The results of the Federal Reserve’s latest round of bank stress tests have just come in over the past few hours, and 15 of the 19 banks participating in it passed. Citigroup, Met Life, Ally Bank, and SunTrust did not.
Per the Fed…
…It's important to note that the Federal Reserve's stress scenario estimates are the outcome of deliberately stringent and conservative assessments under hypothetical, adverse economic conditions and the results are not forecasts or expected outcomes…
For more on this breaking story, checkout:
“Citi fails Fed stress test,” FT Alphaville
“Fed: 15 of 19 Banks passed adverse stress test scenario,” Calculated Risk
I’ll save the editorializing (but not the snark) for others; but, if they’re anything like what we experienced in 2009, then they don’t mean much more than propaganda.
In related news…
-- And, having cited the disparity between the rapid recovery of Wall Street versus much slower improvements on many Main Streets throughout America, over the past three-and-a-half years, including…
…still-increasing income inequality surpassing all reliable metrics that have been in place since 1917 to accurately measure those statistics…
…record levels of poverty that include the inconvenient fact that roughly 140,000,000 Americans are either living in poverty, or are on the precipice of it (with even the most financially “sound” segment of that demographic group--which now comprises between 40% and 45% of all Americans--being only a couple of paychecks away from falling into the poverty abyss)…
…and long-term unemployment rates and a housing market decline that have surpassed the worst numbers reached during the Great Depression…
…both Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke have recently noted that the natural rate of unemployment will gradually taper off over the next few years to somewhere in the 6% to 7% range, where it will then remain for the foreseeable future, essentially telling us that we should get used to the fact that, once everything “settles down,” which will be somewhere between 2018 and 2025…
...at that point, roughly 50% more people will be unemployed on a continual basis (than in past periods of economic normalcy) in our “new normal,” whenever those times may arrive.
-- It was formally announced today that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s righthand spinmeister Richard “Jake” Siewert, Jr. was just appointed as a managing director and chief spokesperson for Goldman-Sachs. (Here’s a LINK to my post about this story at the beginning of February.)
In further-related news…
When asked for comment on the Siewert announcement, White House spokesperson Jay Carney stated, “Really not a big deal. He’s just moving his desk over to a more senior division of our government.”
Elsewhere, former White House Chief-of-Staff and former JP Morgan Chase Director of Corporate Governance Bill Daley, along with current White House Chief-of-Staff and former Chief Operating Officer of Citigroup’s Alternative Investments unit Jacob “Jack” Lew couldn’t be reached for comment.
White House spokesperson Carney, when asked to comment on the results of the latest round of Wall Street stress tests noted: “Hey, if Ben Bernanke tells us all is good on Wall Street that’s good enough for me. And, I just got off the phone with my old colleague, Jake Siewert, who was busy ‘doing god’s work,’ and he didn’t have any time to get into any substantive detail on the matter with such short notice. But, he did mention that everything’s cool in lower Manhattan, today.”
-- It was noted by many at the Federal Reserve press event today that, like Wall Street, Main Street will be conducting a stress test of its own between now and November 6th, when the results of that effort will be announced to the public.