[cm2187]

Idiotic article. First a CLO is essentially a portfolio of loans. You can call that gambling, and in a way, every financial risk is gambling, but it is the very job of a bank to take credit risk, and to lend.

Then, I don't know about Wells specifically, but it is possible that these CLOs may not even be external transactions, that the bank securitised its own loans so that it stands ready to post them to the central bank as collateral to get short term funding in exchange, if a liquidity crisis hits. If it is the case, it is actually a good thing.

The banking system is increadibly strong vs 2008, the amount of capital banks hold is a multiple of what they held in 2008, while having reduced the size of their balance sheets at the same time (ex Chinese banks). They hold huge amounts of liquid assets and have limits on how much short term funding they can rely on. In addition the introduction of bailin should protect tax payers in the case of a bank failure.

I would be much more worried about the financial impact of money printing. The amount of QE that the Fed has introduced is unprecedented, both in size and velocity, and they keep printing. And we are only at the begining of this downturn. This will massively distord the markets. And I don't believe it will not create inflation ultimately, which is a much bigger threat to savers than their bank credit risk.

[whatok]

Agree with a majority of this. US bank balance sheets are in a whole different universe than they were during the last crisis. CLOs are not only a minuscule portion of their holdings but they also hold a tiny percentage of outstanding CLOs.

Japanese co-op banks on the other hand have huge CLOs holdings and would be extremely exposed if these went sour.

[linuxftw]

> but it is the very job of a bank to take credit risk, and to lend.

This used to be true, but isn't. The job of the bank to is play the spread. They take 0% interest loans from the Fed, loan the money to you, and then resell the loan into the market (aka, your 401k). This is why the subprime mortgage crisis was a crisis. Banks had almost 0 risk. Just let the credit rating agencies stamp AAA on the CLO, push it into the state of California's pension fund as AAA securities, profit.

If any bank is not selling the loan, they're taking a completely unnecessary risk.

[cryptica]

It will likely cause massive inflation but it may not cause much of an increase in CPI. I think economists ought to redefine inflation. CPI is not the same as inflation. CPI metrics have been thoroughly gamed decades ago and they're essentially meaningless.

Almost all of the monetary inflation these days shows up in the markets as inflated asset prices and does not show up in the CPI.

If you believe that bare sustenance of the working class is the only thing that matters, you could argue that this distinction is not significant... But growing wealth inequality is causing concentration of political power, distorting markets, regulating small businesses out of existence, creating useless corporate jobs, driving up rents, eroding privacy rights, eroding democracy, eroding freedom of speech, creating division (Milton Friedman even warned us about this in the 70s), encouraging unethical business practices (surveillance capitalism)... I think we're well beyond the point where we can sweep these problems under the carpet. They have become existential problems for society and they are caused by wealth inequality brought about by asset price inflation and accompanying stock buybacks (often paid for using interest-free printed credit from banks).

We live in a feudal society - But unfortunately for the plutocrats, they cannot use god's will as an excuse to justify their current position in society... The more time passes, the more people become aware of systematic cronyism, the more untenable the plutocrats' positions will be.