Does A $440 Billion Drop In Shadow And Conventional Banking System Liabilities In Q4 Give Bernanke Carte Blanche For QE3?

The shadow banking system, the financial "system" that is far more important to the economic prosperity of the US economy than the traditional liabilities held by conventional banks, and after declining for 9 consecutive quarters, and having hit a peak of $21 trillion in 2008; had reached an inflection point and had posted a very modest increase at around $16 trillion in total liabilities in the third quarter of 2010.

Well, following yesterday's Z.1 release, it seems the bulk of the data was revised, and it appears that not only was last quarter's upward pre-revision data a fluke, when in reality it was another decline of $191.7 billion, but the Q4 data further reinforced the negative trend, with shadow liabilities declining by an even greater $206.4 billion. The components responsible for the decline were ABS Issuers whose liabilities declined by $94 billion, securities loaned by funding corporations declining by $40 billion and lastly repos, which dropped by $79 billion.

In other words, speculation that the Fed had achieved its goal of stimulating an organic reflation in the shadow banking system at which point it would be able to end QE and hand off releveraging over to the private sector were premature, and recent data confirms that the Fed has no choice now but to continue with its quantitative easing process, as it does more of the same: take capital from the public sector and proffer it to Primary Dealers in an attempt at ongoing asset reflation, which will, the theory goes, be matched by a comparable hike in liabilities.

Botton line - Bernanke has once again failed to spark a "virtuous leveraging cycle" even with QE2, which after all is the fundamental goal of the Fed, far beyond even getting the Russell 2000 to 2000. Which means that the Fed will have no choice but to continue "printing" money, and monetizing bonds, as it (in conjunction with the Treasury of course) continues to be the only incremental source of leverage, and thus money, for the world's biggest economy.