{"id":4942,"date":"2013-01-04T00:15:43","date_gmt":"2013-01-04T06:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4942"},"modified":"2013-01-04T00:15:43","modified_gmt":"2013-01-04T06:15:43","slug":"what%e2%80%99s-inside-america%e2%80%99s-banks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4942","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Inside America\u2019s Banks?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2013\/01\/whats-inside-americas-banks\/309196\/2?single_page=true\">Frank Partnoy &#038; Jesse Eisinger<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><I>The financial crisis had many causes\u2014too much borrowing, foolish investments, misguided regulation\u2014but at its core, the panic resulted from a lack of transparency. The reason no one wanted to lend to or trade with the banks during the fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, was that no one could understand the banks\u2019 risks. It was impossible to tell, from looking at a particular bank\u2019s disclosures, whether it might suddenly implode.<\/p>\n<p>For the past four years, the nation\u2019s political leaders and bankers have made enormous\u2014in some cases unprecedented\u2014efforts to save the financial industry, clean up the banks, and reform regulation in order to restore trust and confidence in the American financial system. This hasn\u2019t worked. Banks today are bigger and more opaque than ever, and they continue to behave in many of the same ways they did before the crash.<\/p>\n<p>Consider JPMorgan\u2019s widely scrutinized trading loss last year. Before the episode, investors considered JPMorgan one of the safest and best-managed corporations in America. Jamie Dimon, the firm\u2019s charismatic CEO, had kept his institution upright throughout the financial crisis, and by early 2012, it appeared as stable and healthy as ever.<\/p>\n<p>One reason was that the firm\u2019s huge commercial bank\u2014the unit responsible for the old-line business of lending\u2014looked safe, sound, and solidly profitable. But then, in May, JPMorgan announced the financial equivalent of sudden cardiac arrest: a stunning loss initially estimated at $2 billion and later revised to $6 billion. It may yet grow larger; as of this writing, investigators are still struggling to comprehend the bank\u2019s condition.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Frank Partnoy &#038; Jesse Eisinger: The financial crisis had many causes\u2014too much borrowing, foolish investments, misguided regulation\u2014but at its core, the panic resulted from a lack of transparency. The reason no one wanted to lend to or trade with the banks during the fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, was that no one could [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4942"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4942\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}