I am certainly no financial wizard, but this scares me

Are we headed for "too big to fail" banks to require another bail-out?  The Eurozone allows banks to keep too little cash in reserve.  

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/the-unraveler/basel-III-bank-regulations-davos

Just a snippet...

Quote :

That’s where the Basel Committee on Banking Regulation, a global club of central banks that attempts to coordinate policy across international markets, threw in the towel Jan. 12 on one of the most widely promised reforms of the post-Lehman Brothers era: forcing the biggest banks to keep more cash on hand in case of crisis.

The much-ballyhooed reform package, known as Basel III, was to raise the amount of cash or liquid assets any bank was required to hold in reserve. The pre-2008 ratio — 3 percent cash to debt — was widely regarded as insufficient and led to risky behavior by banks that always assumed national governments would bail them out.

But instead of raising the bar, the world’s most important bank regulating body after the Federal Reserve in Washington actually loosened the requirements. It chose to hold banks’ ratio of cash to loans at the paltry 3 percent rate, and to endorse accounting tricks that will allow banks to hide just how much outstanding debt they are really carrying.

It’s a victory for bank lobbyists, a sellout by politicians who vowed “never again,” and a blow to the world’s taxpayers whose money will now remain hostage to the riskiest kind of casino capitalism...

...Consider this: Just five days before it went down in flames, Lehman Brothers boasted that it had an 11 percent reserve ratio. But that was only on paper. In retrospect, banking regulators realized that the exotic financial vehicles that became popular in the run-up to the crisis — mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and many others — were listed as assets on bank balance sheets when they actually were the worst kind of debts.

Eric wrote:

Are we headed for "too big to fail" banks to require another bail-out?  The Eurozone allows banks to keep too little cash in reserve.  

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/the-unraveler/basel-III-bank-regulations-davos

Just a snippet...

Quote :

That’s where the Basel Committee on Banking Regulation, a global club of central banks that attempts to coordinate policy across international markets, threw in the towel Jan. 12 on one of the most widely promised reforms of the post-Lehman Brothers era: forcing the biggest banks to keep more cash on hand in case of crisis.

The much-ballyhooed reform package, known as Basel III, was to raise the amount of cash or liquid assets any bank was required to hold in reserve. The pre-2008 ratio — 3 percent cash to debt — was widely regarded as insufficient and led to risky behavior by banks that always assumed national governments would bail them out.

But instead of raising the bar, the world’s most important bank regulating body after the Federal Reserve in Washington actually loosened the requirements. It chose to hold banks’ ratio of cash to loans at the paltry 3 percent rate, and to endorse accounting tricks that will allow banks to hide just how much outstanding debt they are really carrying.

It’s a victory for bank lobbyists, a sellout by politicians who vowed “never again,” and a blow to the world’s taxpayers whose money will now remain hostage to the riskiest kind of casino capitalism...

...Consider this: Just five days before it went down in flames, Lehman Brothers boasted that it had an 11 percent reserve ratio. But that was only on paper. In retrospect, banking regulators realized that the exotic financial vehicles that became popular in the run-up to the crisis — mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and many others — were listed as assets on bank balance sheets when they actually were the worst kind of debts.

Banks again!...Citizens go bankrupt the big guys get more money to waste.. along with insurance companies because of [name] cowh healthcare..So the horrible health plans of insurance companies (according to the administration)...are so bad that they need to be bailed out by the government that's trying to take over healthcare with better healthcare coverage?...

Keep no money in a bank...move it to a credit union, starve the banks and protect your deposits.

TEOTWAWKI wrote:

Keep no money in a bank...move it to a credit union, starve the banks and protect your deposits.

I agree. Credit unions are the only way to go.

Agree. I haven't had a bank account in years.

I agree. Only in a credit union.

Outside of getting his towel hung up and making some attempt to pick up his clothes, my teenage son is allowed to get by on the condition of his room during the week because he's taking AP courses, working on his Eagle project, etc. The deal is on Friday afternoon, he has to not just straighten it but clean it to have his freedom through the weekend. The last couple of weeks, because I have been swamped, he has told me is room was clean and I only gave it a cursory inspection. Of course, he was jamming his stuff into every nook and cranny…under the bed….in the closet. Every time I would ask, "Is it REALLY clean?" He would reply, "Gee, yes, Mom, of course it is!" Finally it caught up with him when it looked ok, he had finally lost his phone in his stuffing/cleaning black hole and I decided to look for it.

Only you guys who have been teenagers can imagine the horrors of what I found - half eaten bowls of food, cores of apples, mildewing towels... So, he lost his weekend and spent it cleaning with my coming through every few hours, checking it over and going through the expected dance of his playing victim over having the meanest mother on the planet in time with my preaching and fussing. I too lost any chance of doing anything the entire weekend  and even cancelled planned fun activities... but when Sunday rolled around, he presented in a clean room. For now, he is back on track and my oversight has stepped up. In time, he will become lax, I will become busy and the whole process will start over again.

The problem is that the spoiled brats who are in political office, work for lobbies or are entrenched in the banking industry never learned to keep up with their own messes and only act when it's about to implode. Either they had lousy mothers to start with or are too weak and immature to do the right thing without being mommied. We need oversight from the general population…people ready to parent the banks and hand them a trash can and a vacuum, and then keep it up down the line.

It's time we looked under the bed and inside the closet…no matter how much it hurts.

LOL- that's a pretty nasty bed there. I'm convinced the cleanliness is something you're either born with or not. I treated all my kids the same but one of them is nearly 40 now and still maintains a house that you absolutely couldn't invite friends into without 3 days notice. The other kids (adults really) are neat freaks with spotless homes no matter if they're expecting company or not. They were neat freaks when they were teenagers too.
I never could figure out why they were so different.

I stopped thinking I did something wrong with the sloppy one.

The interesting thing is that the room, like the economy, looked fine on first blush. When I started looking around for the phone, I simply took every item I found stuffed somewhere and put it on the bed. I have found this to be a pretty good strategy.

I wonder what muck we would find if we started looking into the banking system and how high that pile would turn out to be? My guess is that there are some pretty smelly socks in there somewhere.