The federal government backstops more than nine of every 10 new mortgages.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the rest of the U.S. government have backstopped more than 90percentt of new home loans.
Isolated as it is, and not part of any regional electricity grid, the metropolitan area of about 100,000 residents needs an electricity backstop more than most: In its sub-zero winters, pipes can freeze solid in as little as two hours.
Surely, we beleaguered taxpayers do not need to backstop any more institutions than we do now.
By conditioning ECB support on EFSF programmes, the timing of the implicit ECB backstop becomes more uncertain, weakening its near-term market impact, in our view.
Although elegant in theory, it proved badly flawed in practice: the crisis revealed that banks and their overseers had vastly underestimated the risks that had built up in the financial system.Leverage is a simpler, if cruder, measure of banks' riskiness and is meant to provide a backstop to more sophisticated risk-weighting measures.
And proponents of a European lender of last resort to insulate sovereigns from liquidity crises note how America can still borrow at 2% thanks to a deep and liquid government bond market backstopped by the Federal Reserve.Look more carefully, however, and the American example is more complicated.
Investors will not stop punishing Europe until its leaders devise a comprehensive program with a lot more money to backstop the Continent's banks and governments.
Though he was not a business expert — Mr. Pearlstine said that he and Mr. Pooley would "backstop" him on some of the more complicated coverage — editors said he was decisive and hard-working, if a bit aloof.
The danger, he said, is that the companies are using this implicit federal backstop to assume more risk and finance their expansion through increased debt.
