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Thursday, September 29, 2011

Too Big To Fail fact of the day

Zero Hedge quotes the latest report from the US Office of the Currency Comptroller and writes about the extreme concentration of derivatives risk in the US financial markets,

"Of the $250 trillion in gross notional amount of derivative contracts outstanding (consisting of Interest Rate, FX, Equity Contracts, Commodity and CDS) among the Top 25 commercial banks (a number that swells to $333 trillion when looking at the Top 25 Bank Holding Companies), a mere 5 banks (and really 4) account for 95.9% of all derivative exposure... The top 4 banks: JPM with $78.1 trillion in exposure, Citi with $56 trillion, Bank of America with $53 trillion and Goldman with $48 trillion, account for 94.4% of total exposure."




And more worryingly, the TBTF problem keeps getting worse, posing even greater systemic risks,

"The biggest banks are not only getting bigger, but their risk exposure is now at a new all time high and up $5.3 trillion from Q1 as they have to risk ever more in the derivatives market to generate that incremental penny of return."

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