You're gonna love this one, according to the New York Times as the Treasury laboriously pours over banks books, all of the banks are passing their stress tests.
They are discovering may come as a relief to both the financial industry and the public: the banking industry, broadly speaking, seems to be in better shape than many people think, officials involved in the examinations say.
That is the good news. The bad news is that many of the largest American lenders, despite all those bailouts, probably need to be bailed out again, either by private investors or, more likely, the federal government. After receiving many millions, and in some cases, many billions of taxpayer dollars, banks still need more capital, these officials say.
Even better the Treasury is delaying the results and demanding it all be kept private (Reuters):
The U.S. Treasury Department is planning to delay the release of any completed bank stress test results until after the first-quarter earnings season to avoid complicating stock market reaction, a source familiar with Treasury's discussions said on Tuesday.
The Treasury is still talking about how results of the regulatory stress tests on the 19 largest U.S. banks will be released, and may disclose them as summary results that are not institution-specific, the source said.
Let's translate. Oh sure, it's all good, everybody's fine, don't worry, be happy, hey private investors, come make some money guaranteed, don't want to upset the markets, oops can't make those results public, here's another trillion dollars, now everybody smile.
My question is did it take this long to cover the tracks or where you all playing video games, pretending to do an internal audit?
The "too big to fail" banks
The "too big to fail" banks grew as a result of bond-based
acquisition in the 90s, using leveraged tax-write offs. They did not organically grow their businesses. Now, they've become too big to manage...and are still being bailed because of all the good ol' Wall Street boys, i.e. Sanford Weil, Hank Greenberg, et al. The fact is, the FTC allowed all this anti-competitive consolidation (as a result of kickbacks and lobbying). It, like most of the Federal Agencies, failed to do its work because it was peopled by political hacks. It smells really bad. I'm ready for a huge clean-up...the FBI and Justice should just get out the weed wacker and go to it. Seriously.
Such a joke.
It's not surprising. After all, Geithner did say that he would do whatever is necessary to maintain our dear financial system. But do these people have any idea just how corrupt and imperial they look? Everyday, I want to take the observations of Ilargi and pass them on. He and his wife Stoneleigh are just so good at reducing our experience to the levels of absurdity it so richly deserves. Today's synopsis is, I think, a classic:
Wow, mentioning Geithner, Summers, Obama and Salvador Dali in the same essay! That's just not easy to do. I was always proud of using the word "picayune" in a corporate memo years ago. I bow to the master.
Japan redux.
And then there is this report from Bloomberg. So many why's and so few answers. Not the kind of stuff that leads to confidence.
I've noticed Bloomberg reporting
generally is being much more honest than most. That's quite an editorial for them to print but it seems more and more "establishment" financial media are really calling it out.
I also noticed they have put together a lot of interviews that are excellent.
So of course they are about the last channel that goes with any cable package and instead we get CNBC, which at least in the afternoons is almost noise at this point.
I was playing video games!
Sorry...Robert, couldn't help it. :P Please forgive me.
But, Time Magazine says banking crisis is over
Here it is: More Quickly Than It Began, The Banking Crisis Is Over. I was going to do a story on this but why bother.
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