Zombie Banks

This is an interesting article. If you're not business oriented then you won't understand it. To put it in laymen's terms, the Fed is not forcing banks to price the assets they hold at actual value because it would mean that some (many?) banks are insolvent. In order to prevent this the Fed allows the banks to "pretend" that their assets are worth more than they are so that they appear solvent. This is known as a Zombie bank and the US Govt was very critical of Japan when they did the exact same thing in the 1990's.