from ZeroHedge:
Last October, when the wounds from the March 2023 bank failures – which surpassed the global financial crisis in total assets and which sparked the latest Fed intervention, setting the market’s nadir over the past 16 months – were still fresh, we made a non-consensus prediction: we said that since the Fed has once again backstopped the US financial system, “the next bank failure will be in Japan.”
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Next bank failure will be in Japan https://t.co/51eCSNZeIh
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 3, 2023
This prediction only got warmer two months later when, inexplicably, Japan’s Norinchukin bank, best known as Japan’s CLO whale, was quietly added to the list of counterparties for the Fed’s Standing Repo Facility, a/k/a the Fed’s foreign bank bailout slush fund.
The Norinchukin Bank, New York branch has been added to the list of Standing Repo Facility Counterparties, effective Dec. 1
great, the Fed is now bailing out Japan’s CLO whale.
Can someone please bug the next dinner at Centralbahnplatz 2 18th floor dining room
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 1, 2023
But if that was the first, and still distant, sign that something was very wrong at one of Japan’s biggest banks (Norinchukin is Japan’s 5th largest bank with $840 billion in assets) today the proverbial canary stepped on a neutron bomb inside the Japanese coalmine, because according to Nikkei, Norinchukin Bank “will sell more than 10 trillion yen ($63 billion) of its holdings of U.S. and European government bonds during the year ending March 2025 as it aims to stem its losses from bets on low-yield foreign bonds, a main cause of its deteriorating balance sheet, and lower the risks associated with holding foreign government bonds.”
See, what’s happened in Japan is not that different from what is happening in the US, where as the FDIC keeps reminding us quarter after quarter, US banks are still sitting on over half a trillion dollars in unrealized losses, as a result of the huge jump in interest rates which has blown up the banks’ long-duration fixed income holdings, sending them trading far below par and forcing banks (and the Fed, see BTFP) to come up with creative ways of shoving these massive losses under the rug.
