White House Plans Unified Banking Regulator

Bank tells Fed it'll shrink its footprint if things get rough

(NEWSER) - Should we start calling it Bank of Some of America? If push comes to shove, the banking giant is prepared to pull its operations out of some parts of the country, sources tell the Wall Street Journal . The unpalatable retreat is one of several contingency plans the bank drew up last year at the Federal Reserve's insistence, an exercise intended to prepare for the possibility that its mortgage and other financial problems could worsen. More»

Failures down in 2011, but weak banks are taking longer to recover or die

(NEWSER) - Bank failures were down significantly in 2011, but that doesn't mean banks are getting healthier—it just means sick ones are taking longer to die, the Wall Street Journal finds. Some 92 banks failed last year, down from 157 in 2010. But many of 2011's casualties were in weaker shape than the banks that failed in 2010. There are still 844 banks on regulators' problem-bank list, and analysts expect many more undercapitalized banks to fail over the next two years. More»

Banks took in billions of dollars, even as they claimed to be healthy

(NEWSER) - For more than two years, the Fed and the banks it bailed out during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis have kept many of the details of the massive, multi-trillion-dollar bailout a secret. But, thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests, 29,000 pages of bailout details are pouring out of the Fed at last, and those details are explained in an extended and damning report by Bloomberg Markets magazine. Among the biggest revelations:

• $7.77 trillion: the total amount doled out in aid by the Fed to all the banks, as of March 2009, which Bloomberg notes surpasses 50% of the value of "everything produced in the US that year." In comparison, the $700 billion TARP "at least had some strings attached," says one House Democrat. "With the Fed programs, there was nothing."

Chair weathered financial crisis, oversaw closure of 350-plus banks

(AP) - Sheila Bair is stepping down as chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. this summer, ending a five-year term in which she helped craft the government's response to the 2008 financial crisis. The FDIC says Bair will leave her post as one of the government's top bank regulators on July 8. More»

They charged bigger interest rates on cheap money from Uncle Sam

(NEWSER) - Crisis-walloped banks aided with federal loans likely made a fortune by lending the same money back to the federal government at substantially higher interest rates, a new report indicates. The study by the Congressional Research Service supports complaints that the largest banks essentially engaged in taxpayer-financed arbitrage by cashing in on loans to Uncle Sam using money obtained almost for free from ... Uncle Sam. At the same time, American businesses were dying and homeowners were going under because bank loans or federal aid weren't available to them. More»