|
Official U.S. Bailout Thread
|
View this Thread in Original format
| Fir3start3r |
Start listing them here folks because there's going to be lots...
Here's a new one - Americans are going to be paying American Express, twice!
That's right, American Express just filed (and got approval from the Federal Reserve) to become a bank so that they can qualify for the government handout. :whip:
I'm actually furious for you guys down there! :whip:
(I have NO love for credit card companies)
| quote: |
American Express Wins Federal Reserve Approval to Become Bank
By Ari Levy and Scott Lanman
Nov. 11 (Bloomberg) -- American Express Co. won Federal Reserve approval to become a commercial bank, gaining access to funds as credit losses build and sales of asset-backed bonds plummet.
The Fed waived a 30-day waiting period on the application ``in light of the unusual and exigent circumstances affecting the financial markets,'' according to a statement released yesterday in Washington. Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues unanimously voted for the action.
Credit-card holders failed to repay loans in the third quarter at almost twice the rate of a year earlier, New York- based American Express said last month. With defaults rising along with the unemployment rate, October marked the first month since 1993 that card companies were unable to sell bonds backed by customer payments.
``That business has totally dried up,'' said Frederic Dickson, who helps oversee about $20 billion as chief market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon. ``If I were a shareholder, it wouldn't send a very warm and fuzzy message to me,'' he said in a phone interview.
American Express, the largest U.S. credit-card company by purchases, joins former investment banks Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, which were allowed by the Fed in September to become commercial banks. The company said the conversion won't require any ``significant divestitures.''
American Express fell $1.33, or 5.3 percent, to $23.98 yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange. It has tumbled 54 percent this year, the fourth-biggest decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Company's Assets
American Express has total consolidated assets of about $127 billion, the Fed said. The company already owns two bank units: American Express Centurion Bank, which operated as an industrial loan company under Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. supervision, and American Express Bank, which was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision. Each has assets of about $25 billion and controls deposits of about $7.2 billion, the Fed said. Centurion is being converted to a bank, the Fed order said.
``It puts them in a better position to shift activities to the bank and to gain additional resources through use of the Fed's discount window,'' said Gil Schwartz, a former Fed counsel and now a partner at law firm Schwartz & Ballen in Washington.
In an Oct. 6 filing, American Express said that its bank units have access to the Fed's discount window and the company already had enough cash to last more than a year.
Profit Is Declining
The company has posted four straight quarterly profit declines and lost about half its market value this year as it set aside more funds for soured credit-card debt. American Express makes loans to consumers, exposing it to defaults fueled by more than 700,000 U.S. job losses this year, unlike Visa Inc., which just processes payments and said yesterday that quarterly adjusted profit doubled to $448 million.
``Given the continued volatility in the financial markets, we want to be best positioned to take advantage of the various programs the federal government has introduced,'' Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Chenault said in a statement. ``We will continue to build a larger deposit base to broaden our funding sources.''
American Express used the Fed's commercial paper facility for the first time on Oct. 29, joining a growing list of borrowers that have sold tens of billions of dollars of the short-term debt to the central bank as credit became more difficult to obtain.
The move to become a commercial bank comes almost 15 years after American Express spun off investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. to investors. American Express got into the brokerage business in the 1980s with acquisitions, including the purchase of Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb in 1984. Amid losses that stretched into the 1990s, the company shed its investment-banking operations.
|
>>Source<< |
|
|
| pkcRAISTLIN |
| im no expert, but that sounds ed. |
|
|
| Krypton |
| A credit card company now becoming a bank? How many ways can a debtor be milked of interest? |
|
|
| Fir3start3r |
| quote: | Originally posted by Krypton
A credit card company now becoming a bank? How many ways can a debtor be milked of interest? |
Apparently more than once, and yes pkcRAISTLIN it's ed indeed. |
|
|
| Groundhog Boy |
| quote: | Originally posted by Krypton
A credit card company now becoming a bank? How many ways can a debtor be milked of interest? |
Maybe I'm missing something because I skimmed, but aren't most of the other credit cards already banks? The only other that I can think of that is similar (and I'm not even sure of this one) is Discover. They're not a processor like Visa or Mastercard and have always been exposed to losses from default. When someone defaults on a Visa or MC, JPM, Citi, BoA, Capital One, etc. takes the hit, and all of them are major banks.
Personally, I've never like Am Ex's business model and never understood why it's so successful. I guess it's great for business when you might need a really high line of credit for certain expenses, but I've never been interested in carrying them in my wallet.
To be honest, the biggest deal with this to me is that it took this long to announce after they'd taken from the Fed window. Shouldn't investors have been alerted to this major shift in the business plan a little sooner than 2 weeks after it'd happened? |
|
|
| Kapedano |
| You might want to add to that list the auto companies. This will be interesting to see. |
|
|
| Shakka |
Who thinks the auto industry should receive a bailout? If so, why (and not just because it's cool or because everyone else is doing it;))
| quote: | Obama Asks Bush to Provide Help for Automakers
By JACKIE CALMES
WASHINGTON — The struggling auto industry was thrust into the middle of a political standoff between the White House and Democrats on Monday as President-elect Barack Obama urged President Bush in a meeting at the White House to support immediate emergency aid.
Mr. Bush indicated at the meeting that he might support some aid and a broader economic stimulus package if Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats dropped their opposition to a free-trade agreement with Colombia, a measure for which Mr. Bush has long fought, people familiar with the discussion said.
The Bush administration, which has presided over a major intervention in the financial industry, has balked at allowing the automakers to tap into the $700 billion bailout fund, despite warnings last week that General Motors might not survive the year.
Mr. Obama and Congressional Democratic leaders say the bailout law authorizes the administration to extend assistance.
Mr. Obama went into his post-election meeting with Mr. Bush on Monday primed to urge him to support emergency aid to the auto industry, advisers to Mr. Obama said. But Democrats also indicate that neither Mr. Obama nor Congressional leaders are inclined to concede the Colombia pact to Mr. Bush, and may decide to wait until Mr. Obama assumes power on Jan. 20.
Separate from his differences with Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has signaled to the automakers and the unions that his support for short-term aid now, and long-term assistance once he takes office, is contingent on their willingness to agree to transform their industry to make cleaner, more energy-efficient vehicles.
A week after Mr. Obama’s election, and more than two months before he takes office, the steadily weakening economy and the prospect of many more job losses are testing his effort to remain aloof from the nation’s business on the argument that “we only have one president at a time.”
As the auto industry reels, rarely has an issue so quickly illustrated the differences from one White House occupant to the next. How Mr. Obama responds to the industry’s dire straits will indicate how much government intervention in the private sector he is willing to tolerate. It will also offer hints of how he will approach his job under pressure, testing the limits of his conciliation toward the opposition party and his willingness to stand up to the interest groups in his own.
G.M.’s shares tumbled on Monday to 1946 prices, closing down 23 percent to $3.36, as analysts downgraded the stock on worries it would soon run out of cash and shareholders would be wiped out by any federal bailout.
Mr. Obama has been far more receptive than Mr. Bush to having the government intervene to rescue another major sector of the economy. He called automakers “the backbone of American manufacturing” in his first post-election press conference last Friday, and many thousands of their employees belong to unions that are part of the Democratic Party’s base.
But Mr. Obama’s stance raises the question, with the country in a worsening economic situation, where would the Democrat draw the line as president?
Mr. Bush has drawn his line at the automakers’ doors, having already been forced to shelve the free-market principles of his Republican Party to bail out the financial industry over the past two months. But Republicans say he would acquiesce in aid to automakers in return for Congress’s ratification of the Colombia pact and pending trade agreements with Panama and South Korea.
The outgoing and incoming presidents met at the White House in private, without staff.
The Democratic leaders in Congress, the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, have declined to call a lame-duck session for next week, as they had hoped, without assurance that Mr. Bush would support a stimulus package.
Mr. Obama has called on the Bush administration to accelerate $25 billion in federal loans provided by a recent law specifically to help automakers retool. Late in his campaign, Mr. Obama proposed doubling that to $50 billion. But industry supporters say the automakers, squeezed both by the unavailability of credit and depressed sales, need unrestricted cash now, simply to meet payroll and other expenses.
On Friday, Mr. Obama said he would instruct his economic team, once he chooses it, to devise a long-range plan for helping the auto industry recover in a way that is part of an energy and environmental policy to reduce reliance on foreign oil and address climate change.
While Mr. Obama campaigned on a promise of bipartisan conciliation, his choice for his White House chief of staff, Representative Rahm Emanuel, indicated on Sunday that no such deal linking auto-industry aid and a stimulus package with trade pacts was in the cards. “You don’t link those essential needs to some other trade deal,” Mr. Emanuel said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Democrats close to both Mr. Obama’s transition team and to Congressional leaders seemed willing to call Mr. Bush’s bluff, calculating that he would not want to gamble that G.M. — an iconic, century-old American corporation with business tentacles in every state — would fail on his watch and add to the negative notes of his legacy. Also, economists as conservative as Martin Feldstein, an adviser to a long line of Republican presidents and candidates, have called more broadly for stimulus spending of up to $300 billion.
The major automakers — G.M., Ford and Chrysler — are each using up their cash at unsustainable rates. The Center for Automotive Research, which is based in Michigan and supported by the industry, released on Election Day an economic analysis of the impact of one or all of them failing. If the Big Three were to collapse, it said, that would cost at least three million jobs, counting autoworkers, suppliers and other businesses dependent on the companies, down to the hot-dog vendors and bartenders next door to their plants.
The center also concluded that the cost to local, state and federal governments would reach to as much as $156.4 billion over three years in lost taxes and higher outlays for things like unemployment and health care assistance. Separately, some economists say the demise of even one of the automakers could tip the current recession toward a depression.
For Mr. Bush, however, the hard-line approach is his only leverage to make the trade agreements part of his legacy. The Colombia deal, especially, is strongly opposed by organized labor groups, which are a major force in the Democratic Party, and by human-rights activists.
In the Senate and during his nomination race against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, Mr. Obama opposed the pacts and especially the Colombia agreement, given that country’s reported human rights abuses against unionists. He insists he favors free trade, but only if trading partners agree to protections for their workers and the environment — reflecting the standard Democratic Party line since President Bill Clinton’s administration.
On his campaign Web site, Mr. Obama said he would oppose the Colombia pact “if President Bush insists on sending it to Congress because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.”
Organized labor is not the only interest group with influence in the Democratic Party that is weighing in as Mr. Obama plans his transition. Environmentalists are adamant that any aid be conditioned on the auto industry’s dropping of its opposition to higher fuel-efficiency standards and investing more in new technology. That puts them at odds with unions, who oppose any strings, leaving it to Mr. Obama to mediate.
Both as a candidate and now as president-elect, Mr. Obama has been in contact with former Vice President Al Gore, who last year won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change. In a column published in Sunday’s New York Times, Mr. Gore wrote that “we should help America’s automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new start-up companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity that will be available.”
Mr. Obama has said that he wants to meet with the Big Three auto executives, but advisers say no meeting is scheduled. Among his advisers who have communicated with the industry chiefs and their representatives are Jason Furman, the Obama campaign’s economic policy director; John D. Podesta, the head of Mr. Obama’s transition; and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, an Obama adviser who is under consideration to be Treasury secretary again.
|
|
|
|
| Shakka |
| quote: | Originally posted by Groundhog Boy
Maybe I'm missing something because I skimmed, but aren't most of the other credit cards already banks? The only other that I can think of that is similar (and I'm not even sure of this one) is Discover. They're not a processor like Visa or Mastercard and have always been exposed to losses from default. When someone defaults on a Visa or MC, JPM, Citi, BoA, Capital One, etc. takes the hit, and all of them are major banks. |
Discover has credit risk and doesn't own a bank that I'm aware of. Capital One bought Southcoast bank a couple of years ago. I think conventional wisdom has been that banks often have card divisions, but a card company doesn't just up and become a bank (Capital One aside, they bought Southcoast to give them access to low cost deposits for funding). I'm not sure what Amex's plans are to start up some sort of depository. |
|
|
| Krypton |
| Nothing better than rewarding failure. If the auto industries need a bailout, then they need to surrender their equity and the executive management needs to be completely replaced. |
|
|
| jerZ07002 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Shakka
Who thinks the auto industry should receive a bailout? If so, why (and not just because it's cool or because everyone else is doing it;)) |
the only problem with allowing auto manufacturers to go out of business is that the pieces will be picked up by PE firms that will sell off the parts to foreign manufacturers, leaving the US without a significant presence. The auto industry in the US supports so many jobs (e.g., parts manufacturing, natural resource extraction, electronics, etc...). Unfortunately, I think we should extend some sort of credit line to the company (in exchange for preferred equity interests with soft management oversight). |
|
|
| Fir3start3r |
| quote: | Originally posted by jerZ07002
the only problem with allowing auto manufacturers to go out of business is that the pieces will be picked up by PE firms that will sell off the parts to foreign manufacturers, leaving the US without a significant presence. The auto industry in the US supports so many jobs (e.g., parts manufacturing, natural resource extraction, electronics, etc...). Unfortunately, I think we should extend some sort of credit line to the company (in exchange for preferred equity interests with soft management oversight). |
jerZ07002 is right - the spinoffs from this industry are massive and will even have a huge impact here in Canada (at least here in Ontario were a lot of the manufacturers are)...
That's it, lets incorporate TA into a bank and stick our hand out! :toothless
We'll be sure to include in the fine print that Swamper & mods get a no golden parachute clause though... |
|
|
|
|
