On Sunday's "60 Minutes" it was asserted that the September 2008 failure of Lehman Bros. triggered the chain reaction that caused the global financial and economic crisis of the past four years.
So let me get this straight. The Standard and Poor's rating agency last week took the historic step of putting the US government's AAA credit rating on "negative watch".
[[wysiwyg_imageupload:2206:]]By Julian D. W. Phillips
Some months back we pointed out that in their present form, banks had become the arteries and veins of the financial worlds with central banks the heart. Unfortunately, banks are driven solely by the profit motive. As they grew into every aspect of people's financial lives, they failed to take on the corresponding social responsibilities that they came with it. The result is that when their greed went too far and the banking system was threatened with collapse, they had to be bailed out by their customers at the retail level, the taxpayers. Since then, they have recovered but are not vibrantly underpinning the economies in which their customers are based to promote a recovery. Still, their total thrust is for profits, meaning that there is just not enough banking support to invigorate developed world economies. Worse still, the public perception of bankers has been eroded so far, it's common to hear them described as 'banksters.'
IN August 2007, as world financial markets were seizing up, domestic and foreign banks began lining up for cash from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Arab Banking Corp., the lender part- owned by the Central Bank of Libya, used a New York branch to get 73 loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve in the 18 months after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed.
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s two-year fight to shield crisis-squeezed banks from the stigma of revealing their public loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya.
The number of banks at risk of failing made up nearly 12 percent of all federally insured banks in the final three months of 2010, the highest level in 18 years.
John picked up the phone. It was the bank’s legal counsel, Peter Thompson, calling. He had dramatic news. Garland Brothers, one of the world’s oldest banks, would declare bankruptcy tomorrow. As he lay there in his spacious air-conditioned bedroom, unable to return to sleep, John tried to reconstruct the events of the last four years…
Bank of America Corp., the biggest U.S. lender, may book an $8.5 billion charge on costs to resolve disputes over faulty mortgages, a figure at the upper end of the range the company gave last week, according to Oppenheimer & Co.
Spain has set in motion a partial nationalisation of its crippled savings banks, or cajas, but stopped short of the giant rescue deemed necessary by some experts to contain the country’s festering crisis.
