by Kane » Sun Aug 19, 2012 7:27 pm
Is that from a babbage column?
That aside, those banks certainly did not utilize their commercial banking side to cover the rampant losses on the investment side. Derivatives do not enter the commercial banking equation. Bloomberg's FOIA subpeonas revealed huge sums given to banks of all sorts! Bear was allowed to go down because it wasn't a big enough player on either side, Lehman was reckless ideologically driven decisions.
And debt was at the heart of it all? What? No....companies were handling their debts differently. Thy worked with massive sums on a daily basis so when the credit dried up day to day debt servicing froze and started to cripple companies. Even GE did this! Did anybody bother to ask how the corporate sector allowed these extremely leveraged positions? And how subprime loans were formulated? No....because they didn't care so long as it all worked.
Debt wasn't the cause. You had cascading market failures that allowed debt to build up to unsustainable levels because the models back then saw no wrongs. We've already been over this, the investment banks very own trading desks were staking positions against the commercial arms of the same bank!!! Those commercial loans were pushed by the investment side to turn what they saw as a tidy profit for their side.
Systemic risk posed by that level of dysfunction within a single corporate entity significantly propels support for the organized dismemberment of these branches. Conflicting interests abound.