Word: banking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...side are insurance companies and the like making an opposite bet. If the house is destroyed, one group of institutions wins and the other group loses. Considering all institutions together, no money was truly lost - it's what economists call a zero-sum game. In good times, risk-hungry banks loved this game, but now they have become risk-averse, and the game seems to have changed. So how can many of the banks simultaneously claim enormous swap losses without a single bank claiming significant profit...
...have focused too much on each individual bank and its possibility for failure. The economy does not need every bank to survive; it needs most. Right now, we need to know which ones. By propping up financial institutions that are subject to unknown potential losses, the government is prolonging the uncertainty about whether they will fail. This perpetuates the crisis of confidence in which banks do not trust one another enough to loan money...
Equally upsetting to critics is the list of dozens of companies already benefiting from the AIG bailout. These firms, which insured their purchases of mortgage-backed and other securities with AIG, include investment giant Goldman Sachs ($12.9 billion), Merrill Lynch ($6.8 billion), Bank of America ($5.2 billion) and Citigroup ($2.3 billion). The same firms, directly or indirectly, also received earlier bailout cash under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The group includes some of the most sophisticated investors in the world, prompting critics to question why the companies should not take responsibility for their own financial decisions, rather than accept...
...foreign companies also figured prominently on the list. In fact, they got nearly $60 billion at a time when U.S. firms, notably General Motors, are having to beg for federal dollars just to stay solvent. The biggest winners were French banks, including Société Général, which together scored $19 billion, and German banks, including Deutsche Bank, which got a combined $17 billion...
Several big beneficiaries are also engaged in controversial activities at odds with U.S. policy. One example is UBS, the Union Bank of Switzerland, which got $5 billion. It recently reached a $780 million deferred-prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice to settle charges that it had deployed undisclosed offshore bank accounts to assist rich Americans in evading U.S. taxes. DoJ is still seeking to force UBS to disclose the names of 52,000 Americans suspected as part of the alleged scheme...