Moreover, JPMorgan appears have taken advantage of the financial crisis to expand its consumer lending business and vault to the top of the investment banking charts, including a top-flight ranking as a fee-earner.
Bank credit has not slowed more sharply only because of the expansion of public banks' portfolios, which today exceed in size the total lending by private banks (Chart 4).
If approved by regulators, this will be the biggest foreign acquisition ever by a French bank and the fifth-largest cross-border takeover in European banking (see chart).BNL has been seen as a takeover target for three years, but BNP Paribas was never thought to be a potential buyer.
The merger of Lloyds and HBOS, agreed in a hurry in September before the government launched a broad bail-out scheme, now looks unnecessary, and it will reinforce the dominance of a few players in retail and small-business banking (see chart).
That means anything from meatpacking to banking (see chart, p. 66).
Credit growth in central Europe depends largely on three Austrian banks Raiffeisen Bank International, Erste Bank and Bank Austria, owned by Italy's UniCredit and a handful of other west European banks (see chart).
American and European banks used to dominate the list of the world's biggest banks (see chart 1); the Chinese have since scaled the charts.
In 2008 the surplus of customer deposits over loans (ie, excess savings) at listed emerging-markets banks was about $1.6 trillion, compared with a deficit of about $1.9 trillion at rich-world banks (see chart 4).
Profitability compares very well with European banks (see chart), partly because the economic picture is brighter in Russia and partly because the bank's funding costs are so low as a result of limited competition in the regions.
[LAUGHS]To respond to this particular line of argument from the adminstration, such as it is, Mr Krugman cites Martin Wolf, who writes:The four biggest US commercial banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo – possess 64 per cent of the assets of US commercial banks (see chart) [chart not available online].
Britain and America account for a big chunk of the world's largest banks (see chart).
