banks

In 2008, the FDIC successfully shut down 25 banks. This year it has already been six. To date, the FDIC had generally been able to find a buyer of one of the failed banks' deposits. After all, outside of IndyMac, the large majority of…

In case you missed it, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have cost taxpayers tens of billions to date. The bill is still rising, however, as the two companies are looking for $50 billion more to avoid technical insolvency. Then there is…

Merrill Lynch is looking like a real dog these days -- much more than I realized back in September. As bearish/cautious as I have been on the economy and the financial sector, obviously I was not cautious enough. When the deal got done I…

When the Bush Administration gave banks money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), it was not a complete freebie. The government has received preferred shares in many institutions. This shares pay dividends to the government…

The need to bailout banks for their aggressive lending in central and eastern Europe is becoming ever more apparent. An Austrian bank has taken the lead in getting a consortium of banks together to lobby the European Union for bailout…

This post from January 2009 explains why banks do not increase lending capacity when uncertainty about the level of existing loan losses already on their balance sheet makes them worry about future loan losses. Credit wariness will be the…

As the financial industry further unraveled yesterday, Mathieu Robbins of the Irish Indendent asked a worthwhile question: Was RBS the idiot company of all-time in buying ABN Amro at the top of the market? Robbins says no and offers up…

This just in from the German daily Der Spiegel: German banks are still loaded with risky U.S. assets, only a fraction of which has been written down. If this report is true, it suggests that the entire German banking sector is extremely…

Marshall Auerback here. I wanted to add a few thoughts to the discussion about recent events in U.S. banking. Below is the Federal Reserve press release on the Bank of America bailout. Here are the most important words from the release:…

Now that the government has bailed out Bank of America, I want to remind you that this Bank is a serial acquirer and that the Merrill acquisition is not the only boneheaded move by Bank of America.