But the financial crisis did not involve commercial banks failing due to investment banking activities.
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The repeal of hopelessly outdated Glass-Steagall eased the financial crisis, by enabling commercial bank holding companies to purchase and rescue failing investment banks.
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In response to the crisis of 2008, commercial banks are now required to hold liquidity cushions, usually in the form of government bonds.
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During the housing crisis, many people asserted that commercial real estate was the other shoe waiting to drop.
Thanks to the eurozone crisis, the Bank of England thinks commercial banks probably need all the capital they can get.
Particularly so for GE, still struggling to recover from its near-death experience in the financial crisis when it was suddenly deprived of the commercial paper it needed to fund its daily operations.
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JPMorgan is taking money through the Treasury's capital plan, but the diverse commercial bank company has endured the credit crisis relatively well compared with others.
Many view the so-called Volcker plan as aimed mostly at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that turned into a commercial bank in the depths of the crisis.
Only one of the Bank of England's three reviews into how it has conducted itself since the crisis of 2008 is being carried out by a commercial banker.
The government came under further scrutiny with a question on the eurozone crisis from Liberal Democrat Lord Dykes, which prompted Commercial Secretary to the Treasury Lord Sassoon to say that the UK "must stick to its own fiscal deficit reduction policies" and "stick to keeping our own house in order".
In the five years since the start of the crisis, the investment-banking arms of large international commercial banks have won a dominant share of key markets such as bonds, currencies and commodities (see chart).
So far, Moody's has only faced legal action from private investors, including Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, over losses related to the financial crisis.
The worst mistakes of this crisis were arguably made in relatively simple areas of retail and commercial banking from the concentration of risk in the corporate-loan book of HBOS to Wachovia's kamikaze acquisition of Golden West, a Californian lender stuffed full of mortgage-shaped grenades.
Commercial Secretary to the Treasury Lord Sassoon agreed that resolution of the crisis was in Britain's "vital national interest".
Commercial real estate loan defaults did rise along with residential defaults, but the commercial sector never went down enough to throw the financial system into crisis.
Unlike banks, which have two-thirds of their liabilities in sticky, low-cost deposits, GE gets most of its funding from commercial paper and bonds that can become expensive or inaccessible in a crisis.
Until recently, investors were shunning commercial property in smaller cities, especially those hit hard by the housing crisis.
The oft-cited repeal of Glass-Steagall, for example, actually eased the crisis, by enabling the market rescue of failing investment banks and brokerage firms by commercial bank holding companies.
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That liquidity crisis is why the Federal Reserve had to step in last week and act as commercial bank of last resort, agreeing to buy short term notes called commercial paper directly from companies.
Of course, the calls to shrink banks and separate basic commercial banking activity from everything else are the result of the 2008 financial crisis when government bailouts were made to banks that were too big to fail.
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While Wall Street and Washington fret about how badly investment banks could damage the economy, Tuesday provided a fresh reminder that commercial banks could be a bigger problem as the second wave of the credit crisis begins its run.
American commercial banks were subject to a leverage ratio in the run-up to the financial crisis: they still ran into trouble.
The financial crisis that roiled major New York industries left behind a trail of vacancies throughout Manhattan, unnerving its commercial real estate market.
He deftly sidestepped the financial crisis that nearly drove GE into insolvency, because UTC never built up a finance arm dependent upon commercial paper markets for funding.
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The losses have spilled from commercial and investment banks that manufactured and sold (or held) the mortgage derivatives now in crisis to the institutions that invested in them or played in the game as well.
During the crisis the Federal Reserve and Treasury forced most of America's big independent investment banks into arranged marriages with commercial firms.
General Electric (nyse: GE - news - people ) posted a letter on its web site, seeking to calm investors by emphasizing that the majority of its commercial real estate and residential mortgage assets are outside of the United States, whose domestic real estate crisis is at the heart of the world's current credit upset.
But there is commercial logic, too: Spanish bonds, say, promise a nice return if you think the debt crisis will go no further.
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