Are 100 banks going to fail in the US this year?
 

We're already up to 58 as the FDIC shuts down Waterford Village Bank of Clarence, N.Y.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wat...24?siteid=bnbh

it should :D

getting close! Every Friday or Thursday, if we have a Holiday!

It is possible. It looks like some of the bigger banks are buying up the smaller banks so that might throw the number off. Also, had Chase not bought Washington Mutual the would have gone under. While that is only technically one bank they have thousands of branches and millions of customers.

Banner day for bank closures. Was 58 now 64!

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/six...24?siteid=bnbh

Yes, absolutely!

The smaller mom and pop type banks are being forced out of business by design. Notice how all the large corporate "too big to fail" banks are posting profits now, and are "ready to repay their government loans" all the while the little guys keep falling off..

hmm..

Ultimately this is a good thing. Get the bad banks out of the system and let the good ones take their place.

If we were letting the bad banks go we would have let Bank of America, et al fail.

The little mom and pop types banks that didn't allow themselves to get into the sub-prime mortgage game are doing just fine. I bank at a small credit union that never issued even one sub-prime mortgage and they are doing better than ever. The problem with the little mom and pop banks is that many of them tried to jump into the sub-prime game and got burned and unlike the big banks they don't have a lot of assets or credit lines or big powerful friends to fall back on.

But in a sense you are right. The big companies are buying up all the small companies in every market, not just banking. When I was a kid the town I grew up in had 2 doctors offices with 2-3 docs in each. They were a small town privately owned thing. There were also two pharmacies in town and they were owned locally as well. Now the town has grown and there is another pharmacy and another doctor's office, but all of them are now owned by big chains. Near me a local Chinese food place just closed down then re-opened a few months later as happy panda ( a Chinese fast food chain.) The town I grew up in also had 4-5 little convenience stores that also sold gas. I worked at one of them when I was in high school. They used to all be independently owned and now every one of them is owned by a major chain. It is kind of sad to see the big companies taking over everything in the country and making it one big generic strip mall.

In a perfect world you are correct. Sadly, when it comes to nationwide economics there is no clear cut right and wrong. Bank of America is huge and if it had failed it could have brought with it tons of other banks and cost a lot of people their jobs. Maybe it would have quickly been replaced by another bank and the damage would have been very small, but maybe it would have set off a chain of events that drove us further into the ground.

So 4 PM PDT and we're sitting on 6, can we roll to 11 with a big push from the West Coast?


from the comments :1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

That is great and we should find out just after 5PM which is in 15 mins.

Yes, in theory that's the way capitalism "should" work, but that's exactly the opposite of what happened. The "bad banks" are being propped up with billions in government loans while the smaller banks get no such treatment. :disgust

Regardless of size, I think that ANY and ALL banks that are no longer competitive, or that involve themselves in highly risky behavior should be permitted to fail. When that is allowed to happen, it purges the poor performers from the market so that leaner, better run banks can emerge. Yes, jobs are lost, but I think it's better to quickly cut the losers free than it is to continue with the misguided idea that propping them up and delaying the inevitable will somehow be better. :2 cents:

In almost every case I would fully agree with this. However, with this case the widespread use of sub-primes and bad derivatives (so called toxic assets) was so widespread that if they let every bank that fell victim to them crash and burn it could easily start the house of cards failing and could lead us into a depression.

Of course there is no guarantee that we won't eventually end up there anyway and all these bailouts and stimulus stuff is just prolonging the inevitable, but I think this particular case the bailouts were meant to help us avoid a full on collapse of the economy.

Right now a few good banks are getting screwed because they didn't get help, didn't do anything stupid and are having trouble surviving. If we let all the big banks fail, most of those little banks would follow suit and crash right behind them.

..hehe, I'm not sure that banks "fell victim" to toxic assets. ;-)

Exactly. If this hadn't be allowed to go so far, and for so long, we wouldn't be mere inches away from a full on collapse of the economy.

I agree that the small players are being screwed, but the thing is.. if the Federal Reserve was not so corrupt, and in bed with the Big Banks & Wall Street, the smaller players would have not had to resort to being sucked in to compete with the Big Banks. The smaller banks would not have touched sub-prime lending, and could have grown in a more healthy natural way. The Big Banks could have been left to fail instead of being constantly infused with cash.

For sure they were victims of their own greed.


I recently read an article on Bill Clinton and he was saying the one thing he wished he had done was to put some kind of regulation on derivatives. He said he let Greenspan talk him into not doing anything because he didn't think they would make up much of the market and in the end they were a huge player and a huge cause of the downfall.

Small banks can still survive in a natural and healthy way for sure without ever touching the sub-prime market. I think a lot of them saw the record profits that the bigger banks were making wit those and the temptation was just too much for them. You are 100% correct when you say that the big banks & wall street are in bed with the very corrupt Fed and those relationships helped them cover their troubles for a lot longer than they should have.