How are banks making money lately?

Factual Questions
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Here’s some more information about how dismal the banks’ conditions still are.

  1. For banks with less than $10 billion in assets, they lost a combined $1.8 billion in the third quarter.

  2. The charge-off rate for the quarter was 2.71%, a record high. Chargeoffs were $50.8 billion for the quarter, an 80.5% increase over a year ago.

  3. Non-performing assets increased to 4.94% of all loans and leases, another record high.

Basically, you still have banks trying to strengthen their balance sheets to be able to make it through what promises to be a tough 2010 as well. 133 banks have failed so far this year. 2010 will be at least as high.

Also, to those that say that banks are borrowing from the FED discount window at near zero rates, so they must be making money, non-deposit sources of funds actually declined by 6.2% meaning that the percentage of assets being funded by core deposits is the highest it has been since 1997 at 68.7%.