0. Sphere of Influence

1. Meet the Big 3

2. Meet the Municipal Bond Market

“Municipal bonds (or "munis" for short) help towns/cities raise money for projects like building schools, parks, and fixing highways. Many retail investors--admittedly, on the wealthier side--invest in munis for tax incentives like not paying federal tax on bond returns. In certain cases, certain muni buys also mean no state taxes are paid…Just like what had happened to stocks, the old-school market for buying and selling muni bonds is going electronic. This is mainly done through an ATS, or "alternative trading system" known also as a dark pool. This speeds up the process of buying and selling munis, making it closer to a "house auction".

“Investor concerns over the crises within the financial industry are bleeding into a corner of the $4 trillion municipal-bond market where major investment banks guarantee energy for public utilities….
Spreads have widened on so-called prepaid gas bonds, which government agencies use to purchase long-term supplies of natural gas. Large institutional banks act as facilitators of the transactions, guaranteeing the supply and providing investors tax-exempt exposure to bank credit….

3. San Jose, Revisited

“I believe in theses cases it’s not Wells Fargo that has a problem but the city of San José.

„Because presentments are currently processed automatically at DTC, IPAs have the option to refuse to pay (“RTP”) for maturing MMI Obligations to protect against the possibility that an IPA may not be able to fund settlement because it has not received funds from the relevant issuer. „ -> Wells Fargo didn’t receive the money from San José city.
Wells Fargo acts as an issuing agent for the city - the city transfers assets to the trustee and the trustee securitizes the assets and offers the money market securities to investors. The assets generate money (for example a sports arena that was build) and that money goes through the city of San José to the trustee who is managed by Wells Fargo.

Wells Fargo has no liability or influence on the money that comes from the city and is distributed to the investors. If the money doesn’t come or isn’t sufficient, the assets are sold or liquidated and used to pay investors.
Anyway: Wells Fargo acts on behalf of the city and is not responsible they just handle securitization but don’t have any influence on payments or failure/default.”

4. The Municipal Bond Market Time Bomb

“Now, the primary method of trading on this doesn't look like the New York Stock Exchange or like Nasdaq. It looks like an auction. It takes about 4 hours. An auction is initiated. Participants who come in can bid on this, and it is a competitive auction that yields a very good price.”

5. Meet Headlands, U.S. Municipal/Bond Market Making Firm…Run by 3 Ex-Citadel Employees

• Jason Lehman: Citadel Investment Group, began/ran their global options market making, dipped his dick in Japanese convertible bonds, and managed “Private Investments”
• Neil Fitzpatrick: Citadel Execution Services COO (Citadel Investment affiliate), ran equities/options. Ex-Knight Capital Group, did Citadel’s OTC and equity shit. Direct Edge board of directors.
• Matthew Andresen, co-CEO Citadel Derivatives (Citadel Investment affiliate). Previously served on board of directors/committees in the past from International Securities Exchange, Direct Edge, CFTC, Lava Trading (Citi’s electronic trading unit that made LavaFlow)

6. In Bros We Trust

• Some might have history befall them again: last time the market crashed, Michael Burry’s California went spiraling down to BBB rated for many municipal bonds. California is a special muni case where it generally does well when times are good; much of their revenue is tied to personal income taxes. But when shit goes tits up, it goes tits up.
• Major projects have tons of debt piling up due to the [March 2020 crash] New Jersey built a giant ass mall–I kid you not--called “The American Dream” over 10+ years that has no sales receipts to cover it in part due to the dropoff in retail buying. As of 2 weeks ago, the mall only had like less than $1000 in the bank to pay off muni debt (“Developer Triple Five Group also sold US$800 million of muni-debt backed by payments they agreed to make to bondholders instead of paying property taxes”)...

• NYC’s MTA has been getting reamed by both ends. One of the biggest shitstains on its books is that it took out a shit ton of municipal debt and opted to sell $3 billion in bonds to the Fed’s muni lending program to stay afloat

7. Hurricane

In the post, he mentioned how "American Thinker" 's Joseph Lawler mentioned the SEC has been giving fucking STIFF Heismans nonstop (or per [redacted] the ol' Dustin Martin "don't argues" for you Aussie apes!) on FOIA requests (Freedom of Information Act) related to the municipal bond default in Puerto Rico, the BIGGEST bond default in America's history EVER.
It went all the way the way up to a federal court in California where the SEC said "we don't know what you're talking about" when others found they have fucking 2800 pages of documents on it and nearly 270,000(!) emails referencing it referencing a billion dollar Ponzi scheme on the level of fucking Bernie Madoff.
Big banks (Citi, Wells Fargo, BoFa) had their scheme collapse in 2016, potentially bribed senators to kill investigations into it by the DOJ and now the SEC is caught in yet ANOTHER 2 lawsuits saying they fucking aided and abetted this shit.

“The reality is that a large percentage of Puerto Rico’s debt is held in tax-free municipal bonds and municipal bond mutual funds, owned not by Wall Street banks or tycoons, but by mom and pop investors seeking tax-free income.”

…how the MMLF fund that expanded money/credit to towns/cities started including commercial paper…but also leveraged near the 15 to 1 ratio perhaps under the Net Capital Requirement limit:
[redacted said]: "$500B at 14:1 Leverage? If I'm making the right connection between the flavor of asset, that's just under the 15x Net Capital Requirement limit. Is this all the Fed had/could afford? Or is this all they needed at the time?

8. Don't Bet Against America...Says the Banks and Hedge Funds That Already Did

FWIW also I found an interesting research paper talking about hedge funds buying up credit default swaps, and how they could potentially bankrupt towns/municipalities through some of these moves if they wanted: https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/8264/MingJieWangCreditDefaultS.pdf?sequence=2
"Another potential concern is that even in a market that is generally liquid, the market for individual single-name [Credit default swap]s may be quite small, which could allow a single bad actor (a hedge fund, for example) to force a municipality into default..."

10. ELI5: What’s a Soverign Credit Default Swap?

Sovereign credit default swaps exist. Long story short: sovereign credit default swaps are insurance policies that if a country defaults (usually on its debt)then you get paid! Like many other shit that we’ve seen in the GME saga, they are a form of financial derivative (a bet that something goes up, a bet that something goes down) on an underlying (the thing you’re betting on)....They can be used to insure government debt for a country in case that country is unable to pay its debt, for example. However, just like other instruments, naked sovereign credit default swaps also exist.

Naked sovereign credit default swaps are used to bet that a country or a country's debt will fail without you owning that country's debt. In part, they were destabilising during the Euro-crisis immediately after the 2008 financial crash. Greece was one of the countries that got naked shorted in 2008. In fact, the country got shorted so bad they were worried about fucking SHORT SQUEEZES on Greek debt and the sovereign CDSs!
In 2012, the EU put a ban on naked sovereign credit default swaps. However, workarounds include the fact that a country can effectively change its mind on it within 24 hours and all the regulatory agency can do is offer an opinion.

• The VIX affects sovereign credit default swaps A LOT

• The Big Bang Protocol: ISDA helped formulate a set of rules that decides when a country “defaults”
• You can “short” a sovereign bond if you find a locate (sound familiar?: “Short sales of shares and short sales of sovereign debt will be permitted only where the seller has “located” the share or debt instrument prior to entering into the agreement and has a “reasonable expectation” of being able to borrow the shares.”)

11. Meet the CDDC (Credit Derivatives Determination Committee)...Where Citadel Sit and Helps Decide Which Countries Default on their Debt

Here's one such example of a swap dealer: Swiss financial terrorist aficionados UBS AG, who registered to be a swaps dealer with the US at the end of 2012. (UBS had also been a member of the CDDC through the Greek crisis in early 2012, alongside Citadel. In Mar. 2012, they were also one of the members pressing to ask whether Greece had defaulted already.)
UBS AG registered as a swap dealer in the US at the end of 2012 enabling the continuation of swaps business with US persons. Regulations issued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) impose substantial new requirements on registered swap dealers for clearing, trade execution, transaction reporting, recordkeeping, risk management and business conduct.
If UBS AG decides to make a market on sovereign credit default swaps like Russia, then we might also have no idea who is on the other side of the trade. This also goes for many of the other swap dealers who (surprise surprise) also sit on the CDDC board and can determine just when these sovereign credit default swaps pay out.

12. We Say When

“Before collapse, Credit Suisse quietly conquered an obscure debt market
Before its rescue by Swiss rival UBS, Credit Suisse had quietly become a major player in an obscure market that purports to help developing countries ease their debt burdens in exchange for protecting nature. Known as debt-for-nature swaps, the complex financial instruments help governments restructure their debt to raise money that can be used to fund conservation efforts.

Credit Suisse was the sole structurer and arranger of the world’s largest debt-for-nature swap, a $364 million deal that it orchestrated in 2021 along with The Nature Conservancy, a charity, for Belize. Last year, it sealed another $150 million deal for Barbados. Credit Suisse has in recent years helped revive interest in the instruments and for the first time opened them up to institutional capital. The bank raised money for Belize and Barbados from pension funds including Sweden’s Alecta and Nuveen LLC, a unit of the US’s TIAA, by issuing so-called blue bonds tied to the deals.

he convoluted setup has drawn criticism from sovereign debt experts for its high cost and lack of transparency. And the opaque terms of the Belize and Barbados deals — the first of their kind — mean outside analysts will struggle to assess precisely what comes next.

13. Everything Everywhere All at Once