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I am constantly amused by those people who claim there is some vast "conspiracy" in this country when it comes to banks, balance sheets, and fraudulent lending and accounting. There is no conspiracy. It is, in fact, "in your face" fraud. The FDIC does us the courtesy of explaining it virtually every Friday night, right on their web page. I am simply going to take last night's bank closures, which numbered four. One of them has no "deposit insurance fund" estimated loss available, because they didn't find someone to take the assets - they're just mailing checks. But the other three do.
1- Waterford Bank, Germantown MD: $155.6 million in assets, $156.4 in insured deposits. They were "underwater" by $800,000, right? Wrong: Estimated loss, $51 million. That is, the assets of $155.6 million were overvalued by approximately 30% at the time of seizure.
2- Bank of Illinois, Normal IL: $211.7 million in assets, $198.5 million in deposits. They were "underwater" by $13.2 million (which is why they were seized), right? Wrong: Estimated loss $53.7 million. That is, the the assets of $211.7 million were overvalued by more than 25% at the time of seizure.
3- Sun American Bank, Boca Raton FL: $535.7 million in assets (so they claimed anyway), $443.5 million in total deposits. Heh, why did you seize them - they have more assets than liabilities? Oh wait: Estimated loss: $103.8 million, so the actual assets are worth $443.5 - $103.8, or $339.7 million. That is, the assets of $535.7 million were overvalued by a whopping 37% at the time of seizure.
This isn't new, by the way. In August of 2009 I went through Colonial Bank's failure based on BB&T's presentation to its shareholders on the "merger" - and gift it was given by the FDIC. It too showed that Colonial had been carrying assets on their books at a ridiculous 37% above where BB&T ultimately marked them as a whole.
Folks, your bank is being assessed deposit insurance premiums to pay for these losses. You are paying these losses through increased fees and interest expense on your credit cards and all other manner of borrowing. You are paying for outrageous, pernicious and endemic balance sheet fraud. There is no conspiracy. It is right under your nose. One of these three banks, based on their balance sheet, wasn't even underwater - it was "to the good" by nearly $100 million dollars. The balance sheet was a flat, bald-faced lie. You want to sit for this? Why should you?
Now let's ask the inconvenient question:
Are the big banks - specifically, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan - all similarly overvaluing their assets?
Why should we believe they are not? You can go through more than a year's worth of FDIC bank seizure information and in essentially every single case you will find that overvaluations of somewhere from 20-50% have in fact occurred, yet not one indictment for book-cooking has issued.
So let's be generous and assume that the "big banks" are over-valuing their assets by 25% - the lower end of the range of what the FDIC says is, through actual experience, what's going on, and add it all up.
Bank of America shows $2.25 trillion in assets.
Citibank shows $1.89 trillion in assets.
JP Morgan/Chase shows $2.04 trillion in assets.
Wells Fargo shows $1.31 trillion in assets.
This totals $7.49 trillion smackers.
The FDIC's experience with seizing banks thus far suggests quite strongly that all four of these entities are lying about these valuations, and that were they to be seized the loss embedded in them (and for which you, the taxpayer would be responsible) is somewhere between $1.49 and $2.99 trillion dollars.
Incidentally, neither the FDIC or Treasury happens to have either $1.49 or $2.99 trillion laying around, and it is highly questionable if they could raise it, should that become necessary. Now of course neither you or I can prove this is correct. However, we can look at the FDIC's own published bank closing statements, and derive from them a pattern stretching back more than a year now that has disclosed that in essentially each and every case the banks in question have overvalued their assets by anywhere from 20-40%, and that as of the day of the seizure such an overvaluation was in fact a continuing and ongoing practice. (1 |
