1. The decision to allow Lehman Brothers to fail, after which solving the $1.26 Quadrillion derivatives crisis became impossible.
2. The ISDA's decision this week that a 75% Greek bond haircut was not a default, but rather a voluntary credit event.
Sinclair discusses both of these events, and why they will both have historical consequences and impacts below.
From Jim Sinclair:
The history of this period will focus attention on two economic clutch type events. These events will have mandated the need for the construction of a new monetary system utilizing a virtual reserve currency traded only by central banks. This reserve currency will be related to gold via a global Western world M3.
An economic clutch type event is one that by its occurrence allows the world to shift gears and change into a new economic velocity and direction.
The first economic clutch event took place when the decision was made that the US Federal Reserve and US Treasury would not support a rescue of the prestigious investment firm of Lehman Brothers. By doing this, they threw that institution and all of its transactions in which it was the deficit other party into default via bankruptcy.
Before then the entire OTC derivative debacle had a simple but extremely controversial solution. The tactic would have been similar to the means of nullifying the effect of the historic failure of the Savings and Loan Institutions during the last great housing recession. This at hand solution was to net the entire global derivative problem into a singular institutions named the Derivative Bank. At that time all OTC derivatives which were established would be returned to the instance of establishment when obligations netted almost zero. It was the institution of Lehman as a bankruptcy that removed the ability to net out to near zero from the daisy chain of global derivatives. To bring the daisy chain of OTC derivatives to net the winner would have to place their paper winnings into the pool and the paper losers would have placed their paper losses back into the pool. This would have reduced the entire loss to only part of the earnings on the banking institution from 1991 (the birth of the derivative use globally) rather than the more than now 20 trillion dollars worth of liquidity required to fund the winners who have benefited mightily from that windfall we financed.
The forced flushing of Lehman Brothers is therefore the economic clutch event that brought quantitative easing to provide the rescue funds to finance the winnings of the global Western world financial system. The downshift was from 5th gear to 1st gear that nearly blew up the world economic engine.
We now have had the 2nd Western world economic clutch event that will shift the gears directly from the plodding along in 1st gear economically into reverse gear, therein blowing the transmission and engine simultaneously. This event is the ISDA blessing of the credit event which reduced the value of Greek debt to its holders by 70% without triggering a default. They have now made it virtuous to walk away from the once lest risk loans, loans to Western governments. Such a walk away is now deemed a credit event, not the dirty D word, default.
A pattern of action has been set in place now which takes QE, the gift from Lehman's economic clutch event, to QE to infinity, the direct result of the Greek economic clutch event that was declared via the International Swaps and Derivative Association. These Gods of Mammon declared 70% of the Greek sovereign debt to be valueless without guilt, sin or consequences.
Replacing the lost value from the sovereign credit event (non-default) in this paper selectively to the banking system makes unlimited creation of liquidity an act of virtue and blessedness.
To assume that other nations facing the same problems will not wish the same treatment is madness. To assume the private sector facing the same problems will not demand the same treatment is madness. Therefore QE to infinity is now deemed an act of virtue and blessedness.
A 70% haircut in the value of the Greek sovereign debt does not constitute a credit event defined as a credit default according to the most powerful financial entity on the planet, the ISDA. This group is more financially influential than governments today. This decision by the revered members of the Association's Determinations Committee has acted to prevent the notional value of all the credit default swaps, an OTC derivative, from becoming real value as would occur if the CDSs were called upon to function.
The ISDA has, according to MSM, taken offense to being described as secretive in its proceedings. The ISDA said minutes of the meeting of the committee would not be publicly distributed as the decision was unanimous.
What has occurred in what is now described as "the successful handling of the Greek problem" by the ECB is in fact a total disaster for mankind in its introduction of QE to Infinity as the blessed settlement to a problem that now is more severe than it was prior to the Lehman event. That problem is that the mountain of OTC derivative has not been attended to, but rather has grown to include the size of all Western world sovereign debt as it is all western sovereign debt that is now threatened by an event of default on a national level. That will simply occur regardless of whatever the ISDA says. Much of it will not be paid, period.
This enfranchised QE to infinity sets a floor via Chinese gold acquisitions to any reaction in price. Alf Field's price objective of gold at $4500 is by this 2nd economic clutch event now in the crosshairs of the gold price.
Gold prices staying high have now been guaranteed. Further to that, those intelligently managed gold producers internationally will shift to dividend payers of note, transforming the gold industry into the utility type equity of the future. Opinions expressed to the opposite are simple exercises in economic ignorance.
Gold's price reactions, when they do occur, will be violent and very short lived. This is fact.
Respectfully,
James Sinclair
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