The Bank Failure Crisis: Challenges in Enforcing Antitrust Regulation
On March 16, 2008, JP Morgan Chase agreed to purchase the quickly collapsing Bear Stearns Companies, then the fifth largest securities firm on Wall Street and an eighty-five-year-old pillar of investment banking, for ten percent of the firm’s value one week earlier. This triggered a wave of consolidation in the banking market unlike any before. One by one, commercial and investment banks began to merge as banks could no longer mitigate their losses from mortgage-backed securities., The banking landscape changed dramatically by the end of 2008, with only a few conglomerate banks dominating the canvas. Bank of America purchased Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial, JP Morgan Chase added Washington Mutual to its list of takeovers, and Wells Fargo took ownership of Wachovia. Read More …