Still Stressed

摘要

The markets greeted the much-discussed banking stress tests with open arms. In fact investors actually cheered the news that banks needed to raise only an additional $75 billion. Gulp. But a closer look at the stress tests raises a number of questions about their quality. For starters, the government completed these exams awfully quickly - it took the feds just a few short months to evaluate the balance sheets of these financial institutions. Consider this: A private independent auditor, such as KPMG or Ernst & Young, would take at least a couple of months with an army of accountants to audit just one bank. The government, with far fewer resources, completed the stress tests on 19 of the country's largest banks in the same amount of time. Hardly a thorough audit.