Tag Archive for Banking Consolidation

OECD U.S. Banking Concentration and Security Note

In the United States, the federal antitrust laws generally apply to commercial banking and investment banking products and services in the same manner as to other economic sectors. Similarly, the Horizontal Merger Guidelines1 (Guidelines) of the U.S. Department of Justice (Department) and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission apply to the analysis of mergers across sectors. Premerger notifications relating to non-bank mergers in the financial sector are filed pursuant to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act2 and are analyzed under the Guidelines.

SIGTARP Quarterly Report

By itself, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“TARP”) is a huge program at $700 billion. As discussed in SIGTARP’s April Quarterly Report, the total financial exposure of TARP and TARP-related programs may reach approximately $3 trillion. Although large in its own right, TARP is only a part of the combined efforts of the Federal Government to address the financial crisis.

Troubled Asset Relief Program: Status of Efforts to Address Transparency and Accountability Issues

As of March 27, 2009, Treasury had disbursed $303.4 billion of the $700 billion in TARP funds. Most of the funds (about $199 billion) went to purchase preferred shares of 532 financial institutions under the Capital Purchase Program (CPP)—Treasury’s primary vehicle under TARP for stabilizing financial markets. Treasury has continued to take significant steps to address all of the recommendations from our December 2008 and January 2009 reports. In particular, Treasury has recently expanded the scope of the monthly CPP surveys of the largest institutions to include all institutions participating in the program, which is intended to provide Treasury with information necessary to begin to track the effectiveness of the program. Treasury also continued to make progress in several other areas, including requiring firms participating in certain new programs to show how assistance will expand lending. These requirements will better enable Treasury to determine what institutions plan to do with any capital infusions and to track the resulting lending activity of participating institutions on a regular basis. In addition, we specifically found that though Treasury is now receiving dividends from the investments it has made in CPP and certain other programs, it has not publicly reported these receipts, which totaled almost $2.9 billion through March 20, 2009. We recommended that Treasury could improve transparency pertaining to TARP program activities by reporting publicly the monies, such as dividends, paid to Treasury by TARP participants.