Word: farming
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...statement, Treasury Secretary N. Gregory Mankiw urged investors to remain calm. Secretary Mankiw also noted the strong balance-sheet positions of the nation’s leading commercial banks, including Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America. None of these banks have participated materially in the wind-farm boom of the past several years, and all maintain equity capital levels well in excess of the minimum regulatory requirement of 15 percent...
...explosive growth dates to the beginning of the Palin Administration in 2017. Spurred by President Palin’s aggressive subsidies to clean-energy sources and a series of technological breakthroughs, wind power quickly displaced almost all other forms of energy. The huge scale of wind-farm construction—the total value of wind farms worldwide exceeds $5 trillion—was facilitated by the innovation of the SWIFT structure. A SWIFT is a specialized investment fund that holds a broadly diversified portfolio of wind-farm assets. These assets generate revenues that are tightly linked to the price...
...first cracks in the SWIFT model appeared in October of last year, with the failure of the relatively small Pro-SWIFT. Pro-SWIFT had an imprudently large fraction of its assets invested in a single Georgia wind farm, which was forced to shut down for two weeks over protests that its turbines were killing large numbers of local waterfowl. The resulting revenue loss forced Pro-SWIFT to sell assets in an effort to service its maturing short-term debt. Although only $10 billion of assets were liquidated, they fetched just 60 cents per dollar of book value. J.P. Morgan...
...over short-term loans. This has led to further liquidations, bigger fire-sale discounts, and a cascading effect. To date, over 50 SWIFTs, representing over $700 billion in assets, have failed. Yesterday, it was reported that Berkshire-Hathaway was in discussions to acquire Magna-SWIFT’s wind-farm assets for 30 cents on the dollar...
...This is going to be worse than 2008,” said Nouriel Roubini of NYU. “Sure, the banks look healthy now. They have been well-regulated and very prudent. But somebody is going to have to buy up trillions of dollars of these liquidated wind-farm assets. The huge discounts will make it impossible for the big banks to say no to this bargain. And when they do, they will have much less left over for their traditional lending activities...