Yesterday, 3-month interbank spreads hit 134 basis points. Prior to the credit crunch, that number was usually around 12 basis points. The spread is at an all time high.The credit crunch has never been more acute than it is tonight. The sterling interbank market appears to have collapsed. Banks are hoarding cash, and they are unwilling to lend to each other without collateral.
Those huge waves of central bank credit, the special liquidity scheme, and the rate cuts; none of it has worked. It has all failed. The financial system is close to meltdown.
How did things get so bad?
7 comments:
I can see why Paulson and Bernanke are so rattled. Pity they came up with such a dud scheme.
And I take it everyone agrees the credit market leads the equity market these days.
Nick
And our glorious leader continues to blame everyone else.
The economist Wilhelm Ropke warns in one of his books from the 1930s, that a crisis of bank solvency can manifest itself as a liquidity crisis. He warns that pumping more liquidity into the system will have little effect other than delaying - or even making worse - the inevitable recession.
Here we are making exactly the same mistakes that we made in the past and still expecting them to work. Can you imagine this happening in any other arena? Aeronautical engineers perhaps puzzling over why the 20th aircraft with the same design flaws as the others crashed like the others - "next time we need even more fuel says one!"
Good point rick
Alice
Boris Johnson describes banking as an 'industry'.
I think that alone says a lot about how things became so bad, Alice.
I dunno.
These 'inter-bank spreads', are they high in cholesterol or low in cholesterol? The public should be told!
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