What in the World is Going on with Banks this Week? Emergency meetings, banker summits, crashing European banks, and the worst bank reports since the Great Recession
By David Haggith
TheGreatRecession.info
April 12, 2016
Just about every major banker and finance minister in the world is meeting in Washington, D.C., this week, following two rushed, secretive meetings of the Federal Reserve and another instantaneous and rare meeting between the Fed Chair and the president of the United States. These and other emergency bank meetings around the world cause one to wonder what is going down. Here’s a bullet list of the week’s big-bank events;
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors just held an “expedited special meeting” on Monday in closed-door session.
The White House made an immediate announcement that the president was going to meet with Fed Chair Janet Yellen right after Monday’s special meeting and that Vice President Biden would be joining them.
Immediately after Monday’s special meeting, the Federal Reserve also posted an announcement of another expedited closed-door meeting for Tuesday for the specific purpose of “bank supervision.”
A G-20 meeting of finance ministers and central-bank heads starts in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, too, and continues through Wednesday.
Then on Thursday the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund meet in Washington.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta just revised US GDP growth for the first quarter to the precious of recession at 0.1%.
US banks are expected this coming week to report their worst quarter financially since the start of the Great Recession.
The press stated that the German government will sue the European Central Bank if it launches a more aggressive and populist form of quantitative easing, often called “helicopter money.”
The European Union’s new “bail-in” procedures for failing banks were employed for the first time with Austrian bank Heta Asset Resolution AG.
Italy’s minister of finance called an emergency meeting of Italian bankers to engage “last resort” measures for dealing with 360-billion euros of bad loans in banks that have only 50 billion in capital.
President Obama’s meeting with Fed Chair Yellen
It is rare for presidents to meet with the chair of the Federal Reserve. The last time President Obama met with Janet Yellen was in November of 2014, a year and a half ago. It is even more rare for the vice president of the United States to join them. In fact, I’ve heard but haven’t verified that it has never happened in a suddenly called meeting with the Fed before.
For security reasons, the president and vice president don’t regularly attend the same events. There are, of course, many planning sessions or emergency meetings where they do get together, but not with the head of the Federal Reserve. Emergency meetings where the VP is included in the planning session would include situations related to dire national security in case the VP winds up having to take over.
The Rest…HERE
