Feather Test

Entry in progress—B.P.
   
The Hobby Economist
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Stressed Out
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History repeats in the short sighted news cycle of the day. The same people have developed new risk models. The assumptions used for the stress tests were not rigorous. Insiders with the banks refer to them as a feather test. They were designed to promote false confidence in the public to prop up equity values of the financial sector. The political climate is no longer ripe to blatantly fund more bailouts to insolvent banks since credit still isn’t flowing to Main Street, which was the point of the whole exercise.
   
Fiscal Frenzy
Analysis of the Stress Test Results
Sunday, May 10th, 2009
The stress test recently nicknamed the “feather test” as some banks have called it was released officially on Friday. This stress test was put in place by the Obama administration to determine how much capital would the top 20 banks need in we were to go into a deeper recession. So, are our nation’s banks out of harm’s way? Almost half of the 19 banks tested need some sort of capital.
         
Banking Whistleblower
Judicial Watch Fooled by Major Banks and Henry Paulson’s Scapegoat Tactic
Posted on May 20, 2009 by bankingwhistleblower
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. The treasury department fabricates a “stress test” which is more like a feather test in order to trick the taxpayers into believing that a government purchase of bank assets was a easonable investment.  The reality is that the assets are nearly worthless.  If they had any value the bankers wouldn’t be trying to unload them.
 
Kurdish Aspect
June 18, 2009
The Exportation of American Prosperity and the Phantom Economic Recovery
By Rauf Naqishbendi
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The apparent solvency of major American banks and their resilience to further financial meltdown is assessed by the federal bank regulators through the “stress test.”  Based on its name, the public might easily conclude that the test is quite stringent. However, those within the banking industry privately refer to this test as the “feather test.”  Banks were able to report impressive earnings, these reports really serve as more of a trick than a treat. The trick is that the banks were allowed to report earnings without writing off bad assets,  referred to as “toxic assets,” but now to reassure depositors and instill confidence, they have renamed them “legacy assets.” Sadly, this sleight of hand will not lessen the fact that hundreds of billions of dollars of dead or undervalued loans remains in the banks’ misleading balance sheets.