Word: toxicants
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shaping up to be is building fast. The worst of the news Monday came with the announcement that financial insurance giant American International Group had lost $61.7 billion in the last quarter of 2008, the largest quarterly loss in corporate history. As the insurer of much of the toxic American mortgage debt that detonated the implosion of the world's finance markets, AIG is now also set to take on an additional $30 billion in U.S. government rescue funding beyond the record-setting $150 billion in aid it received last year...
...That toxic debt was also behind the other bad company news of the day, when HSBC - Europe's largest bank - said it would seek $17.1 billion in new capital, and close its U.S. consumer-lending unit, Household Finance. The American affiliate had saddled HBSC with $16.3 billion in subprime-rooted losses, and explained the group's 62% dip in 2008 profits of $9.3 billion. But closing the troubled unit means adding its 6,100 employees to the list of 3 million American jobs eliminated since November...
...just an ordinary recession.” With the target for the Federal Funds rate against the zero lower bound, the limitations of the Federal Reserve are quite apparent. Since no one can trust a bank’s balance sheet, laced with so-called toxic assets, the economy continues to be threatened. Our legislators are left two main choices: Inject the banks with more capital and hope for the best, or take over insolvent banks, wipe out shareholders, replace the executives, and make the bondholders the new shareholders...
During the banking crisis of 1992, Sweden forced its banks to write down all of its toxic assets, took an equity stake in a handful of the largest banks at the cost of their shareholders, and eventually resold the healthy assets on the public market. Since the government held the reckless banks and their shareholders accountable, some officials say that, after the banks were reprivatized, the total cost of the bailout was close to zero...
...bonds--amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps trillions--are worth far less than their stated, or par, value. How much less is central to resolving the financial crisis. In early February, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he wanted to start a public-private partnership to buy up toxic assets. Banks hold tens of billions of dollars in mortgage bonds, and as the bonds fell in value or were wiped out completely, they erased precious capital the banks need to survive. Geithner and others believe that rescuing banks from these bonds will save them. To do that, the bonds...