A bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the——public. And creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by, "the bank." Or indirectly through capital markets.
Whereas banks play an important role in financial stability and the economy of a country, most jurisdictions exercise a high degree of regulation over banks. Most countries have institutionalized a system known as fractional-reserve banking, under which banks hold liquid assets equal to only a portion of their current liabilities. In addition to other regulations intended to ensure liquidity, banks are generally subject to minimum capital requirements based on an international set of capital standards, the Basel Accords. (Full article...)
A merchant bank is historically a bank dealing in commercial loans and investment. In modern British usage, it is the same as an investment bank. Merchant banks were the first modern banks and evolved from medieval merchants who traded in commodities, particularly cloth merchants. Historically, merchant banks' purpose was to facilitate or finance the production and trade of commodities, hence the name "merchant". Few banks today restrict their activities to such a narrow scope.
In modern usage in the United States, the term additionally has taken on a more narrow meaning, and refers to a financial institution providing capital to companies in the form of share ownership instead of loans. A merchant bank also provides advice on corporate matters to the firms in which they invest. (Full article...)
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World map showing real GDP growth rates for 2009; countries in brown were in a recession.
The Great Recession was a period of marked general decline observed in national economies globally, i.e. a recession, that occurred in the late 2000s. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country (see map). At the time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded that it was the most severe economic and financial meltdown since the Great Depression. One result was a serious disruption of normal international relations.
The causes of the Great Recession include a combination of vulnerabilities that developed in the financial system, along with a series of triggering events that began with the bursting of the United States housing bubble in 2005–2012. When housing prices fell and homeowners began to abandon their mortgages, the value of mortgage-backed securities held by investment banks declined in 2007–2008, causing several to collapse or be bailed out in September 2008. This 2007–2008 phase was called the subprime mortgage crisis. (Full article...)
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The Rhode Island banking crisis took place in the early 1990s, when approximately a third of the US state of Rhode Island's population lost access to funds in their bank accounts. The events were triggered by the failure of a Providence bank, Heritage Loan & Investment, due to long-term embezzlement by its president. News of its problems led to a bank run in which customers tried to withdraw money from the bank which did not have enough money available. In normal circumstances, depositors would be protected by the bank's insurance, but the state's private insurer had a long history of problems and was unable to fulfill its commitments. When the insurer collapsed, Governor Bruce Sundlun announced the closure of 45 credit unions and banks just hours after his inauguration.
In the first banking emergency in the state since the Great Depression, 300,000 depositors lost access to their money. Though some of the institutions reopened relatively quickly after obtaining federal insurance, many did not qualify and remained closed for an extended period of time. The state government set up an agency to manage the crisis, selling $697 million in bonds to repay people while filing about 300 lawsuits against the closed institutions and other companies that played a role in the crisis. (Full article...)
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An automated clearing house (ACH) is a computer-based electronic network for processing transactions, usually domestic low value payments, between participating financial institutions. It may support both credit transfers and direct debits. The ACH system is designed to process batches of payments containing numerous transactions, and it charges fees low enough to encourage its use for low-value payments. (Full article...)
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Retail banking, also known as consumer banking or personal banking, is the provision of services by a bank to the general public, rather than to companies, corporations or other banks, which are often described as wholesale banking (corporate banking).
Unlike a certificate of deposit and bonds, a time deposit is generally not negotiable; it is not transferable by the depositor, so that depositors need to deal with the financial institution when they need to prematurely cash out of the deposit. (Full article...)
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The CAMELS rating is a supervisory rating system originally developed in the U.S. to classify a bank's overall condition. It is applied to every bank and credit union in the U.S. and is also implemented outside the U.S. by various banking supervisory regulators.
Different wire transfer systems and operators provide a variety of options relative to the immediacy and finality of settlement and the cost, value, and volume of transactions. Central bank wire transfer systems, such as the Federal Reserve's Fedwire system in the United States, are more likely to be real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, as they provide the quickest availability of funds. This is because they post the gross (complete) entry against electronic accounts of the wire transfer system operator. Other systems, such as the Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS), provide net settlement on a periodic basis. More immediate settlement systems tend to process higher monetary value time-critical transactions, have higher transaction costs, and have a smaller volume of payments. A faster settlement process allows less time for currency fluctuations while money is in transit. (Full article...)
The FDIC is not supported by public funds; member banks' insurance dues are its primary source of funding. The FDIC charges premiums based upon the risk that the insured bank poses. When dues and the proceeds of bank liquidations are insufficient, it can borrow from the federal government, or issue debt through the Federal Financing Bank on terms that the bank decides. (Full article...)
HSBC traces its origin to a hong trading house in British Hong Kong. The bank was established in 1865 in Hong Kong and opened branches in Shanghai in the same year. It was first formally incorporated in 1866. In 1991, the present parent legal entity, HSBC Holdings plc, was established in London and the historic Hong-Kong-based bank from whose initials the group took its name became that entity's fully-owned subsidiary. The next year (1992), HSBC took over Midland Bank and thus became one of the largest domestic banks in the United Kingdom. (Full article...)
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), or simply Commonwealth Bank, is an Australian multinationalbank with businesses across New Zealand, Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It provides a variety of financial services, including retail, business and institutional banking, funds management, superannuation, insurance, investment, and broking services. The Commonwealth Bank is the largest Australian listed company on the Australian Securities Exchange as of August 2015, with brands including Bankwest, Colonial First State Investments, ASB Bank (New Zealand), Commonwealth Securities (CommSec) and Commonwealth Insurance (CommInsure). Its former constituent parts were the Commonwealth Trading Bank of Australia, the Commonwealth Savings Bank of Australia, and the Commonwealth Development Bank.
PSBC was set up with an initial capital of RMB20 billion in 2007 from the State Post Bureau. Today it has RMB1.5 trillion in deposits and the second largest number of branches, after the Agricultural Bank of China. (Full article...)
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The Central Bank of the Russian Federation (Russian: Центральный банк Российской Федерации), which brands itself as Bank of Russia (Russian: Банк России) and is also commonly referred to in English as the Central Bank of Russia (CBR), is the central bank of the Russian Federation. The bank was established on July 13, 1990. It claims the legacy of the State Bank of the Russian Empire (1860-1920) and of the Soviet Gosbank (1921-1992), even though both institutions covered a significant larger territorial scope.
Many subsidiaries, such as Abbey National, have been rebranded under the Santander name. The company is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50stock market index. In June 2023, Santander was ranked as 49th in the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world's biggest public companies. In 2023, the company was ranked 49th in the Forbes Global 2000. Santander is Spain's largest bank. (Full article...)
Following aggressive international expansion, ABN AMRO was acquired and broken up in 2007–2008 by a consortium of European banks, including Fortis which intended to take over its formed operations in the Benelux region. Fortis came under stress in the autumn of 2008, and was in turn broken up into separate national entities; the Dutch operations, namely Fortis Bank Nederland and the former ABN AMRO activities that Fortis had planned to absorb, were nationalized, restructured, and renamed ABN AMRO in mid-2010. On 20 November 2015, the Dutch government publicly re-listed the company through an IPO and sold 20 percent of the shares to the public. (Full article...)
Image 32Statesman Jan van den Brink was instrumental in the merger of Amsterdamsche Bank and Rotterdamsche Bank in 1964, and remained on the bank's board until 1978 (from AMRO Bank)