The era of mega banks – The growth of too big to fail. American banking system still backing over $13 trillion in assets with a negative deposit insurance fund. 7,760 banks but 19 banks make up 50 percent of the asset base.
The growth of the too big to fail bank is something that is modern to this era. In the 1990s there were fewer than 40 institutions that had total assets above $20 billion. In the late part of the 1980s and 1990s this number was below 20. The peak was reached in 2005 with 55 […]
The Federal Reserve plans on exporting the U.S. middle class abroad with Quantitative Easing II. QE1 cost $1.7 trillion and took the underemployment rate from 10 percent to 17 percent.
The Federal Reserve is entering uncharted territory with this second phase of quantitative easing. The public may or may not be aware that the Fed has already embarked on quantitative easing (QE1) and has grown their balance sheet by $1.7 trillion (that’s $1,700,000,000,000) by exchanging U.S. Treasuries for questionable assets including a shopping mall in […]
The debt end game – Top 10 percent of families own an average of $700,000 in stocks while the next 15 percent own an average of $53,000. The other 75 percent are insignificant players by Wall Street standards.
The government recently announced on a slow Friday a $1.29 trillion budget deficit as if it were no big deal for the completed fiscal year. In fact, this was spun as grand news since the previous budget deficit topped $1.4 trillion. We are now reaching a nationwide tipping point of debt. The U.S. Treasury and […]
The hidden gigantic risk of derivatives – Top 77 U.S. banks have their hand in $225 trillion in derivatives. The top 5 banks hold $7.8 trillion of all banking assets growing their asset base by $1.7 trillion from 2007.
The concentration of banking risk in the United States is immense. The Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury like to convey a pretense that we have a very diverse banking system with over 7,800 banking institutions. In the mind of most of the public, this seems like a very diverse industry. Imagine having 7,800 different kinds […]