As discussed in several notes this year and mentioned in the FOMC preview, the plethora of new liquidity programs that the Fed has put into place are creating balance sheet issues. The $30 billion that the Fed may be lending to JPM, plus whatever else it lends through the PDCF can be added to the list laid out on Friday.

The Fed has already liquidated over $100 billion of Treasury bills since last summer, and it feels like there is at least $100 billion more to go in the next month or two. Market participants need to be prepared for some potentially radical results.

While the mortgage credit losses still don’t look huge relative to the size of the economy or the financial markets — the baseline assumption in the paper is $400 billion in losses, which is about 2-1/2% of total equity market cap or “just one bad day in the market” — they are nevertheless responsible for much of the financial and economic turmoil of the past 6 months. It is estimated that roughly half of the total losses are likely to be borne by leveraged US financial institutions, which aggressively mark to market and closely monitor their leverage and value at risk.