure, creating more opportunities for conflicting incentives among investors and thus more potential for disputes. We simply suggest that, under the current judicial approach to creditor disputes, we should expect to witness more opportunistic investor behavior, rather than less.
If you are confident in your ability to write and interpret contracts in a way that allows you to be opportunistic (and prevents your creditors from being opportunistic), and willing to put one over on your creditors to maximize value for yourself, you might be inclined to issue relatively more debt and relatively less equity. You get some option value by having more contracts that you can interpret opportunistically, which you don’t get from issuing equity that requires you to act fairly.• 1) There are, as it were, first-order corporate finance considerations: Selling equity gives up more ownership of your company, and thus more upside if things go right; if you are optimistic you will not want to sell equity. Selling debt requires repayment, though, and if things go poorly having too much debt can destroy your company. You will want to raise only as much debt as you can safely pay off.
• 2) There are various considerations that come from existing market and social and legal structures. You might not want to sell stock to meddling venture capitalists, or in a public offering where it will end up in the hands of activist investors and short-term-focused institutions. You might want to sell debt because interest payments on debt are tax-deductible and the cost of equity is not.
• 3) There is, also, the potential for opportunism. If you sell stock, you mostly cannot be opportunistic in your treatment of your shareholders; they can sue you for breach of fiduciary duty and come to court and say “this wasn’t fair” and a court will agree with them. If you sell debt, you can be very opportunistic in your treatment of your creditors; they can sue you for breach of contract and come to court and say “this wasn’t fair” and you will say “hahahahaha gotcha, in section 19.37(c)(ii) it says I can do whatever I want,” and the court will say “that’s true it does” and let you do whatever you want.
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