'Banks today are bigger and more opaque than ever..'

<blockquote>'Banks today are bigger and more opaque than ever, and they continue to behave in many of the same ways they did before the crash.

..

Bankers and regulators today might dismiss warnings that customer-accommodation derivatives could bring down the financial system as implausible. But a few years ago, they said the same thing about credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.

..

..the special-purpose entity has been reanimated, and is now known as the variable-interest entity. In the alphabet soup of Wall Street, the acronym has switched from SPE to VIE, but the idea is the same. Big companies create these entities to borrow money and buy assets, but—like Enron—they do not include them on their balance sheets. The problem is especially worrisome at banks: every major bank has substantial positions in VIEs.'

- What’s Inside America’s Banks? January 2013</blockquote>


Context

<blockquote> (2012 in Review) - '..desperate politicians and extraordinarily accommodative central bankers..'

Banking Reform

2013 Outlook, Part One: Global Monetary Conditions</blockquote>