BEN NORTON: Hi, everyone. I’m Ben Norton, and this is Geopolitical Economy Report. Today, I have the pleasure of being joined by Michael Hudson, the brilliant economist and author of many books.
Michael is also the co-host of a program here, Geopolitical Economy Hour, that he does every two weeks with friend of the show Radhika Desai. I will lix to that show in the descxtion below.
I had Michael on in March to discuss the collapse of three U.S. banks in just one week. That was Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and Silvergate Bank. And yet the crisis has continued since then.
And I knew I needed to bring back Michael to talk about the latest developments.
In just two months, four banks in the United States have collapsed. And we now see the latest example this May is First Republic Bank, which is the second biggest bank in U.S. history to collapse, went down and was taken over by J.P. Morgan.

本···诺顿:大家好。我是本·诺顿,这里是地缘政治经济报道。今天,我很荣幸邀请到杰出的经济学家、著书颇丰的迈克尔·哈德森(Michael Hudson)。迈克尔也是《地缘政治经济时间》节目的联合主持人,他和节目的朋友拉迪卡·德赛(Radhika Desai)每两周做一次。我将在下面的描述中链接到那个节目。
今年3月,我请迈克尔讨论了美国三家银行在短短一周内倒闭的问题。分别是硅谷银行,签名银行和银门银行。然而,自那时以来,危机仍在继续。我知道我需要请迈克尔回来谈谈最新的进展。在短短两个月内,美国就有四家银行倒闭。我们现在看到今年5月最新的例子是第一共和银行,它是美国历史上第二大银行,倒闭并被摩根大通收购。

And this is the biggest bank to collapse since 2008 when Washington Mutual collapsed. Although, as Michael has often pointed out, what we should be saying is, the biggest bank in the U.S. that was “allowed” to collapse because he pointed out that many banks were actually insolvent but weren’t allowed to collapse.
Now, First Republic Bank had $207 billion in assets. And there are similarities between this collapse and the previous collapses.
Like those banks, a similarity with First Republic is that the majority of its deposits were uninsured. About 68% of its deposits were above the federally insured limit of $250,000. So that means that there are $120 billion worth of uninsured deposits.
And what’s interesting about First Republic compared to other banks is it had very wealthy clients and many of them had long-term low interest mortgage loans. So as an example, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, had a $6 million mortgage with First Republic Bank, and that was at 1% interest. So very low interest.

这是自2008年华盛顿互惠银行倒闭以来倒闭的最大银行。尽管,正如迈克尔经常指出的那样,我们应该说的是,美国最大的银行被允许倒闭,因为他指出,许多银行实际上已经资不抵债,但却没有被允许倒闭。
现在,第一共和银行拥有2,070亿美元的资产。这次崩溃和之前的崩溃有相似之处。
与这些银行一样,第一共和银行的相似之处在于,它的大部分存款都没有保险。大约68%的存款超过了25万美元的联邦保险限额。这意味着有1200亿美元的存款没有保险。
与其他银行相比,第一共和银行的有趣之处在于,它的客户非常富有,其中许多人都有长期的低利率抵押贷款。举个例子,Facebook的CEO马克·扎克伯格,在第一共和银行有600万美元的抵押贷款,利率是1%。利率很低。

Now, when I had Michael on last time, he explained how one of the reasons that Silicon Valley Bank collapsed is because it had invested a lot in long-term bonds. And because the Federal Reserve has been aggressively raising interest rates, the value of those bonds has significantly decreased.
So when there was a run on the bank, the bank had to sell those bonds that had lost value and use that to try to pay the depositors. But it didn’t simply have enough at the end and it collapsed.
Now, in the case of First Republic Bank, it wasn’t too exposed to bonds like Silicon Valley Bank was, but it did have a lot of long-term mortgages, about $100 billion worth.
So now we see that JPMorgan is taking over First Republic Bank and JPMorgan has been given a sweetheart deal. In fact, JPMorgan reported that it expects to make $2.6 billion off of this deal.

上次我请迈克尔来的时候,他解释了硅谷银行倒闭的原因之一是因为它在长期债券上投入了大量资金。由于美联储一直在积极提高利率,这些债券的价值大幅下降。
因此,当银行发生挤兑时,银行不得不出售那些失去价值的债券,并用这些债券来偿还存款人。但它最后没有足够的资金,它崩溃了。
现在,以第一共和银行为例,它不像硅谷银行那样有太多的债券风险,但它确实有很多长期抵押贷款,价值约1000亿美元。
现在我们看到摩根大通正在收购第一共和银行摩根大通得到了一笔私下交易。事实上,摩根大通报告称,它预计将从这笔交易中获利26亿美元。

As part of the agreement, JPMorgan does not have to pay First Republic Bank’s corporate debt. And the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the U.S. government backed company, has agreed to a loss-sharing agreement.
So if because of some of the long term mortgages that have lost value, if JPMorgan ends up losing some of the value on mortgages and commercial loans, the FDIC agreed to bear 80% of the credit losses.
Meanwhile, the FDIC is estimating this is going to cost $13 billion to its deposit insurance fund.
And that means that in just two months, since the beginning of March, the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund has paid out around $35 billion to save Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and now First Republic Bank.
So, Michael, those are the basic facts.

作为协议的一部分,摩根大通不必支付第一共和银行的公司债务。美国政府支持的联邦存款保险公司(FDIC)也同意了一项损失分担协议。
如果因为一些长期抵押贷款贬值,如果摩根大通最终在抵押贷款和商业贷款上损失了一些价值,FDIC同意承担80%的信贷损失。
与此同时,联邦存款保险公司估计存款保险基金将为此花费130亿美元。
这意味着,自3月初以来的短短两个月内,联邦存款保险公司的存款保险基金已经支付了大约350亿美元来拯救硅谷银行、签名银行和现在的第一共和银行。
所以,迈克尔,以上为一些基本事实。

Now, that doesn’t explain what’s happening at a macro scale on the economy, but it does show it’s another example of how these private banks are getting bailed out by the government when large banks like JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States, is given a sweetheart deal where it’s going to make billions of dollars.
The FDIC is bearing the cost. And this is despite the fact that, as Pam Martens and Russ Martens pointed out at Wall Street on Parade, JPMorgan is actually ranked by regulators as the riskiest bank in the United States.
So giving JPMorgan Chase control over this bank that already had finance issues makes it even riskier for the U.S. financial system.
So I talk about a lot of things there, but those are the basic points.
I want to get your analysis, Michael, and especially in response to the JPMorgan takeover and the increasing concentration of these large banks, the sweetheart deal it got, and the FDIC bailout.
What do you think about all of that?

现在,这并不能解释宏观经济上发生的事情,但它确实表明,这是另一个例子,说明这些私人银行是如何得到政府救助的,而像摩根大通这样的大银行,美国最大的银行,得到了一笔私下交易,它将从中赚取数十亿美元。
联邦存款保险公司正在承担成本。尽管事实是,正如帕姆·马滕斯和拉斯·马滕斯在《华尔街巡游》中指出的那样,摩根大通实际上被监管机构列为美国风险最大的银行。
因此,让摩根大通控制这家已经存在财务问题的银行,对美国金融体系来说风险更大。
我讲了很多东西,但这些都是基本的观点。我想听听你的分析,迈克尔,尤其是你对摩根大通收购的反应以及这些大银行日益集中的反应,它得到的优惠交易,以及联邦存款保险公司的救助。
你对这一切怎么看?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the entire U.S. banking system is just as insolvent as the banks that you’ve just mentioned.
What’s amazing is that all of this is treated as if somehow it was unforeseeable. And people are saying, like Queen Elizabeth said in 2008, did nobody see this?
Well, I’ve been writing about this, exactly how this would occur for the last 15 years, ever since I wrote Killing the Host.
And the reason the banks are insolvent now is because of President Obama’s program and his Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, who appointed the current Federal Reserve President, Powell.
When President Obama decided to bail out the banks, instead of writing down the bank loans to what would have been reasonable levels, instead of saving the junk mortgage victims from their houses, he decided to go along with his boss, Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, and save Citibank and the other big banks that were the most troubled banks of all.

迈克尔·哈德森:整个美国银行系统就像你刚才提到的银行一样资不抵债。
令人惊讶的是,所有这些都被视为不可预见的。人们说,就像伊丽莎白女王在2008年说的,“没有人看到这个吗?”
从我写《杀死宿主》开始,我就一直在写这件事,写了15年,到底会发生什么。银行现在资不抵债的原因是奥巴马总统的计划和他的财政部长盖特纳任命了现任美联储主席鲍威尔。
当奥巴马总统决定救助银行时,他没有把银行贷款减记到合理的水平,没有把垃圾抵押贷款的受害者从他们的房子里救出来,而是决定和他的老板,比尔·克林顿政府的前财政部长罗伯特·鲁宾(Robert Rubin)一起,拯救花旗银行(Citibank)和其他陷入困境的大银行。

And they’re still the most troubled banks of all, except they have a government guarantee, just like Obama gave them, that no matter how much they lose, they will not lose the money. No matter how much the banks lose in negative net worth, the economy will lose, not the banks.
All of that became implicit when the Federal Reserve decided to help the banks that were insolvent in 2008 and 2009, to help them recover their net worth by quantitative easing.
That is creating $9 trillion worth of Federal Reserve balance sheet support of the banks to enable the banks to drive down interest rates to near zero, 0.1%, which is about what banks were paying their depositors.
And the banks used all of this increasing liquidity. What were they going to do with the [liquidity]?
Well, they lent them out largely to private capital firms. In other words, they lent them out to operators on Wall Street who borrowed from the banks to buy out companies and take them private.

他们仍然是所有银行中最麻烦的,除了他们有政府担保,就像奥巴马给他们的那样,不管他们损失多少,他们都不会损失这笔钱。不管银行负净值损失多少,损失的是经济,而不是银行。
当美联储决定在2008年和2009年帮助破产的银行,通过量化宽松帮助它们恢复净值时,所有这些都变得不言而喻。这为银行创造了9万亿美元的美联储资产负债表支持,使银行能够将利率降至接近于零的0.1%,这与银行支付给储户的利率差不多。
银行利用了所有这些增加的流动性。他们打算如何处理(流动性)? 他们主要把钱借给了私人资本公司。换句话说,他们把它们借给华尔街的经营者,这些经营者从银行借钱,买下公司并将其私有化。

Then they would have the companies borrow money from the banks for billions of dollars of money and pay this money out as special dividends to the private capital companies that had bought them out, leaving companies as bankrupt shells, such as Bed Bath & Beyond.
Well, as long as interest rates were just about zero, you had free credit and you had a debt-fueled stock market boom, the biggest bond market boom in history, and a real estate boom.
All of these things you and I have been discussing for many years now, and I’ve been discussing it on my website and my Patreon group.
What happened then was that the Federal Reserve, under the lawyer, Mr. Powell, he’s not an economist, he’s a lawyer, serving his clients, which are Chase Manhattan, Citibank, and the big banks, to decide, well, there’s a danger of wages rising and we’ve got to keep wages down in order to maintain the profit of the stocks that are fueling the stock market gains.
The Federal Reserve decided and announced that it was going to begin raising interest rates from 0% to 4%.

然后,他们会让这些公司从银行借款数十亿美元,并将这笔钱作为特别股息支付给收购它们的私人资本公司,让这些公司成为破产的空壳公司,比如Bed Bath & Beyond。
嗯,只要利率接近于零,你就有自由信贷,你就有债务推动的股市繁荣,历史上最大的债券市场繁荣,还有房地产繁荣。
所有这些事情你和我已经讨论了很多年了,我一直在我的网站和我的Patreon群上讨论。当时发生的事情是,美联储在律师鲍威尔先生的领导下,他不是经济学家,他是一名律师,为他的客户服务,这些客户包括大通曼哈顿银行、花旗银行和大银行,他们决定,工资有上涨的危险,我们必须压低工资,以保持股票的利润,从而推动股市上涨。
美联储决定并宣布开始将利率从0%提高到4%。

Now, at the time this was publicly announced, I talked to many businessmen, many investors, many CEOs, and every single individual that I knew said, — Oh, they’re going to raise the interest rates. That means that if we hold a long-term government bond, like a 30-year bond, or a 5-year bond, or a 10-year bond, the price is going to go down, because when interest rates go up, the price of bonds go down.
Everyone I knew moved into short-term government bonds, that is, Treasury bills, three-month Treasury bills, or maybe two-year Treasury notes, because they didn’t want to take the loss that occurred if you’re holding a 30-year bond.
And holding a 30-year mortgage is just like holding a 30-year bond. All of a sudden, interest rates are going up, but you’re holding a security, a mortgage or a bond that pays a very low interest rate and whose price has fallen by 30%, maybe even 40%.
Now, that means that if you’re a bank and you have depositors and your assets are reduced in market price by 40%, what are you going to do if your
deposits aren’t reduced? You have negative equity.

当这个计划被公开宣布的时候,我和许多商人、投资者、首席执行官交谈,我认识的每一个人都说,哦,他们要提高利率了。这意味着如果我们持有长期政府债券,比如30年期债券,5年期债券,10年期债券,价值会下降,因为当利率上升时,债券价格会下降。
我认识的每个人都买短期国债,也就是国库券,三个月国库券,或者两年期国库券,因为他们不想承受30年期国债的损失。
持有30年期抵押贷款就像持有30年期债券一样。突然间,利率上升了,但你持有的证券,抵押贷款或债券利率很低,价格下跌了30%,甚至40%。
这意味着,如果你是一家银行,你有储户,你的资产在市场价格上减少了40%,如果你的存款没有减少,你会怎么做?你的净资产是负的。

Well, just about every bank in the country moved into a negative equity position, because all the banks have made fairly long-term loans.
And as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, that lowered the price of the mortgages that banks held, the Treasury securities that banks held. All of this was going down.
Now, after Silicon Valley Bank went under, for instance, Yves Smith on Naked Capitalism, which is my favorite financial site to follow on these things, said, — Well, Silicon Valley Bank just hopelessly mismanaged their portfolio in holding on to these long-term government bonds. Why did they do it?
Well, here’s why they did it. Imagine what would have happened if Silicon Valley Bank or any bank in America would have acted just like the private individuals who move their personal retirement accounts or their personal financial accounts into short-term treasuries.
They all would have begun to sell their 30-year mortgages or other long-term mortgages. This by itself would have crashed the price of 30-year mortgages.

几乎所有的银行都变成了负资产,因为所有的银行都发放了相当长期的贷款。
随着美联储提高利率,银行持有的抵押贷款价格,银行持有的国库券价格下降。这一切都在发生。
比如,在硅谷银行破产后,伊夫·史密斯在我最喜欢关注的金融网站Naked Capitalism上说,硅谷银行持有这些长期政府债券,对他们的投资组合管理不善,这是无解的。但他们为什么要这么做?
下面是他们这么做的原因。想象一下,如果硅谷银行或美国的任何一家银行像个人一样,把他们的个人退休账户或个人金融账户转移到短期国债中,会发生什么——他们都会开始出售30年期抵押贷款或其他长期抵押贷款。这本身就会使30年期抵押贷款的价格暴跌。

If they would have sold their 30-year Treasury bonds and said, — Well, we’d better move into short-term treasuries, imagine if all the banks would have decided, we heard what the Federal Reserve said, they’re going to raise the interest rates to 4% and lower the value of these securities by 30 or 40%. Let’s all dump them.
Well, the act of selling them would have caused the prices to decline to a point where indeed, right away, they would have been yielding this 4%. Obviously, there’s very little they could do.
That’s because finance and credit in the United States are privatized.
The crisis that we’re going through today is not the kind of crisis that China would experience because China has made money and credit and banking a public utility.
In the United States, it’s all privatized and part of it is subject to the balance sheet constraints of: What do you do if interest rates go up, the value of your assets goes down, while your liabilities, that is what you owe depositors, continues high?
Well, some of the newspapers said, — Well, why didn’t Silicon Valley Bank and other banks simply take out an option and hedge?

如果他们卖掉30年期国债,说,我们最好转投短期国债,想象一下,如果所有的银行都决定,我们听到美联储说的,他们要把利率提高到4%把这些证券的价值降低30%到40%让我们一起甩掉他们吧。
出售它们的行为会导致价格下降到一个点,实际上,它们马上就会为4%的收益率让路。显然,他们无能为力。
这是因为美国的金融和信贷是私有化的。我们今天经历的危机不是中国会经历的那种危机,因为中国已经把货币、信贷和银行变成了公用事业。
在美国,银行都是私有化的,其中一部分受制于资产负债表的约束:如果利率上升,你的资产价值下降,而你的负债,也就是你欠储户的债务,继续居高不下,你该怎么办?
一些报纸说,好吧,为什么硅谷银行和其他银行不直接拿出期权来对冲呢?

In other words, the suggestion was, — Well, if you know you’re going to have a $100,000 mortgage that’s going to be worth $60,000, why don’t you just get someone to guarantee that in two years or so when the Fed increases interest rates to 4%, you can still go to the counterparty that’s holding the derivative and say, — Okay, now this is only worth $60,000. I want you to pay me $100,000 for it.
Well, how are they going to find a sucker who would have gone into that?
Because the banks that write the derivatives and the futures and the options read the newspapers also and they all read that the Federal Reserve says it’s going to raise the interest rates to 4% and reduce the value of assets to only about 60%.
So they would have said, — Sure, we’ll write it. You’ll have to give us a $100,000 mortgage. That’ll cost you $40,000 for the insurance.
In other words, nobody wants to lose any money. And the fact is, whoever held these long-term securities was going to lose money.

换句话说,这个建议是,如果你知道你将有一笔10万美元的抵押贷款价值6万美元,你为什么不找个人来保证两年后当美联储将利率提高到4%时,你仍然可以找到持有衍生品的交易对手说,好吧,现在这只值6万美元。我要你付我十万美元。
他们怎么能找到一个会这么做的笨蛋呢?因为写衍生品,期货和期权的银行也读了报纸,他们都读到美联储说它将把利率提高到4%把资产价值降低到60%左右。所以他们会说,当然,我们会写的。但你得给我们10万美元的抵押贷款。你要花四万美元买保险。
换句话说,没有人想赔钱。事实是,无论谁持有这些长期证券都会赔钱。

this is exactly what happened to the savings and loan institutions in the 1970s, in the 1980s. There was nothing the banks could do.
The banks were able to survive for a few years despite the fact that the Fed was raising interest rates to 4%.
The banks said, — Well, there’s only one way that we can avoid facing the fact that our assets are much less than our liabilities by just keeping the deposits there. Let’s keep paying the depositors what we were paying all along, 0.2%.
We hope our depositors are really, really stupid and inertia, and it’s so hard to change a bank account and take money out and buy a government security short term or to buy another financial security. Maybe this inertia will just save us and nobody will do anything.
But we’ve got to get really stupid people in charge of the Federal Reserve who don’t realize that the banks are insolvent. We’ve got to get flacks, public relations people, for the Fed, like Paul Krugman, who said, — No problem at all. Everything’s going to be okay. Our financial system is great. Nothing to worry about.

尽管美联储将利率提高到4%,这些银行仍能存活几年。
银行说,只有一种方法可以避免资产远远小于负债的事实那就是把存款留在银行。让我们继续支付储户我们一直支付的,0.2%。
我们希望我们的存款人非常非常愚蠢和惰性,很难改变银行账户,取出钱来购买短期政府证券或购买另一种金融证券。也许这种惯性会拯救我们,没有人会做任何事情。但我们必须让那些愚蠢的人执掌美联储,他们没有意识到银行已经资不抵债。我们必须为美联储找一些公关人员,比如保罗·克鲁格曼,他说:“完全没问题。”一切都会没事的。我们的金融体系很好。没什么好担心的。

And as long as you can get the Fed saying there’s no problem and the newspapers saying interest rates are going up, forget about the fact that when interest rates go up, the price of mortgages and bonds go down.
If you can just ignore that basic balance sheet fact, depositors are just going to be quite happy earning their [0.2%] on their savings account, even though anyone smart has already taken their money out of the bank and invested in government securities that are yielding 4%.
Now, I know many people, friends of mine, who’ve taken their money out of the bank and invested in two-year government notes or short-term money market funds, and they’re getting 4%. Why on earth would they leave the money in the banks?
Well, Silicon Valley Bank and the New York Bank that just went under, went under largely because they cater to the wealthiest depositors, the high-income depositors.

只要你能在报纸说利率上升时让美联储说没有问题,忘掉利率上升、抵押贷款和债券价格下降的事实。
如果你可以忽略这个基本的资产负债表事实,存款人就会很高兴地从他们的储蓄账户上赚取0.2%的利息,即使任何聪明的人都已经把钱从银行取出来,投资于收益率为4%的政府证券。
我认识很多人,我的朋友,他们把钱从银行拿出来,投资于两年期政府债券或短期货币市场基金,他们的回报率是4%。他们到底为什么要把钱存在银行?硅谷银行和纽约银行刚刚倒闭,很大程度上是因为它们迎合了最富有的储户,高收入储户。
(未完待续)