Health of U.S. Banks

[lib2DaBone]

[liberalmuse]

1. Holy crap!

It's time to start stuffing money in the mattress.

[MannyGoldstein]

2. Looks Pretty Ugly

Surprising that it looks to be uncorrelated with recessions.

[Warpy]

3. This reflects the crash last August

when banks started to look a little more closely at high yield bonds, structured investment vehicles, and other high return "investments" they'd been swapping around for years. They discovered-oh no!- that most of them represented bad real estate loans snipped into pieces and laundered into investments by offshore hedge funds.

They're a lot poorer than they thought they were, in other words, and they're scrambling to avoid insolvency. Some will, some won't and be gobbled up by other institutions.