Friday, May 27, 2011

"Too Big to Fail" banks are even bigger and fail-ier

"We have even more 'too big to fail' institutions; more politically interconnected, very deep and wide institutions that could create another systemic event," says (Gretchen) Morgenson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at The New York Times. "It's almost as if the situation that brought us to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac having to be bailed out has now been squared or quadrupled. It's worse, not better."

(Joshua) Rosner, an analyst at Graham Fisher, wholeheartedly agrees.

"The risks are enormous" because there's even more concentration of assets among the biggest banks, which are "too big to analyze and manage," he says.

If the financial system was a "house of cards" before the crisis, the situation is worse today because back then investors had "some sense the numbers being given in annual reports and quarterly filings were accurate," Rosner says. "Now we know the government seems to be [complicit] in allowing them to fudge those numbers."
-Yahoo! Finance