Category: Financial Institutions
Chart of the Day: Bank credit card fees induce big antitrust lawsuit
So why are these big name retailers suing the big banks. It’s this chart that appears to be the smoking gun. Credit card interchange fees are the highest by a large margin. Clearly those charges that go into the bank and credit card companies’ coffers are either absorbed by retailers or passed on to consumers
Why bank deposits are piling up at the ECB
Central Banks, whenever they buy any asset create new reserves. Commercial banks and people do NOT have the capacity to destroy those reserves. Once the Fed or ECB wires the money or creates that asset line item on its spreadsheet, there is an equal and offsetting liability on its spreadsheet called reserves. This spreadsheet cannot be broken
The continuing saga of bank self-regulation and other fairy tales featuring Alan Greenspan
We continue to witness remarkable developments in the intersection of the related fields of economics, finance, ethics, law, and regulation. Each of these five fields ignores a sixth related field – white-collar criminology. The six fields share a renewed interest in trust
Real Financial Regulators Love Prosecutions of Fraudulent Bank CEOs
Senior former regulators are willing to be quoted by name asserting that Obama’s (not Bush’s) financial regulatory leaders are blocking lawsuits against fraudulent financial elites and their anti-regulatory co-conspirators because they fear embarrassment
Geithner’s Ploy: Saving U.S. Banks at Taxpayer Expense, Once Again
Mr. Obama’s Secretary Geithner went to Europe met with EU leaders to demand that Greece make the write-downs voluntary on the part of banks and creditors. He explained that U.S. banks had bet that Greece would not default – and their net worth position was so shaky that if they had to pay on their bad gambles, they would go broke
Guess what truth and “truthiness” in the TARP bailout reveal?
Every 60 days the Government Accountability Office issues a report on the various TARP programs. Each report looks at how the Office of Financial Stability, the body currently overseeing all TARP programs, is performing on a given metric. The latest report looks at the estimated lifetime costs to U.S. taxpayers of the programs still in operation, and also at how the Treasury communicates these costs to the public. As for this latter question the short answer is: very selectively, indeed
A real mission impossible
When I worked in banking not so long ago, it was actually cool to be “old school”. It was just another way of saying that one would try to balance the bank’s interests with that of the corporate client’s. To make neither too little money off of them, nor too much. And to never, ever, ever give them the impression that the high fees they were paying would be used to pay for something like your next Ferrari
Cohan on Corporate Psychopaths and the Financial Crisis
William Cohan told Bloomberg Television’s Erik Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle that he believes ‘psychopaths” at the helm of major financial institutions were responsible for the credit crisis
Chart of the Day: China’s Financial Architecture
Now the bubble is visibly bursting. How much damage will it do to the Chinese economy — and the world? That is our homework assignment over the holiday. Getting it right will determine 2012′s investment and trading returns, in our opinion. We leave you with an excellent flowchart and table from the IMF explaining China’s financial architecture
ECB’s Long-Term Repo Operation
Following the 1-year repo in June 09, there had been market talk of the money going into the short-term Italian and Spanish bonds. Yet we don’t expect as much of new carry trades some officials might wish. The lion’s share of the funds LTRO taken we suspect will go to 1) replace current ECB funding, 2) build greater cash buffer and 3) reduce some liabilities
Chart of the Day: European Bank Recapitalization
A chart with a country by country breakdown of the over 100 billion euros of additional capital needed by euro zone banks
U.S. Exposure to Europe – Unknowns Unknowns
As Eurocrats dissemble, ratios that quantify U.S. financial system exposure to European insolvency are dated, even as they are published