by ilene - October 16th, 2009 2:13 pm
Nevertheless, President Obama clearly believes the line fed to him by Wall Street. He is no Teddy Roosevelt. The question you should be asking is, will the tentative reforms proposed by the Obama Administration have any kind of positive effect? The answer is probably in a very temporary fashion, but that is more a function of the impairment of the capital markets themselves. However, if you don’t deal with a cancer fully, it comes back and spreads – even if you conduct surgery to take out some of the tumour.
Reform of the current US financial sector is neither possible nor would it ever be sufficient. It’s a bit like Lincoln saying, "Well, this slavery thing has a few problems, but we can ‘reform’ it and make it better.” As any student of horror films knows, you cannot reform zombies. Zombie banks must be killed. In other words, the financial system must be downsized.
Downsizing can begin with the following set of actions:
- All bank assets and liabilities must be brought onto balance sheets, and made subject to reserve and capital requirements and—more importantly—to normal oversight by appropriate regulatory agencies. Any assets and liabilities that are left off balance sheet will be declared null and void, unenforceable by US courts.
- All CDSs must be bought and sold on regulated exchanges; otherwise they will be declared unenforceable by US courts.
- Unless specifically approved by Congress, securitization of financial products such as life insurance policies will be prohibited and thus unenforceable by US courts.
- The FDIC will be directed to examine the books of the largest 25 insured banks to uncover all CDS contracts held. These will then be netted among these 25 banks, canceling CDS contracts held on one another. CDS contracts with foreign banks will be unwound. The FDIC will also examine derivative positions with a view to determine whether unwinding these would be in the public interest.
- In its examination, the FDIC
…

Tags: Alan Greenspan, Financial System, Obama, Shadow banking, too-big-to-fail, U.S. financial sector, zombie banks
Posted in Phil's Favorites | No Comments »
by ilene - June 27th, 2009 11:18 pm
Courtesy of Tom Lindmark at BUT THEN WHAT
With all the hoopla this week about the big banks repaying their TARP loans you would tend to think that the program is, if not winding down, then in a collect the interest and wait for repayment mode. If that’s the case, they you’re thinking if wrong.
The WSJ reports that the Treasury is busier than ever dolling out money to banks. This time they aren’t shoveling it out the door in chunks of billions of dollars, rather they’re spooning it out to the nation’s community banks.
In contrast to Wall Street firms like J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and American Express Co. that returned $68.25 billion in one day this month to escape TARP and all the strings that were attached, a steady stream of small banks still is lining up for government money.
Since May 31, 20 small banks have received a total of $164.1 million in taxpayer-funded capital, according to the Treasury’s latest available figures. Half of those banks got the money in the same week that 10 big financial institutions gave theirs back.
Analysts see no end in sight to the trend. The recession and borrowers are squeezing most of the 8,200 federally insured commercial banks and savings institutions in the U.S., so even a dollop of TARP funds could make a difference. Some banks are turning to the government to fill a void left by investors who are leery about pouring money into the sector, despite the rebound by bank stocks since early March.
Meanwhile, the rules and stigma of TARP that turned some executives such as J.P. Morgan Chairman and CEO James Dimon against the program are irrelevant to small institutions.
Their employees usually don’t fly on corporate jets or collect hefty bonuses that trigger outrage from taxpayers, customers and Congress. And curbs on dividend payments are a modest price to pay for greater assurance that the banks can plow ahead with their core mission to gather local deposits, lend them nearby and support local charities, some recent TARP recipients said.
Maybe I’m missing the point, but TARP always seemed to me to have evolved into a program to recapitalize big banks, in essence to create the fiction that they were properly capitalized and hope that the banks would be able to repay the funds through earnings and a benevolent…

Tags: big banks, small banks, TARP, zombie banks
Posted in Phil's Favorites | No Comments »