Free Republic

Germany's financial regulator has said it won't take further action against the country's largest bank over alleged interest rate rigging and precious metals price fixing. The moves takes the spotlight off a former boss. The watchdog, known as Bafin, announced on Thursday it had ended several major special audits against Deutsche Bank. [...] Deutsche Bank paid $2.5 billion (2.26 billion euros) in fines in April last year after investigations on manipulating interest rates. The bank was also probed for its role in rigging prices of gold, silver, platinum and palladium. It also recorded a multibillion-euro loss for 2015. Bafin officials...

Big banks are cringing as crude oil is crumbling. Firms on Wall Street helped bankroll America's energy boom, financing very expensive drilling projects that ended up flooding the world with oil. Now that the oil glut has caused prices to crash below $30 a barrel, turmoil is rippling through the energy industry and souring many of those loans. Dozens of oil companies have gone bankrupt and the ones that haven't are feeling enough financial stress to slash spending and cut tens of thousands of jobs. Three of America's biggest banks warned last week that oil prices will continue to create...

J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is focused on building a so-called fortress balance sheet at his behemoth bank. To that end, he said the bank JPM, +0.04% has added around $500 million to its reserves against loans losses in the oil-and-gas sector in the first quarter of 2016. The move comes as crude-oil prices have fallen about 12% so far this year and have plunged 34% over the past 12 months, putting the finances of energy companies under pressure. Offering details about its balance sheet at an event for investors in New York on Tuesday, the sprawling bank said...

Ever since the financial crisis, many outside the wealthy elite (sometimes referred to as populists) have argued that the largest banks are too big and too risky. Minneapolis Federal Reserve president Neel Kashkari recently echoed those beliefs.Yet if a new Federal Reserve proposal goes through, Wells Fargo and other large banks might get even bigger and riskier, adding billions to their balance sheets that could increase the banks’ risk profiles.The Federal Reserve says the proposal, which specifies the amount and kind of debt that systemically important large banks must hold, could help make sure that those banks can be wound...

When it comes to residential mortgages, big banks are waving the white flag. Banks originated 74% of all mortgages in 2007, but their share fell to 52% in 2014, the most recent data available from the Mortgage Bankers Association. And it could go even lower. But even at these levels, the big bank backtrack is reshaping a lending landscape that’s already undergone seismic shifts since the housing bubble burst. While there’s widespread agreement that banks should have been reined in — and perhaps punished — after playing a major role in the housing bubble that helped tank the economy, the...

Shares in some of the world's biggest banks are plunging. Financial stocks in the S&P 500 are down more than 11% so far this year. That's worse than oil, energy stocks, and even the emerging markets index. European banks have fallen even further. Deutsche Bank (DB) has lost 31% so far this year, Unicredit (UNCFF) is down 35%, and Credit Suisse (CSGKF) is 30% down. Barclays (BCLYF), BNP Paribas (BNPQF), Societe General (SCGLF), and UBS (UBS) have all lost about 20% since the beginning of 2016. Bank earnings have generally been disappointing. Credit Suisse shares hit a 24-year low after...

Movie sequels are rarely as good as the original films on which they're based. The same dictum, it appears, holds for finance. The 2008 housing market collapse was bad enough, but it appears now that we're on the verge of experiencing it all again. And the financial sequel, working from a similar script as its original version, could prove to be just as devastating to the American taxpayer. The Federal National Mortgage Association (commonly referred to as Fannie Mae) plans a mortgage loan reboot, which could produce the same insane and predictable results as when the mortgage agency loaned so...

Billionaire businessman Maurice "Hank" Greenberg backed away from an alleged $10 million contribution he was said to have made to a PAC affiliated with the presidential campaign of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

In 2016, the Federal Reserve will pay at least $12.2 billion to U.S. and foreign banks to keep the money created via its quantitative easing programs out of the economy. If the Fed raises rates as expected next year, the amount nearly doubles to $23.1 billion. From 2008 to 2015, the Fed purchased over $4 trillion worth of bonds to stimulate growth in the economy. Risk markets responded, as is demonstrated by the close correlation between the S&P 500 and growth of the Fed's balance sheet through its bond purchases.

In an op-ed published in the Financial Times, John Reed says large banks like the one he used to run are now "inherently unstable and unworkable." The man who was one of the chief architects of the "Big Bank" model now says says the United States never should have repealed the Glass-Steagall banking act in 1999. That's exactly what Democratic presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley have been arguing on the campaign trail. They want the law reinstated. Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidates do not. As CEO of Citi from 1984 to 2000, Reed was one of the...

Presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz at the fourth GOP debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 10, 2015. MILWAUKEE — A rare debate flub by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz Tuesday night sparked a boomlet of social media jokes about Texas presidential candidates, but the White House hopeful's most notable moment came when discussing how he would handle a banking crisis as the country's chief executive. Asked toward the end of the fourth GOP presidential debate about the banking crisis of 2008, and the notion of the government treating some banks as "too big to fail," Cruz said he would...

Big banks better start looking under the couch cushions. They need to come up with $1.2 trillion to fortify themselves from the next financial meltdown. Global financial regulators Monday issued new rules that are designed to prevent a failing big bank from dragging down the entire financial system. That's what happened in 2008 when Lehman Brothers imploded, sparking the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. ... Wells Fargo (WFC) and JPMorgan are the U.S. banks most vulnerable to the new G20 rules, Morningstar's Baker said. He estimates Wells Fargo may need to raise up to $30 billion, while JPMorgan...

Deutsche Bank, the giant German bank that has a big presence on Wall Street and is facing much regulatory scrutiny in the United States, on Wednesday warned that it expects to post a hefty loss in the third quarter. The bank, Germany’s largest, forecast a net loss of 6.2 billion euros, or nearly $7 billion, for the quarter. It comes just months into the tenure of Deutsche Bank’s new co-chief executive, John Cryan, who is trying to overhaul the institution. Along with the scandal and upheaval at Volkswagen, Deutsche’s struggles point to some of the weaknesses of Germany’s corporate culture....

“It’s ending purposeless, perpetual, global warfare, stupid.” Republican presidential contenders for 2016 should embrace that campaign theme to demolish the ultra-hawkish Hillary Clinton and her Napoleonic complex. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign theme, “It’s the economy, stupid,” is obsolete. Presidential strategists sermonize that voters are instinctively concerned more about jobs, mortgages, and health care than about national security policy. True enough. But that is because presidential aspirants have failed to discern and to explain the direct connection between, on the one hand, purposeless, perpetual, global warfare and the projection of military force everywhere that has created an exorbitant, inefficient, and corrupt...

A panel of regulators said on Friday that MetLife required heightened scrutiny by the Federal Reserve because of its size, leverage and interconnectedness with other financial institutions. “Material financial distress at MetLife could have significant adverse effects on a broad range of financial firms and financial markets,” the Financial Stability Oversight Council said in a 31-page statement explaining why it had voted 9 to 1 on Thursday to designate MetLife a “systemically important financial institution,” or SIFI. In such a situation, the market disruption could be severe enough “to inflict significant damage on the economy,” the council found. The council,...

At this point, the five largest banks account for 42 percent of all loans in the United States, and the six largest banks account for 67 percent of all assets in our financial system. The bets that I am most concerned about are known as “derivatives“.  In essence, they are bets about what will or will not happen in the future.  The big banks use very sophisticated algorithms that are supposed to help them be on the winning side of these bets the vast majority of the time, but these algorithms are not perfect.  The reason these algorithms are not perfect is because they...

...The decision on how much to pay claimants is being made by compensation expert Kenneth Feinberg. GM says the faulty switches are responsible for at least 54 crashes and more than 13 deaths.....

Liberals wanted a national enrollment system under Obamacare. They might just get it. Right now, 36 states rely on HealthCare.gov, the federal exchange, to enroll people in health coverage. At least two more states are opting in next year, with a few others likely to follow. Only two states are trying to get out. That’s precisely the opposite of the Affordable Care Act’s original intent: 50 exchanges run by 50 states. The federal option was supposed to be a limited and temporary fallback. But a shift to a bigger, more permanent Washington-controlled system is instead underway — without preparation, funding...

he Obama administration has quietly adjusted key provisions of its signature healthcare law to potentially make billions of additional taxpayer dollars available to the insurance industry if companies providing coverage through the Affordable Care Act lose money.. The move was buried in hundreds of pages of new regulations issued late last week. It comes as part of an intensive administration effort to hold down premium increases for next year, a top priority for the White House as the rates will be announced ahead of this fall's congressional elections. Administration officials for months have denied charges by opponents that they plan...

Does IQ correlate with power? How many powerful people in the U.S. are actually geniuses, and how much does intelligence really affect success? In one of my research papers published last year, Investigating America's Elite, I set out to address these questions. I collected data on some key groups that greatly influence society: Fortune 500 CEOs, billionaires, federal judges, Senators, and House members. Individuals were deemed to be in the top 1% of ability if they attended an undergraduate or graduate school that had extremely high average standardized test scores that put the typical person well within the top 1%....