Banking profits huge, but not from LOANS

Banking profits huge, but not from LOANS
Banking profits way up,
loans way down,
where are these profits coming from?

Federally insured banks posted $915 million in profits during the quarter, but the number of institutions under scrutiny for risk of failure also rose.

The FDIC said that the overall banking sector's profits were up from the staggering $38.7 billion losses reported in the fourth quarter of 2008, with reported net income for the full year totaling $12.5 billion - up from $4.5 billion in 2008.

The FDIC attributed the improvements to an increase in non-interest income and lower losses in securities investments and loan losses.

 More than 700 U.S. banks appeared on the government's list of troubled lenders in the fourth quarter of 2009, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reported Tuesday.

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Lending Falls at Epic Pace

U.S. banks posted last year their sharpest decline in lending since 1942, suggesting that the industry's continued slide is making it harder for the economy to recover.

The struggling U.S. banking industry remains a problem for policy makers eager for banks to lend again. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill and administration officials have pushed banks to lend, particularly in light of the billions in taxpayer aid injected into the financial industry over the past two years.

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Frank Partnoy, a panelist from the University of San Diego, claims that "the balance sheets of most Wall Street banks are fiction."

Even as many Americans still struggle to recover from the country's worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, another crisis – one that will be even worse than the current one – is looming, according to a new report from a group of leading economists, financiers, and former federal regulators.

In the report, the panel, which includes Rob Johnson of the United Nations Commission of Experts on Finance and bailout watchdogElizabeth Warren, warns that financial regulatory reform measures proposed by the Obama administration and Congress must be beefed up to prevent banks from continuing to engage in high-risk investing that precipitated the near-collapse of the U.S. economy in 2008.

The report warns that the country is now immersed in a "doomsday cycle" wherein banks use borrowed money to take massive risks in an attempt to pay big dividends to shareholders and big bonuses to management – and when the risks go wrong, the banks receive taxpayer bailouts from the government.

"Risk-taking at banks," the report cautions, "will soon be larger than ever."

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So the Banks are making record PROFITS, 

AND LOANS ARE AT A 70 YEAR LOW.

The banks have quit loaning preferring higher

risk profits from the derivatives market,  credit-default 

swaps traded on unregulated exchanges. G

Banks continue to put the American economy 

at risk, does congress have the intestinal fortitude

to regulate the Criminal banks?

Or will the congressmen be bribed?

Banks got $2.7 trillion dollar bail out,

borrow from the federal reserve at 1%

interest rates and charge loanshark

rates/vig of 30% on credit cards and

460% on payday loans.

And invest in high risk investments,

they are NOT making loans.

The banking mafia is in charge of congress.

Americans, the people no longer control 

congress.

Gerald

Anthropologist

Series 3 and 7

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