From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Thu Feb 18 1999 - 10:01:01 MST
max@maxmore.com (Max More) writes:
>>3. Bank runs: these are pretty much inevitable late this year. The
>>government can shut down the banks to stop them, but that will make
>>matters worse. They're already printing out more money and that's
>>not going to solve the problem.
>
>Why isn't it going to solve the problem? It's possible that if irrational
>hysteria builds, then far more money than expected will be withdrawn. But
>the Fed can handle even that, so long as it doesn't all happen in a day. If
>people draw out extra cash over weeks or months towards the end of the
>year, there will no real problem. Banks will be fine.
If the Fed loans banks unlimited amounts of cash with little regard to
the bank's ability to repay the loans, then they can fairly reliably
prevent runs on the banks before Jan. 1. But that strategy will probably
cause significant inflation, inflation, and invite a repeat of the kind
of recklessness that produced the worst of the S&L failures, so the Fed
will be hesitant to act as if runs are likely without clear evidence of
an imminent panic.
As long as the banking system is fuctioning smoothly and there is little
reason to expect more than a few days interruption in basic services, it
is irrational to withdraw large fractions of one's account, because it
becomes much less convenient to pay many bills if you can't mail a check.
I expect that about 50 million people in the U.S. will withdraw about $1000
each in December, and that the system can handle that without major
disruptions.
Consider what happened in the U.S. in January and February of 1933.
With some of history's worst bank failures fresh in people's minds, and
with FDR's advisors clearly hinting that they would abandon the gold
standard or devalue the quantity of gold for which they would redeem
Federal Reserve Notes (which given the strange quasi-gold-standard meant
that dollars withdrawn from banks as gold would retain their value,
while dollars kept in banks could be expected to lose value), it's hard
for me to understand why informed people didn't withdraw all their
dollar-denominated deposits from banks. The attitude of the incoming
administration was reasonably public by January, yet there was little
panic until the last week of February. This shows both that it takes
pretty clear evidence of dangers to produce a system-wide run on banks
(evidence which I don't think Y2K provides), and that even then people
will wait til the last minute.
>actually cause a rise. Either way, I think it's impossible to time market
>drops and rises. If you're a long-term investor it makes sense to ride it
>through.
Beliefs that are common mainly near market tops. At current p/e's, the
chances of a buy and hold investor doing well are low. I recommend keeping
a close eye on 3 month t-bill rates, and selling when rates show a clear
upward trend.
>>I won't even mention oil; the Middle East is almost as doomed as Asia.
>
>Any information to back up this claim? I would think they could afford to
>update their systems, though that doesn't mean they have.
Oil futures and other futures contracts provide as good an estimate as any
of the risks of major disruptions. The oil futures market is saying quite
clearly that there is no problem. The only futures markets that indicate a
problem are the short-term interest rate markets, which predict a 30 basis
point rise in rates from September to December (which, given the stock
market's high price might be enough to cause a significant correction).
allsop@swttools.fc.hp.com (Brent Allsop) writes:
>more cache than this in their house right now. Isn't this a big
>reason the Fed came up with the new currency to handle all this extra
>demand? There was a huge drain of cache during the stock market fall
>back in 87, something that would have surely caused major problems 100
>years ago. But the Fed was ready and flooded the system with whatever
>it needed. Some banks had to pay high interest to get access to it
>for the short time required but what was required was made available
This is mostly fiction. As far as I could see, banks paid lower interest
rates. I don't know what evidence you have of a "huge drain" of cash; many
brokerage accounts presumably ran low on cash, but I don't think much
happened elsewhere. And the Fed's "flooding" of the system was more
rhetorical than financial:
Monetary Base Currency in
Seasonally Circulation
Adjusted Seasonally Adjusted
871007 265.9 871005 192.4
871014 266.1 871012 192.5
871021 263.3 871019 192.9
871028 267.8 871026 193.9
871104 266.3 871102 194.4
871111 266.4 871109 194.7
hal@rain.org (hal@rain.org) writes:
>I saved a news posting a few months ago which has a rather detailed
>analysis of the money stock, cash reserves, cash in circulation,
>bank accounts, etc. I also found it on a web site but I can't
>find the URL now. The posting was based on information at
>http://www.bog.frb.fed.us/releases/ if you want to verify the details.
For raw data such as I produced above, http://www.stls.frb.org/fred/
is the place to look first.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | Critmail (http://crit.org/critmail.html): http://www.rahul.net/pcm | Accept nothing less to archive your mailing list
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