Bloomberg News finally emerged victorious from an absolutely absurd legal battle with, essentially, bank lobbyists, and has published the summary of its review of documents from America' Big Secret Bank Bailout. It reveals just how much money they all borrowed when they were pretty much all about to go out of business. Here's the meat of the matter: "Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year."

Apart from the absolute madness of the big boys like JP Morgan and Bank of [...]

The Banks are

"Your Chase Checking account has a feature called Chase Debit Card Overdraft CoverageSM. Soon, we can no longer provide this coverage automatically – if you want to keep it, you need to tell us." Aww, you can no longer provide it? Well… okay!

Eliot Spitzer is back on Slate, with a very exciting diatribe about how General Electric made significant gains from the New York Fed's liquidity incentives to the commercial paper market last year, even though the chairman of GE is the only real "people's representative" on the board of the Fed! If only anyone in America knew what any of these words meant, there would be trouble!

"The interchange fees that banks now charge stores for debit transactions are economically and functionally identical to the check interchange fees prohibited by the Fed almost a century ago." —Retail banking is a business almost entirely built on fees—and business is real good I mean, reallll good. Even the class action settlements don't offset the profit.

Today's Goldman Sachs report on the U.S. banking industry has an amusing section where they have quite a number of graphs to prove that we're not going to end up like Japan. They write: "The collapse of an enormous asset bubble, a banking and credit crisis, zero interest rates, central bank balance sheet expansion, and massive fiscal stimulus have caused some people to question whether the scenario here could continue to play out like Japan, where loans declined for eight years after the peak and interest rates remained near zero." Loan shrinkage has indeed been trending just like Japan-but the U.S. cut interest rates and addressed a looming crisis much [...]

"Even the supporters of our existing financial structure – men like former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr… the White House economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers… and JPMorgan Chase's chief executive, Jamie Dimon – concede that big crises occur every five years or so. What hit us in 2008-9 was not a "once per century" event. Rather it was the latest, and scariest, in a series of regular global crises going back at least to the 1970s." -MIT's Simon Johnson takes a stab at explaining why huge financial institutions are self-serving and a menace to those of us who aren't them.

"The nation's largest banks collectively need another $75 billion in equity to ride out potential losses due to the recession." Oh, here, I'll give it to you!

What did you do this weekend? Were you among the couple of thousand people protesting Bank of America in Boston? If so, YOU ARE AWESOME. (Although I have no idea why the Boston Herald referred to the 24 arrested at that protest as a "rogue's gallery." Isn't that… odd?) Bank of America should have people protesting outside every branch, every day. Also apparently there were some other protests, in New York, I guess? It only made page A18 of the Sunday New York Times national edition, where it said that only 500 people were arrested, not 700, so, must not have been that big a deal. (To [...]

I jumped the gun a little bit on August 27, when I very nearly believed for real that Citigroup stock would hit $5. And on April 14, when I hoped it would maybe happen that quarter. BUT GUESS WHAT! After announcing they'd sell off their hedge fund biz, the stock is hopping around at $4.94 to $4.99 this morning. Who's too big to fail? Whoooo is? Who let the banks out! Who? Who who who? AND THEN, at about 10:05 a.m., it hit $5! And then went down to $4.99. And then it hit $5.05, after a spike in volume! WHERE IT IS SORT OF HOLDING [...]

Remember how we talked about commercial debt and default? AKA the "coming crisis? Well here is the slow beginning: The default rate for loans on office, retail, hotel and industrial properties surged to 3.8 percent from 1.6 percent a year earlier, the New York-based real estate research firm said yesterday in a report. The default rate for loans on apartment buildings climbed to 4.4 percent from 1.8 percent.