After Gold & Oil Contract Chaos, CME Group Secures $7 Billion Credit Line “In Case Of Clearing Member Default”

Something unusual is coming…

First we had unprecedented dysfunction in the gold futures markets with dramatic paper and physical price divergences amid virus-inspired geographical shortages for deliverables.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said one gold trader who has been in the market for 30-plus years.

Saxo Bank’s head of commodity strategy, Ole Hansen, observed that a lockdown is occurring in two biggest gold hubs in the world, New York and London,  so many traders are working from home. “This has caused a breakdown in the marketplace”, he said.

“There is no price discovery in the market right now,” he said Tuesday morning. “If you need to borrow gold in the OTC [over-the-counter] markets right now, you are going to pay a king’s ransom.”

Then we had the even more stunning negative prices for front-month WTI crude futures as prices converged to negative spot prices at expiration/delivery, thanks to a lack of storage and ETF-driven illiquidity issues. This sparked major losses for some very large market brokerages and clearing houses, among them, Interactive Brokers:

CNBC: “Across the industry, do you think there is going to be some really serious pain?”

Peterffy: “There is about another half a billion dollars of losses that somebody is sitting on… and I do not know who those folks are.”

So, it is with great interest that we note that CME Group said its Chicago Mercantile Exchange subsidiary entered into an amended credit facility for a $7 billion revolving secured credit facility.

As Bloomberg reports, in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, CME it entered into an amendment to its 364-day multi-currency credit facility with Bank of America N.A., as administrative agent, Citibank N.A., as collateral agent and collateral monitoring agent and some of the banks under its existing facility.

The amended facility is for a multi-currency revolving secured credit facility of $7 billion, which is eligible to be increased to $10 billion.

Specifically, the filing says, the new credit facility is “intended to provide temporary liquidity to CME in the event of a clearing member default, a liquidity constraint or depositary default, or in the event of a delay in the payment systems utilized by CME.”

Of course, this is nothing to worry about as we are sure The Fed has their back… right?