Daily News Channel
If you want to know whether the banking crisis is in the third inning or the ninth, consider Corus Bankshares. The Chicago regional bank has made just over $4 billion in commercial real estate loans. The recently completed government bank stress tests assumed that as many as 12% of all such loans could go bad in the next two years
You know those supersales at your local department store in which they offer great deals on a couple of things in the hopes of getting enough people in the door so they can move the crap too? That’s sort of what the Treasury Department and Tim Geithner are doing with the bank plan that was rolled out on Monday. The problem facing America’s economy has always been how to sell the worst of the toxic assets that are clogging banks’ balance sheets.
Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation , is working hard to reassure everyone that her banks, all 8,305 of them, are safe. Repeating her familiar mantra Wednesday on the CBS Morning Show, Bair said of FDIC-protected accounts, “Nobody’s ever lost a penny of insured deposits.” Bair had good reason to be out on the stump
Once a quarter, the FDIC does something which seems to have little purpose.