Word: toxically
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...Americans can also look at the choices made by the U.K. to salvage its credit system. Large banks there are being effectively bought out by the government as the U.K. attempts to put a firewall around huge losses from toxic assets. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is already 70% owned by the government and management's kilts have been repossessed. (See pictures of the financial crisis in London...
...roughly 10% of the remaining losses. In return for picking up the rest, the government will require banks to sign agreements binding them to increased rates of lending. Just how much risk that exposes the U.K. government to is unclear; the level of banks' exposure to the kind of toxic assets the insurance protects against is still blurry. And any pickup in the economy could reduce a lender's need to cash in any such policy. Still, "we need to offer this insurance," Darling insisted. "If we don't ... then frankly the lending will not start again, and we will...
...Over the last several days, the incoming administration has moved toward the idea of creating one federal agency which would have the purpose of taking most of the toxic assets off bank balance sheets. Since the figure at Citi is probably at least as large as the $300 billion pool that the government is guaranteeing, the combination of bad paper from Bank of America, Wells Fargo (WFC), JPMorgan (JPM), and the next tier of large US banks is almost certainly close to $1 trillion...
...federal government really does not want to build a "bad bank" to take toxic assets from America's largest financial institutions. It has taken a number of measures to avoid...
...sponging up of all these toxic assets takes the discussion back around to what the government gets in return for such colossal aid. The largest American banks had market capitalizations of as much as $300 billion each two years ago. The purchase of bad assets when stock values were at those levels would have kept shareholder dilution at a reasonable level. The government would have gotten shares for taking the junk off bank books and putting it into its new "bad bank" agency...