A look back…

Commerzbank AG, headquartered in Frankfort, is the second largest bank in Germany.

Bloomberg  Nov 28, 2011  –  Excerpts:
Commerzbank AG agreed to buy Dresdner Bank AG from the insurer Allianz SE for 9.8 billion euros ($14.4 billion) on Aug. 31, 2008. Two weeks later, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy, sinking global markets and saddling both banks with bad loans and trading writedowns.

While the Dresdner price was later renegotiated down to 5.1 billion euros, by 2009 Commerzbank was heading for an annual loss and getting emergency liquidity from the U.S. Federal Reserve. Commerzbank borrowed as much as $22 billion from the Fed in July 2009.

The bank, which also had to get about 18 billion euros ($26 billion) of capital injections and 15 billion of debt guarantees from the German government, declined to say whether it got emergency liquidity from Germany’s central bank.

Peak amount of debt on 7/16/2009: $22 billion

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Commerzbank and Dresdner, chasing ‘yield’ in the red-hot subprime market, wired themselves up with some of Lehman’s supposedly high-grade securitized mortgage instruments.  The highly leveraged Lehman bled out quickly when the housing market collapsed and default waves began rolling in.  And Commerzbank and Dresdner got body-slammed with bad loans and trading write-downs.’

U.S. citizens, who did not make those disastrous investments, were then called in to bail out Commerzbank…. to the tune of $22 billion.  To help make this foreign bank ‘healthy’…

Big banks made disastrous investments and got summarily ‘bailed out.’  And American tax-payers got… ‘austerity’…(?)

It’s time to level the playing field.  It is time for U.S. citizens to receive nothing less than that same access to direct liquidity infusions that foreign banks received from the Fed.

It is time to restore financial health to millions of families across America.