The stress tests appear to be boiling down to one critical measurement of bank capital, Tangible Common Equity (TCE). While the assets themselves may be tangible, the intangible result could be a tectonic shift to a politicized banking system. To avoid any confusion it is probably best that I define my terms at the outset:
1. Tangible Common Equity (TCE) equals
book value minus
intangible assets,
goodwill, and
preferred equity. Essentially this is the most conservative measure of bank capital and represents what common shareholders would have left if a bank were liquidated.
2. Tangible Book Value (TBV) equals
book value minus
intangible assets and
goodwill. This measure would include preferred shares held by the government and private investors and gives a broad view of…
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Through coercion and fiat His Royal Highness (HRH) Obama has forced the senior-secured lenders to take a secondary position to unsecured lenders in the "pre-packaged" Chrysler-FIAT bankruptcy plan. President Obama characterized the 20 or so lenders who were opposed to the plan as "a small group of speculators". His left wing "nut job" ally Representative Dingell characterized them as "vultures" and warned that they "will be dealt with in court". Their crime one can only assume is being moneylenders, but they are not the ones on trial.
Until this week senior secured lenders, those that held a contract that gave them first lien on a companies assets, had a preferential position in any bankruptcy proceeding unless of course they "voluntarily" give up that right. HRH Obama has by simple royal fiat…
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AIG paid $165 million in
bonuses, but angry lawmakers and administration officials insisted the money belonged to taxpayers and vowed to get it back. The clamor over compensation overshadowed AIG's weekend disclosure that it used more than $90 billion in federal aid to pay out to foreign and domestic banks, including some that had multibillion-dollar U.S. government bailouts of their own. The counterparty list is a veritable who's who of the world's top financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs (
GS), Bank of America (
BAC), British bank Barclays (
BCS) and Germany's Deutsche Bank (
DB). The question arises - Why did the United States Government insist on honoring these legally questionable obligations?
At the heart of this transfer of billions of taxpayer dollars to the world's leading financial institutions…
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