Friday, September 26, 2008

Banks ran and still run on the fed?

I'm not the most knowledgable person in the financial world but I've been reading as much as possible (some days every article which is usually around 20) on realclearmarkets.com and cnnmoney.com. This article makes me seriously wonder why we need $700 Billion to bailout banks and other financial institutions when they've been getting so much money already. How much toxic assets can these people actually have? We're talking about things stemming from 3 years of bad mortgages. We're also continuing to give the European Central Bank and now the Swiss National Bank money.

The deal will have the Fed provide $10 billion to the European Central Bank and $3 billion to the Swiss National Bank. In return, it will receive a reciprocal amount of foreign currency from each country.
The $13 billion comes on top of the $277 billion in such swap deals that had previously been announced, including $110 billion with the ECB and $27 billion with the Swiss National Bank.
Figures released Thursday showed that borrowing by Wall Street securities firms totaled $105.7 billion as of Wednesday, up from $59.8 billion a week earlier.
In addition, under an emergency program unveiled by the banks last week, commercial banks borrowed $72.7 billion through Wednesday in order to buy commercial paper from money-market mutual funds.
And loans through the traditional discount window rose to $39.3 billion, up $5.9 billion from a week earlier. Other credit extensions jumped by $16 billion to $44 billion.
The moves come as banks and Wall Street firms have become reluctant to lend money to each other, or to customers. There are reports of banks hoarding cash out of concerns about their own future as well as uncertainty about the financial condition of other institutions.
If they're getting what seems to be endless billions from the fed, without a congressional bailout, why are they concerned about money? If this sounds naive of such matters I'd be welcome to any enlightenment on where I'm wrong.

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