Crash Survival Zone

Government stress tests are expected to show that nearly a dozen of the nation’s largest banks do not have enough money to survive if the economy worsens and will need to raise billions of dollars as a precaution.

Findings of the government’s long-awaited tests of 19 banks leaked out Wednesday, a day ahead of an official [...]

by Gary Dorsch

An eight week long upturn in European, Japanese, US and emerging stock markets since March 10th has sparked a wave of optimistic commentaries in the financial media that the worst bear market since the 1930’s has finally come to a merciful end, and the rocky road to recovery lies ahead. Since hitting a [...]

History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But when it’s your farce, sometimes it’s hard to appreciate the humor.

We’ve railed about the stress tests since they were announced, but the chicanery, starting with the March 10 Citi and Bank of America pronouncements that they had had a decent couple [...]

A Texas bank is about done demolishing 16 new and partially built houses acquired in Southern California through foreclosure, figuring it was better to knock them down than to try selling them in the depressed housing market.

Guaranty Bank of Austin is wrecking the structures to provide a “safe environment” for neighbors of the abandoned housing [...]

University of Oregon economics professor and Economist’s View blogger Mark Thoma filed this guest post.

More than a year ago, I called for the Federal Reserve to begin aggressively removing toxic assets from the balance sheets of troubled banks in order to minimize the fallout from the collapse of the mortgage market. Shortly after that, the [...]

New loans may be profitable, given how cheaply banks can borrow today. But many banks are still worrying about whether they’ll get paid back on old loans.

The latest Federal Reserve survey of senior loan officers finds very few shoots of green in that garden. The Fed asked senior loan officers: What is your bank’s outlook [...]

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman Warren Buffett dismissed the importance of government stress tests in helping him assess banks, and said Wells Fargo & Co. will prosper no matter what the results show.

“I think I know their future, frankly, better than somebody that comes in to take a look,” Buffett today said of the bank stocks [...]

A culture of easy reward encouraged British bankers to make an “astonishing mess of the financial system” and regulators need to consider whether banks should be broken up, British politicians said on Friday.

“The culture within parts of British banking has increasingly been one of risk-taking leading to the meltdown that we have witnessed,” a cross-party [...]

At its core, the financial crisis is about uncertainty; who’s holding what, how much it’s worth, when it will blow up.

If you take the headlines at face value, it has been a good month for banks. Wells Fargo announced $3 billion in first-quarter profits, Goldman Sachs racked up $1.8 billion, JPMorgan Chase had $2.1 billion, [...]