Monetary System

If you read my recent post on How big banks earned so much money this quarter you would see that much of the income at Wells, JPMorgan, US Bank and others came from refinancing old mortgages. While this may be a boon to present income, it…

Paul McCulley of PIMCO made a few comments back in March which caught my attention.  Given how well banks are doing this earnings season, I thought it relevant to quote him here.  The essence of his remarks was this: Deleveraging is a…

We are a few weeks into earnings season and it should be abundantly clear that financial institutions are firing on all cylinders.  In fact, financials are leading the broader market for the first time since 1993.  Yet, loan losses have…

Simon Johnson, a former IMF Chief Economist, who blogs over at the Baseline Scenario, is testifying before Congress today about 'Too big to fail' financial institutions.  Below is a video in which he tells Bloomberg his thoughts on the…

The Bloomberg video below makes it seem that Whitney believes the stress tests are a sham. She says the tests are a theoretical exercise whereby banks ask: "what will our earnings power be in two years after we sell off these 'toxic'…

From the FDIC website. More information available here: Great Basin Bank of Nevada, Elko, Nevada, was closed today by the Nevada Financial Institutions Division, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver.…

Small banks are going bust at a pretty good clip.  Apparently, there is no free ride for the likes of American Sterling Bank.  Its deposits were acquired by Metcalf Bank as the FDIC took it into receivership a.k.a nationalized it.  But, of…

This comes from French-language Swiss daily Le Temps: Over 50% of respondents in Geneva surveyed by the HEG School of Management believe that the bankruptcy of a large institution is likely. The Swiss political world is clearly…

On the back of a decent quarter at JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon has signalled his desire to repay government money as quickly as possible and remove the strings attached to that money.  Dimon has often said that JPMorgan Chase did not…

I am sure you have seen the catastrophic financial results of Swiss bank UBS released this week. I have been saying for quite some time that UBS is too big to fail, but also too big to bail for tiny Switzerland. In my view, the recent…