Earlier today Trump declared that Sunday would be a national day of prayer.

With Americans having far bigger concerns on their minds, we doubt many will have time for prayer today, although there is one person who could do with some divine assistance: Fed chair Jerome Powell.

And there is a specific reason for that... or rather 12 trillion reasons.

But first, let's back up to a post we write back in October 2009 explaining how the Fed's emergency response during the financial crisis - which included credit facilities backed by corporate bonds and even stocks, all the way to unlimited FX swap lines with foreign central banks - was first and foremost in response to a massive dollar margin call that resulted in the aftermath of the Lehman and AIG collapse as conventional cross-border funding pathways froze up, forcing the Fed to step in and flood the world with dollars to avoid a catastrophic surge in the dollar as the entire world scrambled to obtain the world's reserve currency.

Back then the BIS published a paper titled "The US dollar shortage in global banking and the international policy response" which explained how then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke in essence bailed out the entire developed world, which was facing an unprecedented dollar shortage crisis due to the sudden deflationary shockwave unleashed by the financial crisis, which also ground the global economy, and conventional dollar funding pathways to a halt while heightened counterparty risk after Lehman's collapse and liquidity concerns compromised short-term interbank funding, resulting in a lock of shadow banking conduits and money market funds "breaking the buck." In short: an unprecedented crisis as a result of a global dollar margin call.