A lot has changed since the financial crisis. A number of large banks and Wall Street firms have disappeared. There are new regulations in the works meant to limit risky trading and bring derivatives that compounded the financial systems losses into regulated markets. Subprime lending has been coming back recently, but its still a fraction of what it once was. But at least one of the widely recognized causes of the financial crisis is not only still around, it has perhaps gotten worse. By every measure I can think of, and I have tried a bunch, the big banks are bigger than they were five years ago, at the dawn of the financial crisis. [..] The six largest banks in the nation now have 67% of all the assets in the U.S. financial system, according to bank research firm SNL Financial. That amounts to $9.6 trillion, up 37% from five years ago. And the big banks seem to be getting better at acquiring assets all the time. The overall growth of assets in the system in the same time is up just 8%. The biggest bank in the nation, JPMorgan, has $2.4 trillion in assets alone - the size of Englands economy. And JPMorgan is seven times larger than the nations No. 10 bank U.S. Bancorp, which itself has $350 billion in assets - along the lines of Austria -- and at this point is probably part of the TBTF club as well. Also way up: Profits. The four biggest banks in the U.S. alone, which along with JPMorgan include Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, made collectively nearly$45 billion in the first six months of the year, nine times what those same banks made five years ago. theautomaticearth/Finance/qe-the-people-and-the-damage-done.html
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 22:57:36 +0000
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