Word: bankes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Street types have seen lately are the weeds sprouting in the parking lots of abandoned malls. Unemployment is marching toward 10%, and house foreclosures are still rising. If you're a day late with your credit-card payment or overdrawn by a few bucks on your ATM card, the bank (which your tax money helped bail out) is still sticking you with obscene fees and charges. Hence the question that so many of us are asking: Where's my bailout? (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
...correlation between excessive pay and excessive risk-taking isn't quite accurate. It may be true in the case of hedge funds or leveraged-buyout - which call themselves private-equity (PE) - firms or some parts of stricken outfits like AIG, Citi and the former Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America. But hedgies and PEs aren't covered by pay czar Ken Feinberg's ukases...
...when the likes of Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase, which were well capitalized and well run, say they didn't really need TARP money in the first place, that's more or less accurate. However, that doesn't mean that Goldman, JPMorgan and every other bank in the country weren't bailed out. Had the world economy melted down and more giant institutions failed, even strong firms like Goldman would have gone under. In July, Goldman acknowledged this, more or less, when it graciously - yes, graciously - paid a full price of $1.1 billion to redeem stock-purchase warrants it gave...
...more macro way, Goldman and Morgan Stanley in particular were facing the equivalent of a bank run in September 2008, as fear-stricken hedge funds for which they were prime brokers pulled out their assets. The firms would have been toast if the government hadn't allowed them to become bank holding companies overnight, giving them access to almost unlimited funds that the Federal Reserve makes available to banks...
...take it to the bank that the CIA knows all of this, just as it knew in the early '60s that Diem's brother was a corrupt thug. You can also be certain that the CIA would prefer to have untainted sources. But the bone-dry bed of reality in Afghanistan is that there are few if any to be had. In that country, you survive by renting clans, tribes and narcotics dealers, which comes with their unsavory business whether you like...