![[Most Recent USD from www.kitco.com]](http://www.weblinks247.com/indexes/idx24_usd_en_2.gif)
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Mass customer withdrawals do not ruin a bank that wasn’t primed for ruin anyway. Whatever stopped the takeover was defined in due diligence.
The financial problems of the West are not yet solved.
Depositors bring down Dutch bank
By Paul Lewis
Customers of the Dutch bank DSB have forced it into bankruptcy by withdrawing £550m of their savings in just 12 days.
They were encouraged by campaigner Pieter Lakeman who runs the Mortgage Grievances Foundation.
He appeared on Dutch television on Thursday 1 October and told customers it was "in their personal and collective interest to take their money out".
Professor Jacob de Haan of Groningen University said Mr Lakeman was protesting about the way the bank lent money.
He told Radio 4’s Money Box programme: "The bank was under attack and being criticised for being aggressive. Many people borrowed much more than they could afford and as a consequence some were in severe financial troubles."
He added that Pieter Lakeman believed it to be in the interest of those borrowers if the bank went bust.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
A busy weekend for the bank rescue agency that itself is in immediate need of rescue.
I believe, before this is all over that the FDIC will insure deposits by payments not in cash, but in short-term non-marketable US treasury instruments.
Things are just great out there.
Bank Closing Information
October 23, 2009
These links contain useful information for the customers and vendors of these closed banks.
First Dupage Bank, Westmont, IL
Riverview Community Bank, Otsego, MN
Bank of Elmwood, Racine, WI
Hillcrest Bank Florida, Naples, FL
Flagship National Bank, Bradenton, FL
American United Bank, Lawrenceville, GA
Partners Bank, Naples, FL
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
This New York Times article is one more tear in the fabric of structured investment vehicle mortgages.
If Lenders Say ‘The Dog Ate Your Mortgage’
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
Published: October 24, 2009
FOR decades, when troubled homeowners and banks battled over delinquent mortgages, it wasn’t a contest. Homes went into foreclosure, and lenders took control of the property.
On top of that, courts rubber-stamped the array of foreclosure charges that lenders heaped onto borrowers and took banks at their word when the lenders said they owned the mortgage notes underlying troubled properties.
In other words, with lenders in the driver’s seat, borrowers were run over, more often than not. Of course, errant borrowers hardly deserve sympathy from bankers or anyone else, and banks are well within their rights to try to protect their financial interests.
But if our current financial crisis has taught us anything, it is that many borrowers entered into mortgage agreements without a clear understanding of the debt they were incurring. And banks often lacked a clear understanding of whether all those borrowers could really repay their loans.
Even so, banks and borrowers still do battle over foreclosures on an unlevel playing field that exists in far too many courtrooms. But some judges are starting to scrutinize the rules-don’t-matter methods used by lenders and their lawyers in the recent foreclosure wave. On occasion, lenders are even getting slapped around a bit.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Worthless is an understatement.
Detroit house auction flops for urban wasteland
Sun Oct 25, 2009 4:07pm EDT
By Kevin Krolicki
DETROIT (Reuters) – In a crowded ballroom next to a bankrupt casino, what remains of the Detroit property market was being picked over by speculators and mostly discarded.
After five hours of calling out a drumbeat of "no bid" for properties listed in an auction book as thick as a city phone directory, the energy of the county auctioneer began to flag.
"OK," he said. "We only have 300 more pages to go."
There was tired laughter from investors ready to roll the dice on a city that has become a symbol of the collapse of the U.S. auto industry, pressures on the industrial middle-class and intractable problems for the urban poor.
On the auction block in Detroit: almost 9,000 homes and lots in various states of abandonment and decay from the tidy owner-occupied to the burned-out shell claimed by squatters.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
This is very bad news for the FDIC and banking in general.
GMAC has returned to haunt us after devouring GM itself. Those nasty derivatives are still up to mischief.
GE Capital is still hiding out there as well.
Huge commercial real estate lender may file bankruptcy, heightens meltdown fears
Douglas McIntyre
Oct 25th 2009 at 12:00PM
Analysts have been warning for months that commercial real estate would be the next financial tsunami. Vacancy rates have hurt landlord receipts. Tenants are able to force lower rents in negotiations due to the rising vacancies. Some tenants are filing bankruptcy or walking away from leases completely.
Commercial real estate losses have already started to show up in the financial statements of the largest banks. Some of the 106 banks closed this year under the supervision of the FDIC had tremendous losses on their commercial real estate portfolios.
In the midst of rapidly falling commercial real estate values, one of the country’s largest real estate lenders, Capmark, will probably file for bankruptcy in the next few days according to The Wall Street Journal.The paper writes: "In 2006, a group led by KKR & Co., Goldman Sachs Capital Partners and Five Mile Capital Partners acquired the lender GMAC LLC’s commercial-real estate business and renamed it Capmark."
The news of Capmark’s demise could heighten fears that commercial real estate losses among banks will cause another significant wave of writedowns at major financial firms that have already had to take one round of government aid. GE (GE) and Bank of America (BAC) posted large commercial real estate losses in their third-quarter earnings.
Mounting commercial real estate losses also mean that the FDIC’s ability to cover deposits at failing banks will be stretched more than it already is. The agency recently suggested that it may bring in $45 billion by implementing an advance collection of fees that banks would pay to the FDIC between now and 2012.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Think about this quote from the article below:
"Experts suggest we could be no more than 10% of the way through this cycle of bank collapses, which is sure to be the worst run of closures since the Great Depression."
Think about this quote anytime you hear the Fed will be aggressive in raising rates. Think about this anytime you hear the US will curtail QE. Think about this anytime you hear the Fed is practicing how to drain liquidity.
Bank failures hit 106 on year
Oct. 23, 2009, 9:50 p.m. EDT
By Greg Morcroft, MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Seven more banks failed Friday, pushing the 2009 total to 106 and marking the first year since 1992 that at least 100 have gone under.
Experts suggest we could be no more than 10% of the way through this cycle of bank collapses, which is sure to be the worst run of closures since the Great Depression.
The parade of failures continued on Friday with closures of three banks in Florida, one each in Wisconsin, Georgia, Minnesota and Illinois.
So far 106 banks have failed in 2009.
CreditSights, which tracks the dismal data, predicts that in the current cycle, from 2008 through 2011, as many as 1,100 banks will fail. That would wipe out 13.4% of all U.S. banks, representing 7% of U.S. banking assets.
The last year in which the FDIC had that many banks to deal with was in 1992, at the tail end of the last real estate crisis. The FDIC rescued 122 in 1992, according to Keefe, Bruyette & Woods researchers.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
The source appears to be legitimate. The article is a shocker.
Usually when money of geezers gets stolen, it is by relatives. It looks like the State beat them to it.
Secret court seizes £3.2bn from elderly… and even forces furious families to pay to access own bank account
By JASON LEWIS, MAIL ON SUNDAY WHITEHALL EDITOR
Last updated at 5:14 PM on 25th October 2009
A secret court is seizing the assets of thousands of elderly and mentally impaired people and turning control of their lives over to the State – against the wishes of their relatives.
The draconian measures are being imposed by the little-known Court of Protection, set up two years ago to act in the interests of people suffering from Alzheimer’s or other mental incapacity.
The court hears about 23,000 cases a year – always in private – involving people deemed unable to take their own decisions. Using far-reaching powers, the court has so far taken control of more than £3.2billion of assets.
The cases involve civil servants from the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG), which last year took £23million in fees directly from the bank accounts of those struck down by mental illness, involved in accidents or suffering from dementia.
The officials are legally required to act in cases where people do not have a ‘living will’, or lasting power of attorney, which hands control of their assets over to family or friends.
