Word: chasings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Kuttner may be right about the conflicts, but it's awfully hard to see how they brought on the current mess. In fact, Bank of America's takeover of Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan Chase's of Bear Stearns underscored a truth that was already becoming apparent on Wall Street - super-banks (more commonly known as universal banks) are, for all their flaws, a lot more stable and secure than un-super investment banks...
...York Fed asked Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to try to arrange a $70 billion private loan for AIG, but that didn't go anywhere. Treasury officials mulled a government conservatorship as with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but it might have required an act of Congress to make that happen. So the Fed devised a deal in which AIG agrees to repay the loan with asset sales and give the government (and thus taxpayers) a 79.9% equity stake in the company...
That could happen. But another possibility is that loan losses will continue to grow to the point that the core institutions of the American financial scene - Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America in particular, but also possibly Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley - are seen as endangered. Then we'll really get to see what a bailout looks like...
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, who in March put up $29 billion to entice JP Morgan Chase to take over struggling Bear Stearns, and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who just over a week ago committed up to $200 billion in taxpayer funds to rescue mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have opted not to go the bailout route this time. The Fed did announce yet another expansion of its lending programs to banks and investment banks, but so far that's it. The hope seems to be that if Lehman's (and perhaps AIG's) liquidation transpires...
...just Frannie we're talking about here. There were also $29 billion in government loans behind Bear Stearns' shotgun marriage to JPMorgan Chase & Co. in March, although since they were made by the Federal Reserve--which can print its own money--it's not a direct cost to taxpayers. Then there are the $4.5 trillion in bank deposits insured by the FDIC. The first big bank bust of the current crisis, that of mortgage specialist IndyMac, cost an estimated $8.9 billion, leaving the FDIC with just $45 billion on hand to cover a likely rash of failures. But while...