by Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade
If the dark secrets about the U.S. banking system that federal regulators have been keeping since the financial crash of 2008 are allowed to be aired in public Congressional hearings as a result of the current banking crisis – and mainstream media will grow a backbone and cover those hearings – it could help the U.S. avoid a catastrophic financial reckoning down the road.
For years, Wall Street On Parade has been reporting that just four banks in the U.S. control more than 85 percent of all the opaque derivatives in the banking system. We have also regularly reported how federal agencies have singled out these four banks for posing systemic risk to the financial stability of the United States. We’re talking about JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup’s Citibank.
On March 30, we crunched the numbers from the regulatory filings made by these banks (call reports) and reported that as of December 31, 2022, these four banks held a combined $3.286 trillion in uninsured domestic deposits. (Federal deposit insurance is capped at $250,000 per depositor per bank. Uninsured deposits taking flight were a key element in the recent bank runs that led to the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history.) As of December 31, 2022, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. held $2.015 trillion in deposits in domestic offices, of which $1.058 trillion were uninsured; Bank of America held $1.9 trillion in deposits in domestic offices, of which $909.26 billion were uninsured; Wells Fargo held $1.4 trillion in deposits in domestic offices, of which $721.1 billion were uninsured; and Citibank N.A. (parent, Citigroup) held $777 billion in deposits in domestic offices, of which $598.2 billion were uninsured.
We can now put that $3.286 trillion figure into sharper perspective. On May 1, the FDIC released its report on “Options for Deposit Insurance Reform.” Without mentioning that just four banks controlled $3.286 trillion of uninsured deposits at year end, the FDIC report did provide the figure of $7.7 trillion as the total of uninsured domestic deposits held by all banks at the end of 2022.
That means that just these four banks held 43 percent of all uninsured deposits at 4,127 federally insured commercial banks in the U.S. as of year end 2022.
The FDIC report reads as follows:…
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