Puppets and Propaganda: Fraction ... Er ... Fictional Reserve Banking

03-22-2010 • ZeroHedge.com

On paper - there are 10-to-1 reserve requirements, banks like JP Morgan were using 100 to 1 leverage. She said that, with derivatives, leverage might be much higher. And remember that most of the credit in our economy is actually through the shadow banking system, not through traditional depository banking. As the Washington Times wrote in February 2009: “Before last fall’s financial crisis, banks provided only $8 trillion of the roughly $25 trillion in loans outstanding in the United States, while traditional bond markets provided another $7 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. The largest share of the borrowed funds - $10 trillion - came from securitized loan markets that barely existed two decades ago. . . . Mr. Regalia [chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce] said ... 70 percent of the system isn’t there anymore,’ he said.” Bernanke, Summers, Geithner and the boys have been working as hard as they can to re-start the shadow banking system, and traditional loans to individuals and small businesses have plummeted. So the percentage of shadow banking system lending to the all lending has probably skyrocketed again.