Infinite Unknown

NEW YORK (AP) - Regulators on Friday closed Haven Trust Bank in Georgia and Sanderson State Bank in Texas, bringing to 25 the number of U.S. bank failures this year.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was appointed receiver of Haven Trust Bank, based in Duluth, Ga., and Sanderson State, with one office in Sanderson, Texas.

Haven Trust had assets of $572 million and deposits of $515 million as of Dec. 8. Sanderson State had assets of $37 million and deposits of $27.9 million as of Dec. 3.

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Tags: Bank Failure, Banks, Economy, FDIC, U.S.

Dec. 6 (Bloomberg) — First Georgia Community Bank of Jackson, with four offices southeast of Atlanta, was closed by regulators, becoming the 23rd U.S. bank failure this year amid losses tied to record mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures.

First Georgia, with $237.5 million in assets and $197.4 million in deposits, was shut by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance yesterday and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was named receiver. United Bank of Zebulon, Georgia, will assume First Georgia’s deposits and open the failed bank’s offices today as United branches, the FDIC said.

“Deposits will continue to be insured by the FDIC, so there is no need for customers to change their banking relationship to retain their deposit insurance coverage,” the FDIC said in an e-mailed statement.

Regulators have closed the most banks in 15 years, with the collapses of Washington Mutual Inc. and IndyMac Bancorp Inc. among the biggest in history. November was the busiest month in more than a decade, with five institutions shut, matching the pace in July 1994, according to the FDIC.

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Tags: Bank Failure, Banks, Economy, FDIC, Foreclosures, U.S.

On Friday November 21, the world came within a hair’s breadth of the most colossal financial collapse in history according to bankers on the inside of events with whom we have contact. The trigger was the bank which only two years ago was America’s largest, Citigroup. The size of the US Government de facto nationalization of the $2 trillion banking institution is an indication of shocks yet to come in other major US and perhaps European banks thought to be ‘too big to fail.’

The clumsy way in which US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, himself not a banker but a Wall Street ‘investment banker’, whose experience has been in the quite different world of buying and selling stocks or bonds or underwriting and selling same, has handled the unfolding crisis has been worse than incompetent. It has made a grave situation into a globally alarming one.

‘Spitting into the wind’

A case in point is the secretive manner in which Paulson has used the $700 billion in taxpayer funds voted him by a labile Congress in September. Early on, Paulson put $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for his old firm, Goldman Sachs. However, if we compare the value of the equity share that $125 billion bought with the market price of those banks’ stock, US taxpayers have paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could have bought for $62.5 billion, according to a detailed analysis from Ron W. Bloom, economist with the US United Steelworkers union, whose members as well as pension fund face devastating losses were GM to fail.

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Tags: AIG, Bailout, Banks, Bush administration, Chrysler, Citigroup, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Dollar, Economy, FDIC, Financial Crisis, Ford, General Motors, GM, Government, Henry Paulson, Lehman Brothers, Politics, Stock Market, Taxpayers, Treasury, U.S., Wachovia, Wall Street, Washington Mutual

We will see hyperinflation, the dollar will fail and then the US will fail.
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Henry Paulson, U.S. treasury secretary, left, and Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, look through their notes before a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee in Washington, Nov. 18, 2008. Photographer: Jim Lo Scalzo/Bloomberg News

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.

When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.

“Whether it’s lending or spending, it’s tax dollars that are going out the window and we end up holding collateral we don’t know anything about,” said Congressman Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. “The time has come that we consider what sort of limitations we should be placing on the Fed so that authority returns to elected officials as opposed to appointed ones.”

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Tags: Bailout, Banks, Ben Bernanke, Congress, Credit Crisis, Credit Crunch, Economy, FDIC, Fed, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, Government, Henry Paulson, Politics, Taxpayers, Treasury

Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) — Seizure and sale of Downey Financial Corp. and two smaller lenders may cost the FDIC more than $2 billion as foreclosures rise and home prices extend declines in the worst housing slump since the Great Depression.

U.S. Bancorp acquired Downey and smaller PFF Bank & Trust, California thrifts crippled by bad mortgages, yesterday in a deal brokered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Community Bank of Loganville, Georgia, was also closed and its $611.4 million of deposits taken over by Bank of Essex in Tappahannock, Virginia.

Regulators this year have closed the most banks since 1993 as mortgage defaults and tightening credit froze markets. The collapse of IndyMac Bancorp Inc. was among the biggest in history, costing the FDIC $8.9 billion. The agency expects Downey’s demise to deplete its Deposit Insurance Fund by $1.4 billion, with PFF costing $700 million and Community $240 million.

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Tags: Bank Failure, Banks, Credit Crisis, Credit Crunch, Economy, FDIC, mortgage crisis, Mortgages

WASHINGTON: Federal regulators will guarantee as much as $1.4 trillion in U.S. banks’ debt in a bid to get the distressed financial system pumping again. They also took steps to make it easier for private investors to buy failed banks seized by the government.

Against a bleak economic backdrop, news that New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for Treasury secretary gave battered Wall Street a shot in the arm Friday. The Dow Jones industrials zoomed nearly 500 points as stocks erased roughly half the losses racked up the prior two days. Investors have been seeking a clear message from Obama on who will lead his economic brain trust during the financial crisis.

Directors of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. voted to approve the bank-debt guarantee program, which is part of the government’s financial rescue package. The FDIC program is meant to break the crippling logjam in bank-to-bank lending by guaranteeing the new debt in the event of payment default by the borrowing bank.

Some analysts have said that freeing up bank-to-bank lending with the guarantees won’t necessarily translate into a thaw in broader lending as banks are still wary of making loans to businesses and consumers.

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Tags: Bank Failure, Banks, Economy, FDIC, Fed, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, George Bush, Government, Politics, Timothy Geithner, U.S.

Freddie Mac, the US mortgage giant, yesterday admitted that it is so overwhelmed by its liabilities that without government backing, it would no longer be a viable business. The company said that it had lost $13.7 billion (£9.2 billion) in the third quarter of the year and begged for $13.8 billion from the US Treasury in rescue funds.

The plea for the multibillion-dollar cash injection came just days after Fannie Mae reported a record $29 billion loss for the period and gave warning that it was haemorrhaging cash so rapidly, it might need federal funds by the end of the year to survive.

The US Treasury has been overwhelmed by requests for federal aid in the past few weeks. In addition to setting up a $700 billion bailout fund to take equity stakes in troubled banks, the Treasury is being pressed by the car industry for a cash bailout. Yesterday, Neel Kashkari, the Assistant Treasury Secretary, said that he was under pressure to consider ways of using the $700 billion bailout to stem a surge in foreclosures across the US.

The Freddie Mac request for funds would see the drawing down of part of the $100 billion in emergency reserves that were committed by the Treasury in September.

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Tags: Economy, Fannie Mae, FDIC, Financial Crisis, Freddie Mac, Government, Politics, Treasury, U.S.

Sunny Yang, left, a masters degree student from Shanghai and employed banker in New York City, speaks with World Bank representative Roberto Amorosino about opportunities for unemployed friends of his during a career fair at Columbia Univeristy Friday, Nov. 7, 2008 in New York. The U.S. unemployment rate bolted to a 14-year high of 6.5 percent in October as another 240,000 jobs were cut, far worse than economists expected and stark proof the economy is deteriorating at an alarmingly rapid pace. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation’s jobless ranks zoomed past 10 million last month, the most in a quarter-century, as piles of pink slips shut factory gates and office doors to 240,000 more Americans with the holidays nearing. Politicians and economists agreed on a painful bottom line: It’s only going to get worse.

The unemployment rate soared to a 14-year high of 6.5 percent, the government said Friday, up from 6.1 percent just a month earlier. And there was more grim news from U.S. automakers: Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp., American giants struggling to survive, each reported big losses and figured to be announcing even more job cuts before long.

Regulators, meanwhile, shut down Houston-based Franklin Bank and Security Pacific Bank in Los Angeles on Friday, bringing the number of failures of federally insured banks this year to 19.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was appointed receiver of Franklin Bank, which had $5.1 billion in assets and $3.7 billion in deposits as of Sept. 30, and of Security Pacific Bank, with $561.1 million in assets and $450.1 million in deposits as of Oct. 17.

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Tags: Bank Failure, Banks, Barack Obama, Credit Crisis, Credit Crunch, Economy, FDIC, Ford, Foreclosures, General Motors, George Bush, GM, Government, Housing market, Labor Department, mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Politics, Recession, Stock Market, U.S., Unemployment, Wall Street

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and state regulators seized Los Angeles-based Security Pacific Bank late Friday — one of two banks to fail that day and the 19th to fail so far this year.

Pacific Western Bank, also based in Los Angeles, will assume all of the deposits of Security Pacific, the FDIC said in a statement. Also on Friday, Houston-based Franklin Bank SSB (FBTX:Franklin Bank Corporation was closed by regulators. See full story.

The four branches of Security Pacific will reopen on Monday as branches of Pacific Western. Depositors of the failed bank will automatically become depositors of Pacific Western.

Deposits will continue to be insured by the FDIC. As of Oct. 17, Security Pacific had total assets of $561.1 million and total deposits of $450.1 million.

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Tags: Bank Failure, Banks, Economy, FDIC

Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) — Freedom Bank of Bradenton, Florida, became the 17th U.S. bank seized by regulators this year as the deepest housing slump since the Great Depression triggers record foreclosures and mounting losses.

Freedom, with $287 million in assets and $254 million in deposits, was shut yesterday by the Florida Office of Financial Regulation and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was named receiver. Fifth Third Bancorp of Cincinnati will assume the deposits and buy $36 million of assets, the FIDC said. Freedom’s four offices will open Nov. 3 as Fifth Third branches.

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Tags: Bank Failure, Banks, Credit Crisis, Credit Crunch, Economy, FDIC, Financial Crisis, mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Politics, Treasury, U.S.