all of the above banks, save the SachsenLB maybe are all major players in their target sectors.I definetly said MAJOR bank in Europe, so the small banks don't count as the impact is fairly small.
I don't see any of these banks with "bankrupt" behind their name... Saved by government/private investors still means that the bank is saved, or you wrote it down incorrectly.
UBS and Credit Suisse are amongst the top10 of the worlds largest banks, societe generale is one of the largest french banks and a major players in investment banking. Dresdner Kleinwort and WestLB also are big investment banks. Northern rock was one of the 3 largest mortage banks in the UK, HBOS one of the Uks largest mortage and retail banks aswell. Hypo Real estate is europes largest mortage bank, BayernLB is a large governemnt financier and provider of corporate finance and IKB is one of the leading banks in corporate finance for small companies in germany. Even relatively small banks such as BayernLB and IKB going broke can cost millions of jobs in the end.
Now you can add AIG, Lehman, Merryl Lynch and HBOS to the faield banks list. all of them major players and marekt leaders.
And if they are saved by the government it means they have failed, as without government intervention they would have gone bancrupt.
A bank should not be in the position that it needs saving.
Even if a bank makes profit it doesn't mean they are liquid enuogh to run their busienss. It is what a lot of people forget about, profit is not what matters but cash flow.One of the three major Belgian Banks.
They raised their capital in July by selling a bunch of shares at low prices, hence the first drop in value.
Yesterday, the bank lost 11.5% of their value! Today is expected the same, last week was (oh no) the same.
The value of the shares is lower than ever, but still: the bank is nowhere near bankrupt. They still make profit, how strange it may sound (it does, doesn't it?)...
They lost € 500,000,000 b/c of Lehman, if AIG goes bankrupt as well, who know what will happen...
Its why Morgan Stanley and Merril Lynch went running for the hills... They were profitable yes. But they did not have the money to keep operating in the short term.
Oh by the way... A major German Bank, now called "Germanys most stupid bank" transfered over 300 million euro to lehman on the monday they filed for bancupcy. Since its even a governemnt bank... the one that owned IKB when it went bust, its a major scandal now..
If thats your best analyst i nthat matters, you need to get new ones... as That has been the case like a year ago. Inter-bank lending rates have skyrocketed already long ago...Paul D'Hoore, Belgium's best analyst in these matters, says that the banks have lost their confidence in each other and that that makes the crisis even worse.
That did not solve the problem, but made it worse.. and it really pisses me off.Back on topic:
A friend of mine just told me that the American Bank has supported AIG with ca.70 billion $ in exchange for an 80% majority of shares...
This action had an immediate reaction in the rest of the world, the values of other bank/insurrance shares have stopped dropping too fast. Now they are even with yesterday, a little lower or even a little higher.
Congratz USA, after causing the problems, you have solved them. That would be a first...
If i was any of your americans, i'd be sueing off AIGs arse right now.
They deliberately wanted to be saved by the govenrment. Allianz wanted to take over major parts of AIG which would have saved it... Munich RE was also interested in alrge parts of AIG. But AIG rejected them and would rather be saved on the tax payers wallet. good job.
of course you can. the problem was not that Lehman had too much debt, but noone wanted to keep lending to them. Imo it was even part of a Barclays scheme.. They wanted to take over parts of Lehman and that would have saved them. But they said no and Lehman went bust. The same day they offered buying the same parts again at a much lower price... wtf.It is impossible to go into bankruptcy when you don't borrow money. The article that Z cited said they were net roughly 150 billion dollars in debt. DUH! Of course there is going to be trouble. Debt = risk. They had a ton of debt and therefore a ton of risk. They made stupid choices and it came back to bite them. Sure- the economy has slowed a little, but if you haven't made stupid choices, it's still good enough to thrive.
But back to bancrupcy... To tell a company to stop borrowing is jsut plain stupid. on average around 75% of any companies capital is borrowed money. If noone would borrow money to expand, we'd have pretty much no large company left, since noone.. especialy not the amreican ones, can finance their extensive expansion without debt.
Finance 101. Stop borrowing money in a lot of cases means, stop growing. It called leveraging.
without beeign an expert i do think i am able to calaim a lot of knowledge. seeign that i've got liek 4 years of tradign and investemtn experience.. bought my first mutual fund and stocks when i was 11, 10 years ago..
I have studied economics for over 2 years now and keep constant and thurough tabs on financial, economic and busienss news (4 magazines, 2 financial newspapers and about hal a dozen online newsletters aimed towards professional traders)
i even once argued with a Goldman Sachs Eurity Research Associate on their Sell recommendation of adidas and said it was wrong during an internship interview... A week or two later they upgraded it.
AIG should not have been saved by the government If it really is too big to fail, someone else will do it. In fact there were plans to do so. But AIG wanted to be saved by the governemnt.
I saw a part of Bush's speech o nthat stuff the other day... To me it sounded like "I have no idea whats going on, but i'm doign stuff and spending tax payers moeny on it. My advisers don't have much of a clue either. We all don't know how the economy works".