Deutsche bank shares recovered from a plunge to all-time record lows on Friday on a “save the day” news leak that the US department of Justice would reduce its mortgage-manipulation fine from $14 billion to $5.4 billion.
Shares that were down about 9% rallied to close up 6.4%. Deutsche bank had set aside $5.5 billion to cover losses. The $14 billion fine was nearly as large as companies market cap of about $18 billion.
Today, six current or former Deutsche Bank managers along with seven other individuals were charged with fraud related to Monte dei Paschi derivatives. Banca Monte dei Paschi, in Italy, is the world’s oldest bank, dating to the year 1624.
Please consider Ex-Deutsche Bank Executives Among 13 Charged in Paschi Probe.
Six current and former managers of Deutsche Bank AG — including ex-asset and wealth management head Michele Faissola — along with former executives at Nomura Holdings Inc. and Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA were charged in Milan for colluding to falsify the accounts of Italy’s third-biggest bank and manipulate the market.
A judge in Milan approved a request by prosecutors to try 13 bankers on charges over separate derivative transactions Paschi arranged with the securities firms, said a lawyer involved in the case, who attended the closed-door hearing Saturday, where the decision was announced.
Monte Paschi, the world’s oldest bank, restated its accounts and has been forced to tap investors twice to replenish capital amid a surge in bad loans and losses on derivatives. It’s now attempting to convince investors to buy billions of soured debt before a fresh stock sale.
Deutsche Bank’s shares have slumped 49 percent in Frankfurt this year, swinging wildly last week on news that hedge-fund clients withdrew some funds. Monte Paschi has dropped 84 percent this year amid concern it will struggle to restore profitability and strengthen its finances.
The charges culminate a three-year investigation by prosecutors that showed Monte Paschi used the transactions to hide losses, leading to a misrepresentation of its accounts between 2008 and 2012. The deals came to light in January 2013, when Bloomberg News reported that Monte Paschi used derivatives struck with Deutsche Bank to mask losses from an earlier derivative contract dubbed Santorini.
Former Deutsche Bank managers Michele Foresti, who oversaw rates and European credit flow trading, and Ivor Dunbar, former co-head of global capital markets, also were also indicted.
Monte Paschi’s former executives Giuseppe Mussari, Antonio Vigni and Gianluca Baldassarri and Nomura’s former bankers Sadeq Sayeed and Raffaele Ricci also will face trial for allegedly obstructing regulators after the investigation revealed that the 2009 deal, dubbed Alexandria, was designed to disguise losses from a previous investment.
Deutsche Bank’s Dario Schiraldi, Matteo Vaghi and Marco Veroni as well as Monte Paschi’s Daniele Pirondini and Marco Di Santo will go to trial, which is scheduled to begin on Dec. 15.
One of my speculations regarding Deutsche Bank’s share price involved a derivatives mess or counter-party risk with Monte dei Paschi.
That speculation was spot on. What else are Deutsche Bank and Monte dei Paschi hiding? I don’t know but a $42 trillion notional derivatives book value provides ample room.
Many have pointed out the key word is “notional”, and that many of the contracts are internal, netting out to zero. OK, call it $1 trillion if you like, or even $500 billion.
A 1% loss on $1 trillion looks like this: $10,000,000,000.
What is the real value at risk? I don’t know, and its derivatives mess seems so complicated I believe it may not know either. And what happens if Monte dei Paschi goes under or vice versa?
Again, I don’t know. We are all speculating about the problems, and the amounts.
This stuff has been going on a long time. On February 15, 2013, ZeroHedge commented on the Deutsche Bank, Monte Paschi Cover-Up: Tier 1 Capital and an Equity Swap.
Suspicious Accounting Methodology Change
On September 20, I asked Is Deutsche Bank Cooking its Derivatives Book to Hide Huge Losses?.
In that post I pointed out a suspicious accounting methodology change related to derivatives.
Accounting Methodology Change
I dove into Deutsche Bank’s 4Q/FY2015 Presentation which contained these statements on various pages.
- Continued strong de-leveraging in the quarter of EUR 44 billion on an FX neutral basis, principally in derivatives.
- Full year 2015 de-leveraging of EUR ~130 billion on an FX neutral basis.
- Equity Derivatives significantly lower y-o-y driven by lower client activity exacerbated by challenging risk management in certain areas.
- Lower loan loss provisions reflecting portfolio quality and the benign economic environment.
- Despite adverse FX impact, non-interest expenses decreased mainly due to lower litigation and performance-related expenses.
- De-risking activity was the main driver of Balance Sheet reductions in 4Q2015.
Consolidation & Adjustments
Income before income taxes (IBIT) does not look pretty, to say the least. And what’s with these accounting methodology changes?
Lower loan loss provisions? In this environment?
Red Flags
Accounting methodology changes and lower loan loss provisions are a pair of red flags.
So we still do not know everything, but we do know there are fraud charges involving both Deutsche Bank and Monte dei Paschi.
Anyone surprised?
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Mike “Mish” Shedlock
How come no bankers have jailed in eight years of obama?
Not one.
Their companies pay fines and they get to keep thier insane bonuses.
For pretty much the same reason no Obama has been jailed in 8 years of Obama.
The purpose of complex, unclear and deliberately vague laws regarding deliberately vague acts, is to enable enough obfuscation to keep the drones happily chanting “Democraciii Gooood! Rule of law! Rule of law!” as they’ve been indoctrinated to do since birth. All without unduly inconveniencing the More Equals, nor preventing them from doing whatever they bloody well feel like with the lives and livelihood of others.
Ultimately, the companies don’t even pay the fines as they become pass thru costs paid by the little people who pay the taxes, just ask Leona.
You are sorta of right … in a way that anyone actually cares about.
No one from a primary dealer bank (wall street) has been indicted … let alone prosecuted … and heaven forbid, convicted.
On the other hand, the small fry banksters have seen justice.
https://www.sigtarp.gov/Pages/home.aspx
Off topic: Mish have u heard the rumor about our FBI director receiving millions of dollars from the Clinton Foundation? U may have already answered this if so please disregard.
When President Obama nominated Comey to become FBI director in 2013, Comey promised the United States Senate that he would recuse himself on all cases involving former employers.
But Comey earned $6 million in one year alone from Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin became a Clinton Foundation donor that very year.
Comey served as deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft for two years of the Bush administration. When he left the Bush administration, he went directly to Lockheed Martin and became vice president, acting as a general counsel.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/10/exposed-fbi-director-james-comeys-clinton-foundation-connection/
My question here is: “If Congress made the provision that he recuse himself in cases regarding former employers, why didn’t Congress call attention to this fact when the investigation started”?
One possible answer: “Congress was complicit in the whole thing and is just as guilty as Comey”.
The silence is deafening. another thing… The internet got handed over today after the Big Horse and Pony Show, starring Ted Crudz, that Congress paraded in front of the MSM. Notice how they went on vacation until after the election to let things calm down. They are complicit in that too.
“That speculation was spot on.”
Link to aforementioned wonderful call?
He definitely said it. Just a)Obviously from the stock price there was/is a problem, and b) everything is considered a derivative, even things that shouldn’t be, and when the poop is about to hit the fan, everything will always get blamed on a derivative book, particularly since no one knows what a derivative even is.
..but he did say it.
In reality the whole of a bank’s business is derivatives. The derivatives we name as derivatives are a slightly more opaque layer to the initial asset/liability, which if you think about it, are simply a written contract derived from an initial agreement ( i.e. loan and repayment), the appraisal of which is subjective. The whole framework floats in an imaginary realm where CBs set out to guide asset values and hence revenue using one economic point or another. As a market maker, a bank that underpins the valuation of assets/currency in Europe and further afield, DB is systemic, with governments and the ECB/CBs one notch higher in the schematic, and hence, theoretically at least, in a position to profit from its demise due to its failure requiring their intervention. Every failure so far has seen elimination of established rules, and various forms of corruption take place – those higher in the order just seem to act more legally and in response to lower initial excesses… when in fact they are as much behind and part of them as the banks.
They have simply cooked up a way to credibly get away with over-riding sovereign law and international agreement.
“The derivatives we name as derivatives”
Well said. I myself, take a simple Newtonian approach. If it does not exhibit significant levels of non-linearity, it’s not a derivative.
Off topic: Comey received 6 million from a defense contractor who is a large contributor to the Clinton foundation.
For many years I felt safe that the FBI would protect us from government tyranny.
I felt the same about the media.
Today I feel those protections have realistically gone bye-bye..
We’re on our own.
This was delusional thinking. The FBI, CIA and military have been infiltrated with Zioglobalist traitors for decades, at least since the end of WW II. They have stolen unimaginable amounts of our tax dollars and used them against our best interests and in fact in the best interests of foreign nations, free of accountability because of their “national security/classified” shield which has in the long term proven much more dangerous than any “iron curtain.”
Is it any wonder few trust ANY authority to be transparent, open, honest?
Conspiracy theories exist for a reason.
When anyone invents anything directed to your detriment you know that the theory has ended and the reality has begun.
Conspiracy theories exist for a reason…. and these days, the great majority of them are proven true rather than false. Maybe that’s why ICANN was designated to take over the DNS,,, Every institution seems to need censorship these days to keep the game going.
No “Authority” ever has been, nor ever will be, “transparent, open, honest.” Failure to recognize this, is THE key enabler of the progressive delusion.
Anyone you voluntarily bend over for and grant “Autority” over you, will rape you and rob you ’til there’s nothing left worth raping and robbing. That’s how things have always been, and how they’ll always be.
“Our” authorities are no better than anyone else. No better than Saddam, no better than isis, no better than Kim. No matter how loudly they claim to be on TV. What at one point gave America some claim to Shining City on the Hill status, was not that it’s rulers were somehow better than other rulers. They never were. But America’s rulers had the advantage of not having much in the way of power. A minuscule budget, No real standing army. no federal police. No central bank. A general citizenry armed well enough to have an effective veto on policies that affected them too negatively personally….
Once America became nothing more than a bunch of dumb dunces who fell for the progressive scam that a great country is great because it has great “leaders”, America ceased being any different than any other country where the leader struts around on TV and claims to be great.
But, in reality “My daddy is better than your daddy” will never amount to more than a flaunting how stupid and childish one is. Our “daddy” really is no better than Venezuelans’ daddy. Never have been, never will be.
If the DOJ reducing the DB fine from $14B to $5.4B is not a BAILOUT, then what exactly is it?
Must be nice to be Too Big To Fail.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
The “fine” is just politics — the Obama regime will end in 4 months, long before anything is settled. Maybe DB will just give the former Bankers Trust to DoJ in settlement, more likely the politicians in both countries will have to deal with bigger problems.
If the DoJ fine was a legal matter (it isn’t), the statute of limitations ended a long time ago. And any lawyer worth his/her salt knows you can’t collect $14 billion from a bank that only has $10 billion in equity — even if the verdict gets upheld. It is obviously just political posturing.
Shutting Deutche Bank is exactly like Obama’s earlier threat to keep his heal on the throat of BP (after the gulf of mexico rig explosion). Legally speaking, BP was liable. Practically speaking, BP was supplying most of the US military’s gasoline in two wars (Iraq and Afghanistan). And practically speaking, BP is critical to the British economy.
Kill Deutche Bank, and you kill the ECB and shut down the economies of every EU member country. Simple as that.
Germany isn’t going to toe the line with Obama’s policies — anymore than any other country would follow a lame duck president. Obama will be angry, but Germany is and will continue talking with Russia. It will continue to de-escalate George Soros war in Ukraine. It will continue selling advanced machinery to China. Obama (and his foreign policies) will leave office in January.
The Fed created the mortgage mess by keeping interest rates too low; Congress (see Barney Frank’s rant on FNMA) pressured lenders to issue mortgages that made zero sense to anyone. Deutche Bank is not innocent, but then neither is Goldman, Citi, JPM, Wells Fargo, BofA, etc.
The entire drama is about politicians covering their own asses. Politicians are the only “bailout” here, and it will continue until voters stop voting for it.
“Kill Deutche Bank, and you kill the ECB and shut down the economies of every EU member country. Simple as that.”
You aren’t related to Hanky-Panky Paulson, are you, Freddie?
You forgot to mention “tanks in the streets”. ha.
Not related to Paulson, resent even the suggestion.
I think if you understand Germany’s economy (and its importance to Europe in general):
(1) you would know that Germany has more small and medium sized businesses
(2) you would know that German businesses (even the larger ones) rely on bank lending much more than in the USA. The disintermediation that happened in the UK and USA didn’t happen in much of the continent, especially Germany
(3) German laws favor keeping financial lending practices on a different balance sheet than manufacturing. Vendor financing happens less often, and even when it happens the loans are quickly sold to factoring departments within banks
(4) the large number of small / medium sized businesses makes it difficult to do credit checks on every counterparty — much less risk having a local bank that has a relationship with the borrower.
(5) a much greater percentage of commerce happens between private companies (those with no public accounting / credit assessment) — the banks have the credit info that people in the US think would be widely available. The companies do not want to be beholden to the quarterly wall street “beat the EPS estimate” nonsense that overwhelms US management.
All of these things could change over time (as they did in UK/USA) — but it won’t happen instantly or even as fast as foreigners can question DB’s solvency. For the reasons in number 5 above, many people in Germany don’t want the Anglo-US financial system.
To your insult about Hank Paulson — I suspect many Germans would be deeply embarrassed / offended at the idea of a Paulson style bank bailout. Banks are supposed to finance commerce, not speculate in political finance as in the US. Banks are supposed to provide a safe place to store money (not steal from depositors because a half wit is running the ECB into the ground).
If DB needs a public bailout, it will be Merkel’s political head, and probably Draghi’s literal head. Certainly the ECB will get dismantled
Are you insinuating that DB has no responsibility for it’s own financial problems, Freddie?
It’s everybody else’s fault, isn’t it?
DB made most of it’s own bed. Now it’s time to lie in it.
No more excuses for the Too Big to Fails.
As soon as DB collapsed others will come in to pick up the pieces. It’s Darwinism on a financial level.
Will there be some pain? Sure. People only learn from pain. Pain is good. When earned pain is not immediately realized the pain only grows more intense. Like filling a dying patient full of morphine. It’s all good until the effect wears off and the unrealized pain multiplies.
Like the great Obama once told us: We gotta eat our peas. ha.
Unfortunately, German business and politicos too often fall for US hubris. DB itself did not need to expand into US, and VW did not need to expand in the US, which is the source of their present troubles. Oh, but you need to dine and wine with the global elites to feel important.
Besides, Schroeder opened the door to hedge funds and private equity, so every time a private company gets into trouble, it is scooped up by one of them.
“If DB needs a public bailout,”
Deutsche Bank WILL need a bailout.
End of Story
@LFOldTimer — “Are you insinuating that DB has no responsibility for it’s own financial problems?”
I have no idea where you got such a ridiculous idea. I made very clear that all the big European banks are in the same crappy boat. They shared (past tense) blame with bad monetary policy for getting themselves into a disaster — but yes, I put 100% of the post-2009 blame onto the idiot Mario Draghi.
Instead of pushing banks to reform, instead of stepping aside and letting banks reform –the jackass running the ECB has been stealing from all European banks to finance the drunken mess in Brussels.
The ECB needs the status quo, and is fighting to keep it even though the world (and Europe) has changed. Too much debt is the problem, and having an ECB jackass actively working to add more debt on top of too much debt is definitely Mario Draghi’s fault.
BNP, RBS, Unicredito — even the CHF denominated UBS / Credit Suisse — they all need to change their business models to adopt to a world with less debt (we the consumers need to adapt also). But a world with less debt doesn’t fit into the fascist “super” state in Brussels, nor their corrupt central planner at the ECB.
Banks failed to adjust pre-2008 — that is on them. The ECB prevented them from adjusting post 2009, that is on Draghi.
“The Fed created the mortgage mess by keeping interest rates too low”
Alan Greenspan took the lending standards to ZERO, encouraging the bankers to commit mortgage fraud.
I see no evidence that Deutche is any worse (or better) off than any other big bank in Europe. The balance sheet size is misleading because German banks do not net derivative trades. Not saying that DB doesn’t have serious issues, but pretending like the problem is isolated to just one bank is political propaganda, not analysis.
Merkel won’t allow Italy and France to bail out their big banks (because Merkel is under domestic pressure) — so the clowns running the ECB think they can use DB’s troubles (which are real) to force Merkel’s hand. Very very short sighted.
If Deutche Bank needs a bailout, Merkel will be unemployed within hours — and more importantly German support for the EU will collapse. Protecting savings is more important, providing funding to German industry is more important. Germany’s contributions to Brussels would be terminated, and the monies used to protect DB depositors.
DB has a lot of problems to work through, and it needs to unwind a lot of marginally profitable (and just plain unprofitable) business lines. It will take time, but it will get done.
Its hardly a secret that the financial industry is still much bigger (as percent of GDP) than historical levels; and DB (like all the money center banks around the world) have been expanding since 2008 instead of shrinking — blame Bernanke / Yellen and Draghi for that.
But its rather foolish for drunken EU bureaucrats to think that threatening DB’s stability will force Merkel’s hand and get her to accept more nonsense from Brussels. Maybe she wants to bend more to Brussels — but she is smart enough to realize there is zero support among voters for such a move. Not in most EU countries, and certainly not in Germany.
The EU is doomed, and its acting like a cornered animal. If they cause a crisis of confidence in their financial backer — the EU will collapse at least as fast (if not faster) than DB.
Then again, no one has ever accused the EU drunks in Brussels of being smart.
On a very fundamental level, any bank with a large presence in Germany is going to be severely compromised by the simple fact that German industrials have, in practice, sold an unbelievable amount of stuff to the rest of Europe on credit. Much of which will never be repaid. Simply because it cannot be repaid.
And to make matters worse, it is an integral part of German policy to keep this charade going at full steam, as absent “buy now/pay later (uh, like in, never),” the rest of Europe do not have the means to buy at all. Leaving the world beating German industrial machine, along with it’s world’s most productive and highest paid workforce, in a really uncomfortable bind.
A solid gold standard would have signaled this particular train was about to derail long before it went nearly as far as it has now gone. But by now, the adjustments necessary in Germany are, even if perhaps not quite as painful as those in the debtor counties, no walk in the park either. And the Germans, like everyone else with a printing press and politically determined accounting standards, are of course electing to kick the can for as long as they can.
Well, that is your opinion. Its a free internet, so you are entitled to whatever misinformed opinion you can fabricate.
You meant to say that the ECB is lending infinite amounts to the 3rd world EU members, not Germany and not Deutche Bank.
Germans forced Merkel to strictly limit how much she could lend (give?) to the ESMF and various other EU frauds. There was a widely publicized court case where people all over the west made fun of the German judges wearing red robes and saying that Brussels could not have a blank check, nor could Merkel give a blank check without Bundestag approval (which everyone saw would never happen).
Germans, especially at the Bundesbank, have ridiculed the disastrous policies of Mario Draghi. Just because Draghi thinks the loans (and sovereign debt) from Greece is money good does not mean that Germans agree with him
You are whining about Draghi’s stupid lending, and fraudulently claiming that it is German lending.
Deutche Bank’s issues relate to some bad derivative transactions (including the MBS mess in the USA), but mostly they are the result of bad monetary policy from Mario Draghi.
Banks make their money from carry — the difference between the rates they lend at and the rates they borrow at. Same as insurance companies, same as hedge funds, same as many other finance vehicles.
As long as Draghi is stealing from German savers to delay the EU’s day of reckoning — all financial companies will get squeezed.
True for Deutche bank. True for Unicredito. True for BNP. True for RBS. True for Credit Suisse and UBS.
Say as you wish, but Germany’s target2 balance is German lending, and a German choice. Germany has done all it can to ‘manage’ events to its own favour, in fact it could credibly be accused of purposefully formenting and then using the sovereign and economic failures to increase its own political influence. What you scoop from MSM and the power plays going on behind the scenes are two very different creatures.
“You meant to say that the ECB is lending infinite amounts to the 3rd world EU members, not Germany and not Deutche Bank.”
…
Nope. Stuki is correct here that German banks (and France’s, and Spain’s and Italy’s, and …) have been providing vendor financing for years to the EU periphery.
You do not understand the structure of the ECB. ECB forbidden to lend directly. ECB provides liquidity to banks within eu system that in turn lend to sovereigns.
…
page 35:
“Therefore, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union contains a number of
provisions that aim to ensure prudent fiscal policies and sound, sustainable public finances.
First of all, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union explicitly prohibits
the financing of government deficits through central banks and the offering of any
form of preferential conditions to the public sector by financial institutions.”
http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/monetarypolicy2011en.pdf
need to add
the monetary union – in it’s infinite wisdom – also decreed that banks set aside ZERO for reserves when lending to sovereigns.
European banks waayyy under capitalized.
It is you that does not understand how the EU actually works. No one obeys the EU laws, so quoting them just makes you sound naive.
The ECB is buying all sorts of corporate debt (in Europe, a majority of which is issued by banks) and the ECB is deliberately paying way too much — when Draghi pretends that garbage debt should pay 4% instead of junk rates that are at least double that, he is directly subsidizing the issuers of said debt, which is to say he is giving money to bad banks.
Please don’t waste everyone’s time telling us what you think is supposed to happen based on your interpretation of laws that no one obeys.
Look at the forest, rather than the trees. The latter will always quickly reach saturation levels of detail complexity. As exactly what it spells at any given time, is crucially dependent on all manners of impossible to value, but easy to temporarily manipulate, assets. But the enveloping forest, is very straight forward and clear:
Germans bust their ass and build stuff of genuine value, and trade it for promises of future value. When those promises turn out broken, someone is left holding that bag. Exactly who it is, varies from individual promise to individual promise. Tracking them all down is both pretty much impossible and, for the general public as opposed to those directly involved in those markets, a pointless diversion.
It simply doesn’t matter who is notionally making each loan and valuing all the “assets” that end up making up the convoluted path from a guy in Germany putting wheels on a BMW, to the guy in Spain who “made the money” to pay for it by doing nothing and believing the hype. Nor does it matter who said what and who ridicules whom.
In the big scheme of things, there will be a gradient of impairment that gets stronger the closer a bank is to the German guys that got paid as if what they built were sold for money good, instead of for empty promises. Many/most of which promises, the ECB is still bending over backwards, to pretend are not empty; hence further obfuscating the underlying economic reality.
You sound as if you are much better positioned and equipped than me, to dig into whether DB is unusually exposed to to a failure of this scam than I am. I’m just working off the assumption that as a large, nominally German and with a large presence in Germany, Bank, DB is more exposed than most.
Bankers are out of control. Confiscating the people’s stuff with the printing press. Wanton gambling with derivatives. Making nonsensical loans. Mislabeling junk bonds as AAA. Every few years they demand bailouts or bail ins. Will we ever get bankers that are prudent stewards of other people’s money?
Rothschild’s Corporate Banking Cabal Lobbying To Force Hometown Credit Unions Out Of Existence!
https://politicalvelcraft.org/2013/08/23/rothschilds-corporate-banking-cabal-needs-your-moola-new-corporate-war-on-taxing-hometown-credit-unions-out-of-existence/
“Will we ever get bankers that are prudent stewards of other people’s money?”
No.
Those dumb enough to still believe we will, or even that such a world is theoretically possible, are the root of the problem.
We’ll never get “nice” bankers. What we can get, is a system (or more correctly, a lack of one) that allows people to bypass bankers, and/or hedge against their misdeeds on those occasions where interaction with them is necessary.
@mike ” Confiscating the people’s stuff with the printing press”
The central banks (part of government) are running the proverbial printing presses.
More to the point, Janet Yellen — an academic and a political sellout — is setting interest rates to steal from US savers. Mario Draghi is stealing from european savers.
Yellen and Draghi are not bankers — they are slimey politicians. But they sure fooled you!
@mike “Wanton gambling with derivatives”
Straight out of the 20yr old communication graduate’s handbook of understanding nothing. Derivatives had almost nothing to do with any bank problems.
Stupid lending at artificially set rates, based on dubious collateral, is what destroyed banks in Japan, US, EU (and China).
Governments should not set interest rates (because politicians always want rates set too low). Governments should not dictate collateral values (as they do with red line banking laws, credit laws, etc). And governments should not allow GSE’s (like FNMA and FHLMC) to compete using taxpayer subsidized money.
The ECB should not be overpricing debt from PIIGS countries — anymore than FNMA should be overpricing mortgage debt. Too much artificial “demand” from corrupt political hacks.
@mike “Making nonsensical loans”
Banks were pushed out of their normal lending activities when FNMA/FHLMC used taxpayer subsidies to under-price bank lending. Banks made risky loans to stay in business against a taxpayer subsidized bohemouth
@mike “Mislabeling junk bonds as AAA
You are not even trying to get your facts right. Bankers don’t set credit ratings at all. Congress mandated that insurance companies (and small banks) could only buy assets rated AAA ***BY NATIONAL CREDIT RATING FIRMS***
@mike “Every few years they demand bailouts or bail ins.”
Monetary authorities wanted bailouts and bail ins. Henry Paulson was the only FORMER banker involved in the theft. Bernanke, Draghi, Yellen, Geithner were all unelected regulators.
No surprises here about Bank behaviour – just part of normal business as previously documented
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/greece-crisis-banks-greedy/398603/
The failure of our society is reflected in our Institutions – it seems none including Governments can be trusted. Dark ages?
“Banca Monte dei Paschi, in Italy, is the world’s oldest bank, dating to the year 1624.”
That is an incredible longevity. An Icon.
TRASHED
In America, Wells Fargo has no history dating back to the 1600’s, but with the iconic Wells Fargo stage coach, it is also iconic in nature.
TRASHED
The Federal Reserve. Can’t trust a word out of their mouth, anymore.
TRASHED
In Italy, one is guilty until proven innocent.