Word: toxicants
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...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...
...finance. Home loans, after all, have a lot going for them: the vast majority of people, even today, make their mortgage payments on time. What's more, mortgage bonds are made up of thousands of home loans, giving them safety through diversity. So how did these bonds become so toxic that they've poisoned banks and threatened the entire economy...
...when things unwind--and have they ever--any default gets compounded by the chain of linked bonds. The multiplier effect works like this: while 4.4% of the typical loans tied to Jupiter's bonds are in default, nearly 59% of Jupiter's investments are now worthless. Hello, toxic asset. (See the top 10 financial collapses...
...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...