My eyes were instantly attracted to a Bloomberg headline “Alabama County Sued by Bond Insurers Amid Stalled Debt Talks” - despite all the wonderful, juicy pieces about Wall Street crashing and burning.
The reason? So far, all the early litigation (which will soon completely overwhelm the U.S. legal system) has been governments suing banks or bond-insurers or brokerages. However, this Bloomberg article marks the beginning of another very important facet of the pending litigation-wars: Broke U.S. states and municipalities defaulting on their debts.
In the current example, the lawsuit is “asking that a receiver be placed in charge of the sewer system, which doesn't make enough money to cover the interest on $3.2 billion of debt.” The article notes that the particular bond-insurers, Syncora Guarantee Inc. and Financial Guaranty Insurance Co., guarantee $2.8 billion of this debt – and will have to pay up when the county eventually defaults.
I personally have never heard of these two bond-insurers, so I assume they are relatively small players in this market. Put another way, this one default could be enough to bury both those bond-insurers – that only carry capital reserves large enough to cover a TINY portion of what they insure (some “insurance!”).
In other words, the stage is set for the dominoes to fall. First the county defaults on this huge debt, and goes into bankruptcy. Then the bond-insurers (who can't cover losses of this size) also go into bankruptcy (and are picked clean by creditors). And then this $3.2 billion loss (minus what small amount they can wring out of the bond-insurers) goes onto the balance sheet of the banks that financed this debt – as an immediate write-down.
There are many reasons this process is of such HUGE significance. First, with dramatic declines in revenue and NO cash-cushions, there are going to be numerous, substantial defaults at the municipal, county, and even state level occurring all over the U.S. in the months (and years) ahead.
Forced by the banks to come up with all the money they have got, these government entities will have no choice but to cut ALL spending to the bare minimum – meaning savage job losses at the municipal, county and state level. I won't bother to go into all of the severe ripples caused by these additional, huge, job losses.
Turning to the bond-insurers, those who have been following this sector will note that companies like MBIA (NYSE: MBI, Stock Forum) and Ambac (NYSE: ABK, Stock Forum), who got into SERIOUS trouble by branching out into the U.S. mortgage market, have been trying to re-focus on municipal bonds “because they rarely default.” Yes, and the United States “rarely defaults” as well, but that won't change a thing the day it announces default at the federal level.
In other words, the bond-insurers (who have already been crushed by mortgage losses) will now be completely obliterated when the “safe” municipal bonds they guarantee start to default at unprecedented rates – because this financial crisisis unprecedented in U.S. history. During the Great Depression, the U.S. was still a rich nation, with cash surpluses tucked away for a (very) “rainy day.” Today, there are NO cash surpluses anywhere in the U.S. economy.
Finally, we get to the banks themselves. Given that municipal bonds “rarely fail,” and the fact the banks have “bond-insurers” to (supposedly) protect them, no U.S. banks are putting aside any reserves for losses on this front, and as we have seen, their current reserves aren't even large enough to deal with the huge mortgage losses.
This new source of VERY large losses will broadside U.S. banks and cause the current trickle of bank failures to increase to an out-of-control flood. Those bank failures, in turn, will drain the small reserves of the FDIC, requiring more direct, massive bail-outs from the U.S. federal government. And all the U.S. government can do is print up trillions more Bernanke-bills.
This is one of the many reasons that the U.S. dollar will decline to much less than 1/10th its current value over the next few years, and another reason why EVERYONE needs to have a large precious metals component in their portfolios.
Don't be caught by surprise, like all the “experts” in the market. The U.S. economy is going down, with no recovery in the future – only national default.
Here is the link to the original Bloomberg story:
https://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid
=ab5MWs6G1q0g&refer=home
Visit littleguy123 on his Stockhouse blog Outside the Market.
This article was written by a member of the Stockhouse community.