Discount window bailout operations for banks are now officially worse in magnitude than in 2008, though not in scope

We don't have 500 bank failures.

What we do have is Dodd-Frank 2010 limits on deposit insurance not keeping up with 2023 realities.

Unless Congress steps in and helps high depositors, there will be an exodus of high depositor accounts all across the country to money center banks which have too big to fail status and an FDIC put as systemically important enough to backstop.

This would mean many local banks will come under stress and at minimum weaken local economies even if they don't fail.

We do not need the big banks to become any more powerful than they already are.

And we certainly must not weaken local economies.

The reasons in the plumbing don't matter at this point. It's too late for that.

The $250k limit has to change. The authorities at the Fed, Treasury, and FDIC are constrained by that in what it is permissible for them to do.

Call your Senator.

Call your Representative.

 

This is as good a day as any to remember that Ben Bernanke's Fed under Obama bailed out the banksters and hung 6.5 million homeowners out to dry

 Bloomberg, August 21, 2011, here:

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley, got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress. ...

Homeowners are more than 30 days past due on their mortgage payments on 4.38 million properties in the U.S., and 2.16 million more properties are in foreclosure, representing a combined $1.27 trillion of unpaid principal, estimates Jacksonville, Florida-based Lender Processing Services Inc. ...

Congress required the disclosure after the Fed rejected requests in 2008 from the late Bloomberg News reporter Mark Pittman and other media companies that sought details of its loans under the Freedom of Information Act. After fighting to keep the data secret, the central bank released unprecedented information about its discount window and other programs under court order in March 2011.

 

David Stockman Hates Everything About America, Except Cash

Just like, you guessed it, The New York Times!

He hates:

Crony capitalism, Keynesianism, imperialism, stimulus, social insurance, incumbency, the constitution, free elections, lobbying, deficit spending, the Fed's discount window, the FDIC, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, quantitative easing, interest rate repression, and currencies in a race to the bottom.

But honestly, all he really hates are the new stock market highs.

"When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is."

Wah. Wah. Wah.

Read it all here.

US Banks Stay In Business Because Of The Fed's Discount Window

So says Jeff Bailey, here:

Bankers will talk about being entrepreneurial and needing the freedom to compete. This is B.S. The only reason they're able to stay in business is FDIC deposit insurance and access to the Fed's discount window for emergency borrowing. They exist by virtue of extraordinary government assistance, and while their shareholders get to [the] upside of this deal, taxpayers are hugely exposed to the downside.

Very few people seem to understand this, or even care anymore. And it's the not-caring that really amazes. The lid was blown off this story by Bloomberg here on Sunday night, November 27, 2011, the end of the Thanksgiving weekend when absolutely nobody was paying attention in the public:

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

The story became the rage for a time among bloggers who blogged about it at length and news organizations who dutifully reported the astounding figures, but the nation shrugged. Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs, 5 million residences were forfeit by their owners, and the federal government basically did nothing about it, even protested there was not much it could do, but it made damn sure the bankers and corporations were made good at great expense and risk to the public. Meanwhile the big banks have grown bigger and more dangerous than ever, re-inflating asset prices in the process as they try to repair their off-balance-sheet balance sheets, along with their public ones, and rank and file Americans are basically set back decades because of their losses.

The poor you have always with you, the man from Galilee once told us. Customers of the banks, no doubt, every last mother's son of them.

Most American Banks Are Paying More at the Discount Window Than EU Banks For Swaps

Swap lines for EU banks are now discounted to 0.58 percent. The European Central Bank gives us euros as collateral, and we give them dollars at that rate.

Most American banks are paying much more for dollar loans, either 0.75 percent or 1.25 percent, at our own discount window. Seasonally adverse conditions allow some US banks to borrow at 0.25 percent. 

The reason the EU gets such a break? Maybe because the EU is in big, big trouble, Trouble with a capital "T".

See the discount window data, here.

h/t Mish

Federal Reserve Discount Window Aided Many Banks Which Failed Anyway

So says another in a long line of incriminating stories in The New York Times, highlighting the pervasive involvement of the US government in bailing out failing institutions and implicating it in the spread of moral hazard to the highest levels of American banking:

More than one thousand banks have taken advantage [of the discount window during the financial crisis]. A review of federal data, including records the Fed released last week [by court order], shows that at least 111 of those banks subsequently failed. Eight owed the Fed money on the day they failed, including Washington Mutual, the largest failed bank in American history.

Here's the graphic from the article showcasing some of the worst offenders:

Supreme Court Rejects 8 Bank Clearing House Appeal on Loan Disclosures

The decision, which is moot as to future disclosure requirements because of the disclosure requirements under the Dodd-Frank legislation, will require that the Federal Reserve disclose loans made at the discount window in 2008. The story, excerpted below, is reported by Bloomberg here:

The order marks the first time a court has forced the Fed to reveal the names of banks that borrowed from its oldest lending program, the 98-year-old discount window. The disclosures, together with details of six bailout programs released by the central bank in December under a congressional mandate, would give taxpayers insight into the Fed’s unprecedented $3.5 trillion effort to stem the 2008 financial panic.