Are commercial loans the next shoe to drop?

Updated

Why do banks exist? This keeps coming to mind as the horizon marking the beginning of the end of the financial crisis gets pushed further and further away. We need a safe place to park our cash, and the price we pay for that is razor thin deposit interest rates and multi-million dollar bonus payments to bankers who take those deposits and lend them to people who can't pay back the money. The risks pay off for bankers -- but for the rest of society, not so much.

The current financial crisis was based on the discovery the bankers were wrong about consumer loan repayment -- specifically, they made a slight mistake in assuming that consumers with no incomes would be able to repay mortgages. Now a new form of this toxic waste is rearing its ugly head -- business borrowers who stiff the banks.

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