No banks are safe (bail ins, FDIC limits, systemic risks)

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ancona said:
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Opening fifteen or twenty 100K accounts is unfeasible, and even if we did, "they" would probably rule that it doesn't matter because we're a single entity and not entitled to protection under the hundred thousand dollar "per account" threshold.
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FDIC insured limits went up to $250K a while back (not that the number really means anything in the event of a systemic crisis).

http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/news/cnsum10/250k_fed_deposit_insurance.html
 
The Australian said:
THE federal government has seized a record $360 million from household bank accounts that have been dormant for just three years, prompting outrage in some quarters amid complaints that pensioners and retirees have lost deposits.

Figures from the Australian Security and Investments Commission (ASIC) show almost $360 million was collected from 80,000 inactive accounts in the year to May under new rules introduced by Labor.

The new rules lowered the threshold at which the government is allowed to snatch funds from accounts that remain idle from seven years to three years.

The rule change has delivered the government a massive bonanza with the money collected in the year to May more than the total collected in the past five decades combined. Between 1959 and 2012, the total collected was $330 million.

While the purpose of the laws is actually to reunite people with lost accounts before funds are eroded by fees and other charges, the lower threshold has been criticised as a budget cash-grab which affected accounts that were neither lost or forgotten.

Australian Bankers' Association chief executive Steven Munchenberg said the legislation was a "rushed" budget-boosting exercise which had transferred money set aside by people for their grandchildren's future to the government's coffers.
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More: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...es-idle-accounts/story-fn3dxiwe-1226949007917
 
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U.S. Preparing Bank Bail-Ins - Fed Vice Chair Fischer

Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer delivered his first speech on the U.S. and global economy in Stockholm, Sweden yesterday.

Fischer headed Israel’s central bank from 2005 through 2013 and is now number two at the Federal Reserve in the U.S. after Janet Yellen.

In a speech entitled, The Great Recession: Moving Ahead, given at an event sponsored by the Swedish Ministry of Finance, Fischer said ...
Additional steps have been taken in some countries. For example, in the United States, capital ratios and liquidity buffers at the largest banks are up considerably, and their reliance on short-term wholesale funding has declined considerably. Work on the use of the resolution mechanisms set out in the Dodd-Frank Act, based on the principle of a single point of entry--though less advanced than the work on capital and liquidity ratios--holds the promise of making it possible to resolve banks in difficulty at no direct cost to the taxpayer.

As part of this approach, the United States is preparing a proposal to require systemically important banks to issue bail-inable long-term debt that will enable insolvent banks to recapitalize themselves in resolution without calling on government funding--this cushion is known as a "gone concern" buffer.
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Fischer’s comments that the U.S. is “preparing a proposal” for bail-ins is at odds with Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Bank of England officials who have said that bail-in legislation could be used today.
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http://www.goldcore.com/goldcore_blog/U_S_Bail_Ins_Fed_Vice_Chair_Fischer_Says_Preparing_A_Proposal
 
The G-20 met recently in Australia to make new banking rules for the next financial calamity. Financial reform advocate Ellen Brown says these new rules will allow banks to take money from depositors and pensioners globally. Brown explains, “It became rules we agreed to actually implement. There was no treaty, and Congress didn’t agree to all this. They use words so that it’s not obvious to tell what they have done, but what they did was say, basically, that we, the governments, are no longer going to be responsible for bailing out the big banks. ...
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http://usawatchdog.com/big-banks-will-take-depositors-money-in-next-crash-ellen-brown/

... The G20 announcement in Brisbane on November 16th will formalize a "bail in" for large-scale depositors raising the spectre that their deposits are, as many were in 1932, worth less than banknotes. It will be very clear that the value of bank deposits can fall in nominal terms.

On Sunday in Brisbane the G20 will announce that bank deposits are just part of commercial banks’ capital structure, and also that they are far from the most senior portion of that structure. With deposits then subjected to a decline in nominal value following a bank failure, it is self-evident that a bank deposit is no longer money in the way a banknote is. If a banknote cannot be subjected to a decline in nominal value, we need to ask whether banknotes can act as a superior store of value than bank deposits? If that is the case, will some investors prefer banknotes to bank deposits as a form of savings? Such a change in preference is known as a "bank run."

Each country will introduce its own legislation to effect the ‘ bail-in’ agreed by the G20 this coming weekend. ...
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-12/russell-napier-declares-november-16-2014-day-money-dies

I missed this news when it happened a few weeks ago, but it's important enough to document.
 
I think that is complete bullshit. Bond holders must take losses first. Period. If this does come to pass, I will remove my money from the bank each week and keep it somewhere else, but not in a fucking bank. They could use nearly any method of accounting on any given day to show they are insolvent, proceed to strip mine all depositors accounts, then distribute worthless equity shares to depositors. The shares would almost certainly be subordinated against all other bank shares and equity.

I'm not sure how exactly this is supposed to engender any feelings of security with our financial system. Rather than hold banks accountable for their actions and treat them as you would any other mom and pop that is insolvent, they want to let them steal our deposits to cover their bad decisions. What a total load of horse shit.
 
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Bail-in legislation is still in place across Europe. The European Commission recently threatened to take legal action against those nations who had not yet ratified the BRRD and gave them just two months (until the end of July) to adopt the new EU bail-ins rules. The BRRD purports to protect taxpayers from the need to bail out banks but appears to be again favouring the interests of large banks over those of prudent savers and indeed small and medium size enterprises who could have their savings confiscated.

Under the legislation, government guarantees on bank deposits – usually up to a value of €100,000 – are being quietly disposed of. In their place will be a type of insurance fund paid into by the banks which will be woefully inadequate.
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http://www.goldcore.com/us/gold-blog/bail-ins-at-bad-bank-unconstitutional-says-austrian-court/
 
Bank bail ins in the EU are here after Austria’s financial markets regulator FMA imposed a hefty haircut on creditors in an Austrian bank. Creditors in the bank Heta Asset Resolution will receive less than half of their money back according to the country’s financial regulator, the FMA.

Senior bondholders in the so called “bad bank” could expect to receive around €0.46 for each euro which would be paid from the realisation of assets by 2020, according to the FMA statement. It said that this had been calculated using “very conservative” assumptions.
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Heta Asset Resolution was formed to wind down the bank but regulators froze Heta’s debt repayments after discovering a gaping capital hole at the bad bank.

Heta’s bail-ins pertain to bond holders but it is important to note that recently introduced EU and international bail-in regulation mean that depositors in banks are now exposed to having their deposits bailed in.
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http://www.goldcore.com/us/gold-blog/bank-bail-ins-begin-as-eu-bank-bailed-in-in-austria/
 
Just browsing through all the financial news this morning and my goodness trepidation is permeating the ether. Bonds, equities, Euro banks all (potentially) signalling trouble. Ever since 2008, we have been talking about the proverbial can being kicked down the road and the inevitability of the day when it can't be kicked any further. Is the big one - the systemic crisis that can't be stopped - coming?
 
Ive been anticipating it since Y2k .........

Part of me says bring it on and lets get to the other side as quickly as we can, another part of me ponders the inevitable suffering with food and fuel shortages and if the price will be too high ?
 
It's true. There are no safe banks, that is why it is better to invest in precious metals, they are money in themselves
 
Bail in legislation now in effect in Canada:
On September 23, the Bank Recapitalization (Bail-in) Conversion Regulations under the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation Act, the Bank Recapitalization (Bail-in) Issuance Regulations under the Bank Act (collectively the Bail-In Regulations) and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institution's Total Loss Absorbing Capacity (TLAC) Guideline will come into effect. These represent the final step in the implementation of the bail-in regime that will allow for the expedient conversion of certain bank liabilities into regulatory capital in the highly unlikely event that a domestic systemically important bank (D-SIB) becomes non-viable. ...
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More: http://www.mondaq.com/canada/x/736932/Financial+Services/BailIn+Implementation+Update
 
Australia passed their bail in legislation back in February:
Few would know that very quietly on 14 February 2018, with just 7 senators present, the Financial Sector Legislation Amendment (Crisis Resolution Powers And Other Measures) Bill 2017 was passed into law on a voice vote. You likely saw no press on the matter and yet the ramifications for all Australians are potentially huge.

This is a very long and complicated piece of legislation but at its very core it brings Australia into line with the ‘Bail In’ agenda of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) as agreed at the G20 here in Brisbane in 2014. ‘Bail In’ is about government not bailing out distressed institutions as we saw in the GFC using tax payer’s money, rather using the creditors of the bank to bail itself out.

The legislation allows our banking regulator APRA ‘crisis powers’ to secretly step in and run distressed banks. It allows APRA to then confiscate and write off certain types of bonds and hybrid securities and allows them to confiscate cash savings of SMSF’s. Whereas elsewhere around the world, including our neighbours New Zealand, they specifically include the confiscation of depositors’ funds (savings), the Aussie version just cleverly doesn’t specifically exclude that….
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More: https://www.ainsliebullion.com.au/g...s-your-cash-now-/tabid/88/a/1722/default.aspx
 
While I like getting rid of the "too big to fail" mindset & the idea of not using taxpayer money to bail out businesses that are grossly mismanaged, giving them free rein to steal depositors/investors (who are usually taxpayers & paying taxes on interest/gains) money is not much better, maybe even worse. I've never kept much money in banks & never will. I think this coupled with things like what went on in Cyprus & Greece a few years ago should show people not to keep much money in their bank.
 
That's horrible. According to one news report of the incident I found, the crux of the issue stems from a restriction on withdrawals of foreign currency imposed back in 2019. I guess she didn't want to convert her foreign savings to local currency and withdraw? I couldn't find more details to fully understand the situation.
 
I hide my stash in the mud wall.
 
A bank can legally confiscate its clients' money in the event it needs to stay afloat, and most retail investors are not aware of this, said Lynette Zang, Chief Marketing Analyst at ITM Trading, who stressed that such legislation is already codified in the Dodd-Frank Act.

Zang, who has decades of experience in the financial sector and worked as an investment banker at Larson Lehman/American Express, said that these bail-ins could be part of a bigger systemic monetary reset.
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Countries around the world are poised to adopt Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), programmable forms of fiat money which allow central banks to track, trace, and even freeze a person's funds. This, along with de-dollarization and the digitization of hard assets, will be part of The Great Reset, according to Lynette Zang, Chief Market Strategist at ITM Trading.

"The World Economic Forum says… you will have nothing and be happy," she explained. "Well, you may have nothing, but I'm pretty sure you won't be happy because wealth never disappears. It merely shifts location. So, if you don't own it, somebody else owns it, and as we all know, then you're renting everything."

The Great Reset is a World Economic Forum proposal which suggests that "stakeholders," such as big corporations, governments, and international NGOs, control and manage all wealth in order to mitigate alleged threats such as climate change.

Zang thinks bail-ins, CBDCs, and The Great Reset are all related and elaborates on how investors can protect against this. ...
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Video at link:

www.kitco.com

Your bank can legally confiscate your money, it is 'too late' to stop The Great Reset & CBDCs - Lynette Zang

www.kitco.com
 
I guess I missed this news a while back...

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The FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee (SRAC) held a meeting in November to discuss how the next market crash would occur and what steps would need to be taken to ensure not everybody tries pulling their money out of the financial system at the same time.

“You’ve got to think of the unintended consequences of taking a public that has more full faith and confidence in the banking system than maybe the people in this room do,” one FDIC member noted.
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“We want them to have the full faith and confidence in the banking system. They know FDIC insurance is there. They know what works. They put their money in, they’re going to get their money out.”

He claimed that although institutions will soon be able to figure out the dire implications of what’s being discussed at the meeting, the general public should not, because that would lead to “unintended consequences.”

“I would be careful about the unintended consequences of starting to blast too much of this out in the general public,” he said.

In a fitting description of fractional reserve banking, another SRAC member lamented that although institutions don’t want to see a “huge run” on their deposits, they likely will soon, which will bring about the need to impose bail-ins.

“People need to understand they can get bailed in, but you don’t want a huge run on the institutions. But there are going to be. And it could be an early warning signal to the FDIC and primary regulators when these things happen,” he said.
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One FDIC member claimed this economic “period of peacetime” will soon “flip faster than we saw in 2008.”

“I do think it’s hard to get a lot of demand for transparency right now, in this sort of period of peacetime, but that is going to flip and it’s going to flip faster than we saw in 2008,” he said.

Because of that, he said, it’s necessary for financial institutions to quickly leverage “the social media world” with curated talking points to combat “disinformation” and “avoid rumors taking over the narrative.”
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Watch the full FDIC meeting:
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yournews.com

Must Watch: FDIC Bankers Discuss ‘Bail-Ins’ To Deal With Impending Market Collapse

November 2022 meeting shows financial regulators plot how to hide alarming market signals from depositors to prevent a bank-run panic.
yournews.com yournews.com

 
Pretty simplified explanation. Most of you probably already know this stuff.

Can Banks Just Take Your Money (The Answer Is It Depends) | Bank Bail In vs Bail Out 2023​

Mar 3, 2023


10:29

1. What's the difference between a bank bail in vs bail out
2. How to protect your money if a bail-in does happen (because it's easier to do this than you might think)
3. What role the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) plays in this context
4. What happened in the last bail-in

I'll also talk briefly about the AIG bail out, the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 & the Cyprus bank bail in of 2013.

SOURCES: https://home.treasury.gov/data/troubl...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-c...
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/...
https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposi...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cy...
 
As interest rates have risen, many banks have become more profitable because the spreads between what they earn on loans and investments and what they pay for funding has widened. But there are always exceptions.

Below is a screen of banks that are bucking the industry trend of expanding net interest margins, followed by another list of banks whose margins have widened the most over the past year.
...
So now the question is which other banks might face pressure because their net interest margins have contracted, or because their margins have only expanded slighlty?

Starting with a list of U.S. banks with total assets of at least $10 billion, and removing purer investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS, -4.22% and Morgan Stanley MS, -2.33%, we looked at 108 banks.

A uniform set of net interest margins for the past five quarters isn’t available from FactSet for the full group — it is only available for 56 of the banks. So instead, we screened for net interest income (total interest income less total interest expense) divided by average total assets.

By this screen, 102 of 108 banks showed expanding margins for the fourth quarter from a year earlier.

Here are the 10 showing contracting margins over the past year, or the smallest expansions of margins:

Customers Bancorp Inc. CUBI
First Republic Bank FRC
Sandy Spring Bancorp Inc. SASR
New York Community Bancorp Inc. NYCB
First Foundation Inc. FFWM
Ally Financial Inc. ALLY
Dime Community Bancshares Inc. DCOM
Pacific Premier Bancorp Inc. PPBI
Prosperity Bancshares Inc. PB
Columbia Financial Inc. CLBK
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www.marketwatch.com

10 banks that may face trouble in the wake of the SVB Financial Group debacle

Silicon Valley Bank wasn't well positioned for rising interest rates. Other banks show similar red flags.
www.marketwatch.com www.marketwatch.com

^ Click link to see the list of banks in a chart form with full data
 
Some FDIC stuff I came across on another site.

Quarterly Banking Profile

FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile | FDIC.gov

www.fdic.gov www.fdic.gov

Historical Designated Reserve Ratio
www.fdic.gov

FDIC: Deposit Insurance - Historical Designated Reserve Ratio

FDIC: Deposit Insurance - Fund
www.fdic.gov www.fdic.gov

Crisis & Response: FDIC History 2008 - 2013

As a side note, I don't think we're heading into a Bankageddon but we do need a strong financial watchdog organization. The CFPB is under attack. Who or what should be responsible to keep banks and other financial institutions in check?

thenationaltriallawyers.org

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Under Legal Attack Today

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit hears arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of the law that established the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created in the wake of the 2008 financial crash to protect Main Street consumers against Wall Street...
thenationaltriallawyers.org
 
Follow up to post 106:
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Below that is a screen of U.S. banks with at least $10 billion in total assets, showing those that appeared to have the greatest exposure to unrealized securities losses, as a percentage of total capital, as of Dec. 31.
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On the regulatory call reports, AOCI is added to regulatory capital. Since SVB’s AOCI was negative (because of its unrealized losses on AFS securities) as of Dec. 31, it lowered the company’s total equity capital. So a fair way to gauge the negative AOCI to the bank’s total equity capital would be to divide the negative AOCI by total equity capital less AOCI — effectively adding the unrealized losses back to total equity capital for the calculation.

Getting back to our list of 10 banks that raised similar red margin flags to those of SVB, here’s the same group, in the same order, showing negative AOCI as a percentage of total equity capital as of Dec. 31. We have added SVB to the bottom of the list. The data was provided by FactSet:
BankTickerCityAOCI ($mil)Total equity capital ($mil)AOCI/ TEC – AOCITotal assets ($mil)
Customers Bancorp Inc. CUBI, -13.11% West Reading, Pa. -$163 $1,403-10.4%$20,896
First Republic BankFRC, -14.84%San Francisco -$331 $17,446 -1.9% $213,358
Sandy Spring Bancorp Inc. SASR, -2.91% Olney, Md. -$132 $1,484 -8.2% $13,833
New York Community Bancorp Inc. NYCB, -5.99% Hicksville, N.Y. -$620 $8,824 -6.6% $90,616
First Foundation Inc. FFWM, -9.11% Dallas -$12 $1,134 -1.0% $13,014
Ally Financial Inc. ALLY, -5.70% Detroit -$4,059 $12,859 -24.0% $191,826
Dime Community Bancshares Inc. DCOM, -2.81% Hauppauge, N.Y. -$94 $1,170 -7.5% $13,228
Pacific Premier Bancorp Inc. PPBI, -1.95% Irvine, Calif. -$265 $2,798 -8.7% $21,729
Prosperity Bancshare Inc. PB, -4.46% Houston -$3 $6,699 -0.1% $37,751
Columbia Financial, Inc. CLBK, -1.78% Fair Lawn, N.J. -$179 $1,054 -14.5% $10,408
SVB Financial Group SIVB, -60.41% Santa Clara, Calif. -$1,911 $16,295 -10.5% $211,793
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<SLV> said:
Wow. Consider this... depositors are considered "creditors" by the bank.
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Yep, always have been. When you deposit money, you are making a loan to the bank. Ie: you become a creditor to the bank.
 
Joe King said:
Yep, always have been. When you deposit money, you are making a loan to the bank. Ie: you become a creditor to the bank.
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Which makes you wonder...why deposit $500,000 in a bank account, instead of just buying that much of the bank's STOCK?
 
It's too early for me to get into the weeds here, and look for sooper-sekrut body cues...

...but I'm guessing the point is, this was deliberate.

No DOUBT, IMHO. The system as it was/is, is unsustainable. It WOULD crash; but WHEN, has a lot to do with what the Masterminds do. Like, say, blow it up.

That's been Tom Luongo's assertion - since the Grate Reset failed, and Davos Man unmasked...rather than just fail, the Oligarch Club is going to take everything down in flames WITH them.
 
Casey Jones said:
...but I'm guessing the point is, this was deliberate.
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From what I've been reading across many disparate crannies, it looks to me like:

1) SVB wasn't really operating too differently with respect to their asset management from what many regional banks do.
2) SVB was attempting to shore up their balance sheet in a responsible manner, but had piss poor timing and zero "read the room" awareness regarding the Silvergate troubles
3) Peter Thiel et al sparked a bank run

SVB would have likely been survived point 2 if not for point 3. The bank run was the dagger to the heart. Were the actors who sparked the bank run acting in bad faith (wanting SVB to fail or wanting to capitalize on short selling positions) or good faith (wanting to protect SVB customers from potential SVB/Silvergate contagion)? That's something that internet keyboard warriors aren't likely to suss out with any degree of certainty.

I expect that Peter Thiel et al are going to have some conversations with govco investigators. This drama is far from it's denouement IMO.
 
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pmbug said:
From what I've been reading across many disparate crannies, it looks to me like:

1) SVB wasn't really operating too differently with respect to their asset management from what many regional banks do.
2) SVB was attempting to shore up their balance sheet in a responsible manner, but had piss poor timing and zero "read the room" awareness regarding the Silvergate troubles
3) Peter Thiel et al sparked a bank run

SVB would have likely been survived point 2 if not for point 3. The bank run was the dagger to the heart. Were the actors who sparked the bank run acting in bad faith (wanting SVB to fail or wanting to capitalize on short selling positions) or good faith (wanting to protect SVB customers from potential SVB/Silvergate contagion)? That's something that internet keyboard warriors aren't likely to suss out with any degree of certainty.

I'm expect that Peter Thiel et al are going to have some conversations with govco investigators. This drama is far from it's denouement IMO.
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It was the various vulture-capital firms that started the run.

They were overexposed. They'd parked the bulk of their operating capital in uninsured accounts/structures in this one bank.

There were rumors of stress, due to the factors mentioned. The CEO, stupidly, started calling large depositors, to assure them.

Sure. When someone important takes time to tell people there's no problem...that's a dead giveaway there's a BIG problem.

So, from Thursday, the big players started pulling their money out. Many large cashier's checks were ordered and executed.

The run was on.
 
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