Word: crediteers
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...credit crunch had surfaced several months before the stock-market crash, when commercial banks with combined deposits of more than $80 million suspended payments. It reached critical mass in late 1930, when 608 banks failed - among them the Bank of the United States, which accounted for about a third of the total deposits lost. (The failure of merger talks that might have saved the bank was another critical moment in the history of the Depression...
...Friedman and Schwartz saw it, the Fed could have mitigated the crisis by cutting rates, making loans and buying bonds (so-called open-market operations). Instead, it made a bad situation worse by reducing its credit to the banking system. This forced more and more banks to sell assets in a frantic dash for liquidity, driving down bond prices and making balance sheets look even worse. The next wave of bank failures, between February and August 1931, saw commercial-bank deposits fall by $2.7 billion - 9% of the total. By January 1932, 1,860 banks had failed...
...obvious difference between then and now is that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has learned from history - not surprising, given that he once studied the Great Depression intensively. Since the onset of the credit crunch in August 2007, Bernanke has repeatedly cut the federal-funds rate from 5.25% down to an effective rate at one point last week of about 0.25%. He has pumped money into the financial system through a variety of channels: in all, about $1.1 trillion over the past 13 months...
...stubbornly frozen, despite the Fed's liquidity fire hose. With WaMu and Wachovia wiped out, the stampede out of bank stocks and bonds will surely claim new victims. As the recession bites, Main Street firms will start going bust too. And the impact on the $62 trillion market for credit-default swaps could be explosive...
...public is critical, nobody has yet figured out how to deal with a fundamental cause of this crisis: banks' loss of confidence in each other. They are so nervous about so-called "counterparty risk" - the possibility of not being repaid - that they have stopped lending to one another, bringing credit markets to a grinding halt. "We know who the strong banks are, but we don't know who the strong banks are exposed to," explains Simon Maughan, banking analyst at MF Global in London. In this treacherous environment, a bank doesn't just worry about its counterparty, he adds...