Word: bankes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...would receive $13.4 billion of emergency loans from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) after Congress had refused to pass a separate bailout bill. On Christmas Eve Cerberus got another last-minute gift when the Federal Reserve Board voted to permit GMAC to change its status to a bank holding company. (GM still owns 49% of GMAC). (See pictures of the remains of Detroit...
Meanwhile, a group of economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston had been noticing the same thing. "We were trying to understand why these numbers looked the way they did," says Burcu Duygan-Bump. Partly because of conversations the economists had with Fed staffers in the banking supervision division, the group came to believe the aggregate data was obscuring the underlying dynamics of the financial system. "If you say New England has a snowstorm with an average snowfall of two inches, that might not reflect the fact that Boston got ten inches and northern Maine got none," says Ethan...
...about the same time as the Boston Fed piece came out, two finance professors at Harvard Business School, David Scharfstein and Victoria Ivashina, wrote a paper called "Bank Lending During the Financial Crisis of 2008." Scharfstein and Ivashina focused in on a database of new loans made to large corporations and documented a 36% drop during August-October 2008, as compared with the three months prior. They, too, argued that drawn-downs were artificially inflating overall lending figures. Yes, there was lending, but it was involuntary, and often to struggling companies - like GM and Tribune - that banks might not otherwise...
...that sort of involuntary lending mean that other potential borrowers were getting crowded out? In a rebuttal to the Scharfstein paper, Chari and his co-authors wrote that they hadn't seen any data showing that banks weren't lending to credit-worthy companies asking for loans simply because certain firms were tapping pre-existing credit lines. "The argument is if you're a new customer walking into a bank, it's impossible for you to get a loan," says Chari. "That story may be true, but there's no convincing evidence that's what's going...
...This has been an uncharacteristically quiet last surge week before the holiday," says Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at the market research firm NPD Group. "Usually, this week is money in the bank for the retailer, because they can count on the consumer that has waited until the last minute or the person that has added extra people to their shopping list. Not so this time. This has probably been the most challenging holiday many of these retailers have seen...