Regional Bank Stock Quotes

The Bank of England distributes the nation’s money regionally in this way to avoid the danger of a single calamitous incident at one building destroying its stock of bank notes. This is important because, despite cheques and plastic, the public still uses a vast amount of cash. Approximately £37 billion is fluttering around the national economy daily in paper money.

Harvard Professor William Z. Ripley began warning as early as 1924 that, although the stock market kept going up, trouble was brewing. He first focused on the sharp rise in real estate prices and the surge in mortgage lending. While the price of land increased, the profits from land fell, particularly for farms (then the predominant use of land). Even during the prosperity of the mid-1920s, many farms were defaulting on their debts, and these defaults were creating a minor crisis at some regional banks. In seven states, nearly half of the banks doing business as of 1920 failed before 1929. Ripley believed these regional difficulties in the mortgage markets would soon spill over to the stock markets.

Ironically, solutions are not hard to devise. These solutions involve breaking big banks into units that are not too big to fail; returning to a system of regional stock exchanges, to provide redundancy; and reintroducing gold into the monetary system, since gold cannot be wiped out in a digital flash.

South-east Asia’s high savings rates, most of which flowed into bank deposits, lent themselves to outsize banking systems, which invited godfather abuse. There is, in turn, a pretty direct line from the insider manipulation of regional banks to the Asian financial crisis. The ‘over-banked’ nature of south-east Asia also helps explain a conundrum that has occupied some of the region’s equity investors: why, despite heady economic growth, have long-term stock market returns in south-east Asia been so poor? Since 1993, when a flood of foreign money increased capitalisation in regional markets by around 2.5 times in one calendar year,37 dollar-denominated returns with dividends reinvested (what investors call ‘total’ returns) in every regional market have been lower than those in the mature markets of New York and London, and a fraction of those in other emerging markets in eastern Europe and Latin America.38