How Screwed Is This Bank?: JPMorgan Chase/Wells Fargo Edition

  

Are we talking, fire a few people and cut some plants or, like, Lehman redux?

According to the gurus at New York Magazine quarterly bank earnings season is upon us. And with it, the life-negating sight of hundreds of business journalists all parsing the same labyrinthine financial disclosures for signs of a bank's financial health or illness. This is the quarterly peek we get at the greasy innards of our nation's financial system — who's making money, who's losing it, who's cutting jobs, who's growing like kudzu.

Finding this out isn't easy. If you believe the banks and their press releases, every quarter is a RECORD quarter, with ALL-TIME HIGH profits and GROUNDBREAKING innovation. Problem spots, if there are any, are tucked away, buried in footnotes and tiny type beneath a banner of superlatives.

Here, we've developed a simpler rubric for evaluating banks based on their balance sheets. It's called, "How Screwed Is This Bank?"

Read all about it at http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/10/how-screwed-is-this-bank.html