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America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

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Re: America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

#361

Post by ryandrake »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #213
JamesLeonis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occupy was suppressed by the entire police state, coordinated at the federal level under the FBI and DHS [0]. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-co...

I feel like the most significant cause of Occupy's burnout was the fact that it was so poorly organized and had no concrete goal. I don't recall any specific legislation or reform that they were calling to enact and there was a cacophony of voices each calling for some kind of societal revolution. Eventually the local Occupy demonstration turned into a homeless encampment with some signs propped alongside the roadway…

I remember this comic that ridiculed the "Occupy Wall Street doesn't have a goal" talking point, one of the many corporate-pushed talking points meant to discredit the movement: [1]

1: https://images2.dailykos.com/i/user/2722/TMW2011-10-12colorl...

Re: America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

#362

Post by than3 »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #324
siliconc0w wrote: post #107

The big banks are terrible if you fall outside their algorithmic expectation. My partner and I were trying to get a mortgage and despite near perfect credit, large incomes, etc our apps were auto-denied because I never opened multiple open loan lines. Never needed them, just used CCs I immediately paid off for points as I always had a job/savings and bought cheap used cars for cash. We eventually got one but it took…

> you immediately see the need for breaking these banks up. Why exactly is this the conclusion, as opposed to suggesting the big banks need better evaluation of borrowers (whether thats with better metrics or humans in the loop)? All the problems being brought up seem like they could happen to banks of any sizes...

There are a lot of good reasons for it.

First, centralization and consolidation increase the risk of fraud and corruption, and malign influence with regards to antitrust.

Second, almost no new banks are being chartered. What do you think typically happens when you go from Many -> Few (single digits) -> 1.

If something happens because they play the bailout game, the only real option is for nationalization.

Third, their sector mandate is to loan money to businesses that can use that money to turn a profit and feed the economy. They've stopped doing that outside a few corrupt friends(entities).

What you often don't hear about is what happens when they are the only game in town, they know your business is stressed, and they refuse to loan to you on arbitrary grounds (behind closed doors) knowing they can buy it up in bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar for a larger profit.

Like what Amazon did to the baby diaper companies.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/emails-detail-am...

Re: America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

#363

Post by pessimizer »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #21
wesapien wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys should be flipping cars when bank execs didn't get jail time for the financial crisis

Well America has plenty of outrage, but they're utterly divided and most that outrage just goes into poopooing the other side, instead of something productive like real demonstrations and protests with a real purpose. Instead we get outrage protests mainly designed for extremist groups to waste their time fighting eachother and playing at civil war.

You can only think this if you ignored all of the protests in 2008. What America has is a population that doesn't get a say in American policy, unless there's some indirect sales risk for some powerful person who supports the policy (i.e. somebody is afraid that if the policy is passed, than sales at e.g. Kia or AB InBev will drop because of their association with it.) Even this can be completely thwarted by industry collusion.

Re: America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

#364

Post by throwaway68911 »

TexanFeller wrote: post #347
siliconc0w wrote: post #107

The big banks are terrible if you fall outside their algorithmic expectation. My partner and I were trying to get a mortgage and despite near perfect credit, large incomes, etc our apps were auto-denied because I never opened multiple open loan lines. Never needed them, just used CCs I immediately paid off for points as I always had a job/savings and bought cheap used cars for cash. We eventually got one but it took…

Credit scores make more sense if you think of them not as scores of your ability to pay back debt, but as scores of likely profitability for the creditor. Someone who never carries a balance and never will pay the occasional late fee is less profitable and thus has a lower score.

How to improve your credit score ... get credit cards and pay most of them off, but never close them.

Once you have established credit you will then be offer 0 APR credit cards for 12 to 48 months. With a zero APR credit card that has a balance say of 10,000 your monthly minimum payment is 1% of that so $100. $20,000 $200 a month ... once the APR promo ends transfer it to another card with zero APR.

Closing credits has hurt my credit so i keep them open and locked, as well establish email alerts on all of them for different scenarios to monitor them.

Re: America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

#365

Post by pessimizer »

omgomgomgomg wrote: post #152

Why exactly should banks be private companies at all? Theyre just skimming middle man between the government and end consumer. Sure, the government would know your bank balance and spendings, but that could be worked around If youre in trouble with the irs or the law, the government will have all the insight they request. Sounds crazy? We the people had to bail them out and never get anything of their profits. Too bi…

> Why exactly should banks be private companies at all?

It's a government trust. The only use of banks is to realistically evaluate loans, but priced-in bailouts take away all of the risk, and with it all of the signal. People get loans because they're insiders who have relationships with bankers, or because they're objectively overpaying for them.

If banks will always be bailed out, the proper amount of interest that should be paid on a loan is 0%.

Re: America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

#366

Post by than3 »

0zemp2c wrote: post #257
Mistletoe wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I too tinfoil hat to think the big 4 planned it like this all along? I guess one could ask why WOULDN’T they have meetings trying to engineer exactly what is happening?

yes, and now they are "attacking" PacWest, whose stock is plummeting like First Republic its an easy cycle - find a bank you want for nothing, feed bad press through the usual outlets, watch it fall, then watch depositors get spooked, then buy it for nothing First Republic is probably just one of many banks intended to be undermined, trashed, and then sold for nothing and remember all the times First Republic's CEO c…

Am I wrong in thinking that all banks should have no exposure to the stock market period?

The whole being able to trigger aggregate indebtedness violations through synthetic shares (options), seems like a systemic risk that no ones paying attention to.

Also, its hard to say we still have a fractional reserve system when required deposits have been set at 0% since the pandemic. There's no fraction, its 0 unless you change the definition (i.e. Basel III which uses capitalization as deposits).

Re: America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

#367

Post by zamnos »

Spivak wrote: post #346
HWR_14 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never proved you could handle more than $500 in debt. You then asked for maybe three-orders of magnitude more debt. Surely you can appreciate that difference.

There's no difference at all for someone who works a dayjob. The only thing that matters is that you have you demonstrated that you can make a fixed monthly payment reliably. Paying your bills, paying your rent, paying your CC all demonstrate that. If you rent a $1500/mo apartment you actually have managed $18k of debt. Doing the same thing but this time with interest proves nothing the others don't. Borrowing histor…

But what if they discover alcohol/drugs/gambling/etc? They'll fall off the tracks and the loan will never get paid back. Which ofc is incredibly stupid, classist, and racist to boot. And not even a guarantee by someone's credit score. But with a credit score, you have a metric of just how much money to trust them with (not really), which can be plugged into the spreadsheet and you can hire an army of mortgage brokers to plug stuff into the spreadsheet.

Credit score is a moralizing system that hates the poor, so it's unsurprisingly embedded itself into American culture by three corporations that will never be held accountable (see: Equifax leak).

It's as American as the bald eagle. I'll stop now, my cynicism is showing. I just don't see a way to get to a place where we don't have the current trifecta of credit scoring corporations running our lives without a giant pile of money to start a competing credit bureau that makes and underwrites loans based on different computation of a person's score. Because a credit score was initially for rating people on their ability to pay back borrowed money. It's just been perverted since its inception into what we have now.

Re: America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

#368

Post by pessimizer »

SllX wrote: post #197
brightstep wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same kind of behavior happens in the private sector. Since it’s not government, we don’t call it corruption.

While corruption is never good, I’ll take private-sector corruption over government corruption every day of the week if I’m forced to choose. Governments are sovereign.

The government is corrupted by its relationships with the private sector. The only other way to pull money out of government is through salaries, and government workers don't get paid that much.

Re: America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

#369

Post by teekert »

siliconc0w wrote: post #107

The big banks are terrible if you fall outside their algorithmic expectation. My partner and I were trying to get a mortgage and despite near perfect credit, large incomes, etc our apps were auto-denied because I never opened multiple open loan lines. Never needed them, just used CCs I immediately paid off for points as I always had a job/savings and bought cheap used cars for cash. We eventually got one but it took…

I always find this to be a baffling thing about the American system. Where I live we never take out a loan (except for houses) and most cards are debit cards. The American system seems to punish the way we act here, like you, you can be perfectly credit worthy but you have not been a good loan-taking rent-paying citizen? It feels dirty to me.

Re: America will soon see a wave of bank mergers?

#370

Post by zamnos »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #9
lmpdev wrote: post #3

I know there are regulatory rules which partially explain the fragmented banking sector in the US compared to other nations: four example in Australia we only really have 4-5 proper banks Are there other reasons that small banks have seemed to thrive in the United States but no where else?

There are 95 banks in Australia. [1] That is 3.6 microbanks per person The US has 9 microbanks per person, but based on the prediction of 1000 banks would be similar to Australia. [1] https://www.ausbanking.org.au/insight/banking-by-numbers

What was the uBanks/person in the US before the GFC/2008?
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