When it comes to government bail outs of insolvent banks few are as qualified to opine as John Mack who was CEO of Morgan Stanley when the bank, along with all other U.S. TBTF banks, was bailed out with a multi-trillion rescue package in the aftermath of the Lehman failure. Which is why it was illuminating, if not surprising, that during an interview with Bloomberg TV discussing the future of Deutsche Bank, John Mack said that "there’s no question in my mind, it is absolutely good for every penny." In other words, "Deutsche Bank is fine."
Yesterday's desperate scramble by Deutsche Bank to comfort markets about its liquidity position worked, for about three hours. And then, the bank which really should just keep its mouth shut, did the opposite and reminded an already panicked market just how "serious" things are, in the parlance of Jean-Claude Junkcer, when in an internal memo, the CEO assured his workers that:
That was the good news. The bad news:
Riot police have detained around 10 people protesting outside the central bank in Moscow, who were asking for a better deal on their Forex mortgages after the recent decline of the Russian ruble. The Star reports: Around a hundred protesters gathered outside the bank to demand their loans be converted to rouble mortgages from dollar and euro ones or that their repayments be recalculated using a different rouble exchange rate to take account of the Russian currency’s sharp fall in the last 18 months. Protesters have previously targeted the banks where they first took out their mortgages.
Back in the summer of 2011, when we reported that Canadian banks appear dangerously undercapitalized on a tangible common equity basis...
... the highest Canadian media instance, the Globe and Mail decided to take us to task. To wit:
Were the folks at Zerohedge.com looking at the best numbers when they argued that Canadian banks were just as levered as troubled European banks?