Denninger -- Banks' Assets Overvalued by at least 20% Due to Accounting Fraud$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')...You can go through more than a year's worth of FDIC bank seizure information and in essentially every single case you will find that
overvaluations of somewhere from 20-50% have in fact occurred, yet not one indictment for book-cooking has issued....
...We can look at the FDIC's own published bank closing statements, and derive from them a pattern stretching back more than a year now that has disclosed that in essentially each and every case the banks in question have overvalued their assets by anywhere from 20-40%, and that as of the day of the seizure such an overvaluation was in fact a continuing and ongoing practice.
... We have now learned, a year into this "experiment" with mark-to-model promulgated at gunpoint by Congress that:
1. The banks indeed have been lying about asset valuation and the proof comes in the form of the FDIC seizures, which in essentially case have documented massive and outrageous overvaluation of assets on bank balance sheets.
2.The claimed "mark to model" losses, which were tiny compared to the market-price losses, were in fact fictions, to the point that the poster child of the "mark to model" argument is now suing the purveyors of the instruments supposedly not to be marked to the market for losses that exceed what the market-based loss was back in March of 2009.
If you wish to argue that the economy and banking system are recovering their health, you must deal with this. If indeed large bank balance sheets are concealing a deficiency of somewhere between $1.5 and $3 trillion in losses not only will the economy and lending environment not recover it can't as the large banks all know the truth.