Aftermath of 2008 economic collapse: biggest global banks still...REALLY big

Nov. 16, 2011 — After three years of deliberations, the Financial Stability Board at the Bank of International Settlements recently released the names of 29 financial institutions it had deemed to be “globally systemically important.” Eight of those banks are in the United States, and their names are familiar.

Using data that had already been collected by Global Finance Magazine, as well as other data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Moody’s, and the financial reports of individual companies, the data visualization below shows how big each bank (as measured by total assets) was at the end of 2008, 2009, and 2010, as well as at the end of June of this year. (Assets are shown in billions of dollars: for example, $3,650B represents $3,650,000,000,000 or $3.65 trillion).

It turns out that most of the banks are bigger than they were in 2008.

To move through the years, use the slider in the upper right-hand corner of the visualization. To highlight all the “too big to fail” banks in a country, select the country on the color code on the right.