The week Wall Street went into meltdown
It’s getting very ugly out there. Euromoney’s day starts with the head of the repo desk at one of the leading Wall Street firms, an experienced banker whose face can’t long disguise the exhaustion and strain.
What’s happening? "Even the people at the Fed and the ECB don’t get what’s happening. Firms are almost closing down the doors. They’re refusing to finance any more collateral from their existing clients than they did previously, just when unsecured short-term funding is closing down and more collateral is coming out. And they won’t finance collateral even of the best quality from clients they have not previously dealt with. Think about that. We’ve got hedge funds who are saying ‘look, we have been in business for 10 years and we’ve paid $500 million in fees and commissions to Wall Street and you can’t give us a couple of days?’
"We are getting a lot of blunt decisions made by people far away from these markets and some of them are bad decisions.
