Wells Fargo, 9 Others Expected to Fail Stress Test

(NEWSER) - In the wake of reports that complaining banks cajoled the Federal Reserve into sweetening some stress test results, the Wall Street Journal looks at the hard numbers. Citigroup, for example, was originally supposed to raise $35 billion; the number eventually released was $5.5 billion. The total for Bank of America, meanwhile, shrank from more than $50 billion to $33.9 billion. More»

Compensation limits have prompted swift TARP repayment

(NEWSER) - A common complaint about the TARP bailouts was that by injecting capital and making the financial environment more friendly, the government wasn't doing enough to push the banks into real reform. Why wouldn't the banks simply live off TARP cash as long as they could? Yet those concerns were unfounded, writes Daniel Gross, because it turned out the government did have an effective motivator: limits on compensation. More»

Fed, Treasury want banks to raise more capital first

(NEWSER) - Citigroup and Wells Fargo are at odds with the government over how much they need to raise to repay their TARP bailouts, with Uncle Sam wanting them to raise more capital first. Both are looking to follow Bank of America’s lead and get out from under the TARP, allowing them to escape federal scrutiny of executive compensation, but they’ve been told to raise more relative to what they’re repaying than BofA did, the Wall Street Journal reports. More»

Fed massaged some figures to portray banks as healthy

(NEWSER) - Some major banks managed to cajole the government into using more optimistic figures in its "stress test" results, insiders tell the Washington Post. Banks like Citigroup—eager to show they were healthy and didn't need more help from the government—were given credit for pending moves to raise capital, resulting in the report showing shortages of capital well below what many experts had predicted. More»

Wells Fargo, Bank of America may have reason to worry

(NEWSER) - Now that shareholders have rejected Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit's $15 million pay package, all eyes are on Wells Fargo and Bank of America, both of which are holding their own "say on pay" votes in the coming weeks. The votes are required as part of post-financial crisis financial reform laws, and though negative votes have been cast before, Citigroup marks the first big bank to suffer one. "If it can happen at Citigroup it can happen anywhere, particularly at other big financial firms," an AFL-CIO director tells the Los Angeles Times . More»