Monday, March 29, 2010

Another Advantage for the Biggest Banks

This article is comparing the interest rates paid on deposits for different size banks as measured by amount in assets. Customer deposits are regarded as the cheapest and most stable source of funds for banks especially since the FDIC insures accounts up to 250,000. Average interest paid on deposits was 0.77 percent for banks holding $100 billion or more in assets; this is substantially less than the 1.73 percent, which is the average amount that banks holding less than 10 billion in assets must pay.

The 10 largest banks hold about $3.2 trillion of America’s $7.7 trillion of domestic deposits. Apply the differential in deposit interest rates, and those 10 appear be saving nearly $30 billion a year thanks to their size.

President Obama proposed that big banks pay a “crisis responsibility fee” that would cost them $9 billion a year for 10 years. According to this article he may have undershot the value of being too big to fail.

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