Summary
Transcript
The latest FDIC report tells us that the banks are on the brink of collapse, because they’ve just reported a $517 billion loss in unrealized losses, and that’s across the entire US banking system. And the FDIC, who ensures our money at the banks, tells us that 63 lenders are on the brink of insolvency. And everyone is thinking, here comes another 2008 bake collapse all over again. And even the most famous hedge fund manager, Michael Burry, who got famous for shorting the 2008 crash, as shown in the movie, you know, The Big Short, he’s out talking about how bad this is.
But is it really? So in this video, I’m going to break down what the FDIC said, just how bad this situation is, whether your money in the bank is at risk or not. But most importantly, how this shows us what’s coming from the Fed next, and exactly how we should be positioning for this right now. So let’s go. All right, welcome to the channel. If you’re new, my name is Mark Moss, and I make these videos, of course, to change the way you think about money. And I’m here to talk about what’s going on with the banks.
Now, I have been watching the banks like a hawk for about the last 15 years. Why is that? Well, if you know my story, I had a lot of success early on in my career buying bank owned repos, fixing and flipping real estate, building from the ground up. I started a couple of different businesses. I had a few high value exits, Fortune 500 exits. I had it all on the line. I was retired. I had it made. And then 2008 came and changed all of that for me. Because of the great financial crash, the bank collapse that happened.
Now, I wasn’t paying attention to the financial system at the time. And I got caught off guard and I vowed to never let that happen again. And so I’ve been watching the banks like a hawk ever since I built up my portfolio again. Don’t cry for me. And now I pay attention to what’s going on. So I don’t just get caught off sides. Definitely don’t want that to happen. But I want to profit from this and these moves that are made. And that’s exactly why I make these videos. And it’s exactly what I’m going to break down for you right now.
So let’s go ahead and dig in. Now, first of all, the big news, you’ve probably seen it all over the headlines already. And so I want to bring some reality to you. The truth is, yes, the FDIC, the insurance company that insures your money in the bank gave us an ominous warning. A pretty big warning. As a matter of fact, they talked about a 517 billion dollar loss in just the first quarter of this year for the banks. It’s a pretty big deal. This came out on the press release. You can go to the FDIC website and read this.
It was the quarterly banking profile for the first quarter of 2024. And they talked about the performance. And they talked about how there was a 517 billion dollar loss in just the first quarter alone. Now, if we dig this up, they kind of give us some of the details into how big this was. It soared by 39 billion dollars. So the losses just keep piling up. It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse. 517 billion dollar loss in the first quarter. So that’s what’s going on. Now, if we take a look at this, like I said, without understanding, maybe that seems really bad.
And it certainly is. The FDIC said these were unusually high losses, unusually high. And of course they are. Now, if we take a look at it in more of a chart fashion, a graphical fashion, what we’re seeing here is from 2008, during the great financial crash, it didn’t look so bad. And yet here we are today. And you might say, yes, this looks actually way worse. And you would, of course, be right. Now, the difference that we have here is the red and the blue is the blue is what’s available for sale. So this is the banks are holding US Treasuries on their books.
This is their asset. You give them money and they buy US Treasuries, the risk free asset. Now, these Treasuries have different maturity levels. Some of them are months to years to decades, three decades, 30 years. And some of them, they’re not a term. Some of them they have to sell, some of them they don’t. And this is the problem I want to break down for you a little bit. But just so you can see the graphical representation of this, these blue Treasuries are the ones that are available for sale. And these red ones are what they’re going to hold to maturities.
They’re going to hold them for 10, 20, 30 years. And so those aren’t so much of a problem. It’s what they have to sell right now that they are underwater in. That’s causing a problem. You can just see the size of that move. And of course, you can understand, which is why, of course, the FDIC said that it’s usually high. Now, this has been going on for nine quarters in a row now, nine quarters in a row with no end in sight. Okay, so that’s sort of what’s going on. But we want to dig into the details because the details are always in the details, right? Okay, before I jump into the details real quick and talk about the exact data, I want to let you know that I have a codex, a way to decipher what’s really driving markets.
And of course, it’s about the liquidity. But how does liquidity drive the market and what’s going to happen? And this whole banking situation is going to affect liquidity. And so if you want to know the exact codex of how we can map liquidity over to asset prices and specifically which asset prices are going to move based off sensitivity and even more importantly, how liquidity moves in a repeating cycle. I got a break for you. I want to have a live event where I’m going to break all of this down. I got all the charts to show you how liquidity is moving, how different assets move at different rates.
And like I said, more specifically, how we can time this by understanding the cycles. If you want to come join me for free, I’m going to break all this down. It’s going to blow your mind. The codex of monetary cycles. There’s a link down below or QR code on the screen. It’s all for free. I’m going to show you all the charts and then I’m going to stick around and answer all your questions live. But let’s keep going with the video. So if we dig into the data behind this, we see something maybe a little bit different.
What am I talking about? We know that the banks are sitting on about five and a half trillion. These numbers are so big, we lose relation to them. Five and a half trillion dollars in securities. Why? Well, during the pandemic when the Fed and the U.S. government pumped out trillions and trillions of dollars, most of that went into the banks. The pandemic money. Even when you got your stimmy, you probably put that in the bank where you bought something and then they put that into the bank or so forth. And so all that pandemic money went to the banks.
What do the banks do with it? Well, they put it into U.S. Treasuries. Again, the risk-free asset. And so all of that went in there. As a matter of fact, we had $6.2 trillion in treasuries at the peak in Q122. So it’s come down a little bit from 6.2 to 5.4. I do want to point out just really quickly, certainly, you know, 5.4 is less than 6.2. But it’s not that much less. And it just goes to show you how much money is still out there sloshing around the system that wasn’t there just pre-pandemic.
Okay, now to kind of show you a graphical representation, I love the look of the charts because it shows us sort of the size and the move of these things. And this gives us all securities. Again, going back to 2008, the last great financial crash. Now, you know, there’s a saying, generals always fight the last war. And so what happens is I was attacked here before. I think that’s where the attack is going to be again. And so everybody is expecting a banking collapse because we had a banking collapse, but it doesn’t always work out exactly the same way.
What does it say nature or history doesn’t repeat it rhyme, something like that. Okay, so what we can see here is the different types of securities, the total securities, which are the purple. We can see how high they were here, what’s available for sale and what’s held for maturity. So we already looked at this. And so you kind of get to see it a different way. And you can see that they’ve been coming down a little bit, but they’re still super high compared to where we were in 2008. But the thing is here is that these are unrealized losses.
What does that mean? Well, the assets on their books have gone down to where they, if they sell them today, they’re going to lose a lot of money. But to the point that I showed you, not all of them have to be sold today. Most of them will be held to maturity. And as long as they can, and that’s the question, as long as they can hold them to maturity 20, 30 years, then it should be no problem. They’ll sell them. And that is the problem. That is the theory versus reality. Now, you might remember in March of 2023, I made some videos about it when we had banks collapse.
So we had Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank, et cetera. Go bust. Why? Well, because they had unrealized losses on their books. The problem was those unrealized losses. The theory, not a big deal, became reality when depositors, you and I decided, there’s too much risk there. I think I’m going to pull some of my money out of the bank. And when you went to get, when people went to get their money out of the bank, guess what? The bank didn’t have it. Why? Because it was parked in treasuries that were at a loss.
So then they were forced to sell the treasuries at a loss. And the theory, the unrealized losses became reality, which became real losses. So the thing is, in theory, it shouldn’t be a big deal to have the unrealized losses, but the reality is it’s not a problem until it is. And then it’s a problem really, really quickly. Okay. But really, let’s get back to this really. Is this really a problem? And if so, how big of a problem? And more importantly, at the end of the day, what does it mean to us and what should we do about it? So really what we have here is interest rate risk, not credit risk.
Now it’s important to understand what that means. You see, right now what we’re facing is interest rate risk, meaning because the Fed has raised the rates, it caused the value of those treasuries to go down, which means the banks holding those assets have lost value in those. All right. So it’s interest rate risk because of what the Fed has done. Now the Fed could lower rates again, which would push those assets back up, and they’d be back in maybe close to positive territory. It’s important to understand what this risk is with the banks, because this time is different.
Meaning in 2008, it was credit risk. You see homeowners were defaulting on their loans. The credit was losing value because people were defaulting. But that’s not happening today. It’s not about homes being defaulted. As a matter of fact, homes are at all time highs. It’s interest rates risk. So you have to understand what the risk is. A lot of times people ask me, what should I do? And it’s like, well, what problem are we trying to solve? What’s the risk that we’re trying to solve for? And so you want to understand that’s different.
But what I do want to bring out is that, is it really different? You see, is this really a big deal? $500 billion sounds like a big deal. But compared to what? You see humans, our brains, if anything else, we’re comparing mechanisms. If I were to ask you, is this pen heavy? You would say, well, compared to what? So we want to understand this in comparison. So let me show you a chart here. This is a comparison of how bad things are today or in 2023 versus 2008. So here in 2008, you can see all of these banks that went bust.
Washington Mutual being the biggest one. Indy Mac being pretty big. Colonial Bank being pretty big, etc. Of course, banks have continued to collapse. Banks always collapse, by the way. They’re always collapsing all the time because guess what? What is it? 80, 90% of businesses fail. So they’re always going out of business. But these three banks that we saw in March of 2023 were worse than anything that we had seen any of the big banks that we saw in 2008. So just compared to what we can see the size of this move. But what about right now? Because $500 billion sounds pretty bad.
The FDIC says 63 banks could be going bust on the brink. So 63 banks a lot. Is this something that we should be worried about? Because it certainly gets me clicks on this video. But we want to bring this to reality so we can front run this if we can. So the FDIC says that the health of the U.S. banking system is not an imminent risk. Not imminent, okay? It doesn’t mean there’s not a risk, but it’s not an imminent risk. It says that it could cause credit quality, earnings, and liquidity challenges. So liquidity challenges meaning that there could be deterioration in certain loan portfolios.
So potentially we could see a tightening in the market. Maybe you can’t get as many loans as you want. Maybe interest rates go back up. So there could be volatility. It could be some problems. Of course, if businesses can’t get loans, they don’t have expansion. It sort of starts to have this downward spiral. But to put this into perspective, just to put your mind at ease, just a second here. We can see the number of banks, the problem banks that we have. The problem banks list, those with camels, a composite rating of fours, the bad ones.
We can see that it’s increased from 52 in the fourth quarter of 2023 to 63 in the first quarter of 2024. So it’s going up. So the direction is not good. However, that being said, the number of problem banks represented just 1.4% of total banks. Only 1.4% of total banks are at risk. So it certainly gets headlines, certainly got you to watch this video. But again, it’s a very small percentage. I will say, however, though, you know, we can look back to 2008 and see it was a couple of banks that really dragged this whole system down.
So it’s certainly not something to not pay attention to, but it’s not an imminent collapse. And I would just say overall that the money in the bank that you have there right now, I do not believe is at imminent risk for me. Anyway, I’m not panicking over the money I have in the bank. I know a lot of you are. So if that’s the case, then why am I making this video? What am I telling you for? Well, because I think there’s something that we need to be paying attention to because this presents a massive opportunity for paying attention.
And if you’re not paying attention, it’s going to be a big problem for you. So what am I talking about? Not losing your money in the bank. I’m talking about maybe losing the value of your money in the bank and lost opportunity cost. Let me break that down. OK, let me first talk about the Powell preview. Powell went on 60 Minutes. I did a whole video breaking down Powell’s entire interview on 60 Minutes. And in this clip, he was asked specifically about the banking collapse in 2023 if they got caught off guard. Well, let’s just play the clip.
You seem confident in the banks and yet the Silicon Valley Bank, second largest failure in U.S. history. Did the Fed miss that? So, yes, we we did. And we forthrightly saw that we needed to do better. So we’ve spent a lot of time working on ways to make supervision more effective and also to to to adapt regulation to a more to a modern context. OK, so there you had it directly from Fed chair, Jerome Powell’s mouth. He said, yes, you know, we’re sort of caught off sides in that banking collapse. But don’t you worry, we got it under control now.
You see, they have all types of measures and things in place to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Now, what did they do after the 2003 collapse? This is the important piece to understand. Of course, they bail them out. That goes without saying they cannot. When I say they, I mean the Fed and I mean basically the government, they cannot allow depositors in the bank to lose money. Why? Well, if one bank collapses and people don’t get their money out, guess what’s going to happen to all the other deposits in the system? People are going to say, well, shoot, I can’t trust my money in the bank.
I’m going to take all my money out. And so that’s why I don’t think your money in the bank is at risk. But the value of your money is why? Because when they bailed out the banks, they created something called the BTFP. The BTFP is a bank turned funding program. And so basically they created a credit facility and they put about a hundred billion and went up more than that, about a hundred billion dollars to the banks. So they didn’t go bust. And I want to break down the details because I’ve done several videos on this.
Here’s the important thing to realize, though. This all happened in a matter of days. As a matter of fact, it was six days from the time the banks collapsed to the time that the government, the Fed, put the BTFP program here, the bell out, the hundred billion dollar bell out. And it’s important to understand this because what did that do? This is where we want to think about as investors. When that money went in, when the government bailed out the banks, when the world realized that the Fed is going to bail them out, the Fed put it in place.
And more importantly, the hundred billion dollars got injected into the system. When that happened, we see as homes were starting to sell off, they went back to new all-time highs. As a matter of fact, just last week, US homes across the United States made a new all-time high. But it wasn’t just homes that did that. The S&P 500, you can see, had been trending down, down, down, down, down, down, down. And then right here, the BTFP program happened. And look at what happened to the S&P 500. Looks like a V, doesn’t it? Now, that’s the S&P 500, which is not near as sensitive.
It pushed it up 27%. Now, I made a bunch of videos all through 2023 saying, I’m putting my money into the market. I’m buying, there’s no collapse coming. Why did I make all those videos? Because of this. So 27% on the S&P 500, it’s not as sensitive to liquidity. But you know what is more sensitive to liquidity. Of course, that would be the NASDAQ, that would be tech stocks. And we can see a very similar pattern. They had been going down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. And then right here, the BTFP program happened, and boom, right back up again.
As a matter of fact, the NASDAQ went up by 50%. So it doubled the gains that the S&P 500 did. Now, what’s even more sensitive to liquidity than the NASDAQ? Well, go ahead and drop it in the comments if you already know. And of course, that would be Bitcoin, which we saw a very similar pattern. It had been trending down, down, down, down, down. We had the BTFP enter the market right here, and it went right back up. And this went up for 215%. So it could have made like 5% or 7% on real estate, could have made 25% on the S&P 500, could have made 50% on the NASDAQ, and you could have made 200% in Bitcoin.
If you just watch this channel, well, not just that. If you’re paying attention to the liquidity flows, and if you’re not, you are going to be completely missing out. As a matter of fact, I’ve broken down this monetary codex, a way to decipher the markets that shows it’s the liquidity that’s driving asset prices higher. That’s why all assets are making highs at the same time, regardless of what the economy is doing. But even more importantly, it’s not just knowing how the monetary supply changes the asset prices. More importantly, how different asset prices move based off sensitivity.
And even more importantly, the codex I’ve figured out, the monetary codex, is the cycle. So we can see the timing of how liquidity moves the asset prices. If you want to see all this, I’m going to have a live presentation next week. You can come hang out with me. I have, I don’t know, 20, 30 charts. I’ll break this down so you can understand how to use this in your own investments. And I’m even going to stick around live so you can answer or you can ask any questions you have. I’ll answer them all live. There’s a link down below.
There’s a QR code here on the screen. If you want to come hang out with me, it’s all free. It’s all live. You don’t want to miss this. This is the codex. Okay, now, but what I’m saying is I don’t think your money in the bank is at risk. You’re not going to lose it, but you will lose the value. Why? Because the government and the Fed are going to print more money to keep the banks propped up. So the value of that dollars will go down. And more importantly, the missed opportunity, the lost opportunity of not being in assets.
Which assets? Well, as I just showed you, the more scarce the asset, specifically with a tech narrative, the better you’re going to do. So as I always say, hard scarce assets. So hopefully that sets your mind at ease. This is a big deal, but not for what most people think. Not because you’re going to lose your money, but because you’ll lose the value and because you’ll miss out on the gains. If you’re sitting on the sidelines scared, like the headlines are trying to make you. Hopefully that makes sense for you. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Does that make you feel more at ease? Are you ready to go make some money or are you still scared? Let me know in the comments down below. Of course, as always, give me a thumbs up on this video if you like it. If you don’t, you can give me a thumbs down. That’s okay. But at least tell me why in the comments down below, oh, and hit subscribe while you’re at it. That’s what I got to your success. I’m out. [tr:trw].
See more of Mark Moss on their Public Channel and the MPN Mark Moss channel.
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