For more than two years, I have been tracking the fraud being committed on an ongoing basis by America's largest banks. As I described in a June column titled "The bank-failure recovery," all of America's largest banks have been inaccurately reporting the value of their assets. Based on the information revealed by the FDIC regarding the 129 bank failures this year, it is safe to conclude that around 45 percent of the value of the financial assets reported by the banks are, in fact, completely worthless.
That means that the $7.5 trillion in assets reported by America's four largest banks, Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan/Chase and Wells Fargo are actually worth closer to $4 trillion. More than $3 trillion on their collective books is simply fictitious, created by the crude artifice of claiming that an asset, such as a home mortgage, that can currently be sold for $x is worth $1.82x on their books. This is what financial cynics term "mark to fantasy," which means that the accounting values are whatever the bank deems them to be, as opposed to "mark to market," which is the price that someone has been willing to pay for a comparable asset in the real world.
This was the situation as of June. But new revelations of even more shenanigans on the part of the greatest beneficiaries of the TARP bailout indicate that things are much worse than nearly anyone had realized. http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=211161
That means that the $7.5 trillion in assets reported by America's four largest banks, Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan/Chase and Wells Fargo are actually worth closer to $4 trillion. More than $3 trillion on their collective books is simply fictitious, created by the crude artifice of claiming that an asset, such as a home mortgage, that can currently be sold for $x is worth $1.82x on their books. This is what financial cynics term "mark to fantasy," which means that the accounting values are whatever the bank deems them to be, as opposed to "mark to market," which is the price that someone has been willing to pay for a comparable asset in the real world.
This was the situation as of June. But new revelations of even more shenanigans on the part of the greatest beneficiaries of the TARP bailout indicate that things are much worse than nearly anyone had realized. http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=211161
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