Ben Walsh

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On June 27, Bill Johnson, the CEO of Progress Energy, signed a contract to become the next CEO of Duke Energy. On July 2, the year-and-a-half-old merger agreement between Progress and Duke closed with the stipulation that Johnson would become the new company's CEO.

Yet, on July 3, Johnson's resignation was announced. Here's how Duke Energy explained what happened in its regulatory disclosure:

On July 3, 2012, Duke Energy announced that Mr. Johnson has resigned from all of his positions at Duke Energy and will no longer serve as President and Chief Executive Officer of Duke Energy or as a member of Duke Energy’s Board of Directors...effective as of 12:01 a.m. on July 3, 2012... Also, on July 2, 2012, the Board reappointed Mr. James E. Rogers as President and Chief Executive Officer of Duke Energy, effective as of 12:01 a.m. on July 3, 2012, in addition to his role as Chairman of the Board.

Yes, you're reading that right: Johnson served only one day as CEO. Here's Dealbreaker's Matt Levine: "I have no way of researching this but I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s unlikely that any company has ever previously announced the hiring and firing of a CEO within three paragraphs of each other in the same 8-K". The WSJ somehow needed to speak to actual sources to make following assertion: "New chief executives almost never quit days after accepting an employment contract, executive-compensation consultants said".

For years, there’s been a steady stream of stories laying out what was wrong with the US mortgage market. Now, the Consumer Financial Protection Board (CFPB) is out with a report on reverse mortgages, which allow the elderly to tap into accumulated home equity without selling their homes. Monetization: it’s not just for the kids anymore!

In concert with their report, the CFPB has a good explainer of what exactly a reverse mortgage is. (Hint: “it is a loan”.) The NYT has a good wrap up of the some of the problems with reverse mortgages laid out by the CFPB. For starters, there other, cheaper ways of doing the same thing (home equity loans or lines of credit). Worse, seniors are increasingly choosing to take the lump sum payment to refinance their existing mortgage or pay off other debt. That’s a dire window into the finances of America’s grandparents.

Credit is tight and all but unavailable to many Americans who need it. It would be great if reverse mortgages were an incremental solution to that problem. However, indebted seniors using reverse mortgages to pay off other debts are more exposed to financial risks like unexpected medical bills or home repairs after taking out a reverse mortgage:

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In January, Mitt Romney released his 2010 and 2011 tax returns. Disclosing his 13.9% effective tax rate for 2010 didn't make the issue go away. Now, Vanity Fair's Nicholas Shaxson has a fascinating deep dive into the arcana and ambiguity of Romney's tax records: "The assertion that he broke no laws is widely accepted. But it is worth asking if it is actually true. The answer, in fact, isn’t straightforward."

Shaxson details Romney's stake in a series of inscrutable offshore corporations, one of which, Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd, is particularly hard to decipher, partly because it was absent from several Romney financial disclosures before he finally disclosed it in his 2010 tax return.

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Bob Diamond, the CEO of Barclay's, is under increasing pressure (a $450 million settlement over charges of manipulating a key interest rate will do that). The governor of the Bank of England declined to call Diamond "fit and proper" to run the bank. For American readers, that's British English for 'I'm not saying he shouldn't be fired, but...'

The Financial Times has called on him to resign, saying "if he had an ounce of shame, he would immediately step down". The FT cites this almost too-poetic quote from Diamond: "Culture is difficult to define but for me the evidence of culture is how people behave when no one is watching".

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It's always the emails:

“always happy to help,”...“Done…for you big boy,”

“Dude. I owe you big time! Come over one day after work and I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger”.

Those are the thanks sent to Barclays employees for manipulating key interest rates. The gloating, conspiratorial tone is in full public view now that the bank has settled charges with the CFTC, the Department of Justice and the FSA that it manipulated Libor and Euribor for just over $450 million. CEO Bob Diamond promptly apologized in a written statement, and he and three other top execs will forgo bonuses this year. Breakingviews' George Hay notes that the scandal confirms the worst of the public's view of banks and thinks that the "full costs of the affair for Diamond and Barclays will be more than just financial".

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It isn't yet a full-fledged housing recovery, but it is good news of a certain kind: The Case-Schiller Index shows that average home prices increased 1.3% in April, after seven consecutive months of decline. April also showed the smallest year-over-year decline in home prices since September 2010:

What's driving the tentative recovery? If you ask the National Association of Realtors, it's partly because of shrinking home supply. Calculated Risk, who says it's likely home prices have bottomed nationally, dismisses concerns about how backlogs of distressed homes may affect home prices:

JPMorgan is improving risk management by boldly endeavoring to not make the same mistake  — huge positions in credit derivatives — twice, the WSJ reports. But that’s about as far as the changes go. The CIO will still be able to buy “asset-backed securities, emerging-markets debt, collateralized debt obligations and troubled corporate debt”.  That’s an incredibly small correction in response to the CIO’s losses.

The message from Jamie Dimon to traders is clear: our risk management process is fine, keep doing exactly what you were doing before. Just don’t do that (points to “$2 billion blunder” headline”).

In seeming contrast to his positive view of JPMorgan’s risk management, Dimon had less than kind words for new financial regulation in his testimony last week before the House and Senate. But here’s the weird thing: the two things aren’t actually that different.

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The Supreme Court is holding off issuing a ruling on the constitutionality of Obamacare until next week.

The are four basic scenarios of what the Court can do and the decision has massive economic implications. The industry accounts for some 18% of US GDP; billions of dollars in federal spending and the future of hundreds of community healthcare centers are in play.

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Shadow banking has at least one component that non-financial types have actually heard of: money market funds. These are supposed to be low-risk investments, with accordingly low yields. MMFs are all about keeping your principal intact – a net asset value (NAV) below $1 is generally a mortal failure.

In the fall of 2008, the Reserve Primary Fund famously broke the buck after it was stuck with massive amounts of Lehman Brothers debt, unleashing any manner of craziness into a market that had been treated by many as a savings account.

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Sunday's Greek election ended with a narrow victory for the conservative, pro-bailout New Democracy party, which now must try to form a coalition government. That is, of course, the same untenable status quo that preceded the election.

Meanwhile, the NYT reports that European leaders are working toward a "grand vision" that, at first blush, sounds a lot like the many vague promises we've heard from eurozone officials before. The plan this time is to prevent bank runs and what the NYT's Jack Ewing calls the "vicious cycle of government debt problems turning into banking crises". But like everything in Europe, the politics of this are tricky; Lisa Pollack walks us through who wants banking union, a closer political union, a fiscal union or some permutation of the three.