By Matthew Goldstein

A measure aimed at protecting companies from community bank failures may be finding new life as a way to guard against the fallout from the political squabbling in Washington, D.C. over raising the debt ceiling.

Even though much of Wall Street believes that sanity will prevail in the end and the nation’s politicians will not allow a U.S. debt default to occur next week, the level of anxiety in the financial world has risen in the past few days. And that unease has led some money managers to begin looking at a post-financial crisis measure aimed at protecting non-interest bearing bank accounts as a potential safe haven.

By Matthew Goldstein

Derivatives guru Janet Tavakoli is a long-time critic of the rating agencies and in particular the role the raters played in the subprime debt crisis. And she says given the shabby job the rating agencies did in giving the green light to the subprime debt boom, it’s odd to think of firms like Standards & Poor’s playing such a big role in the ongoing US debt ceiling negotiations.

“Standard & Poor’s lost its credibility due to a long history of misrating financial products,” says Tavakoli.

By Matthew Goldstein and Svea Herbst-Bayliss

John Kinnucan, a research consultant who’s been linked to an ongoing insider trading probe, claims Maverick Capital founder Lee Ainslie has stiffed him by not paying all of the hedge fund’s bill from last year.

The Portland, Oregon-based Kinnucan tells Reuters/ Unstructured Finance that Maverick owes him $15,000 for research information he provided on technology companies in the second-half of 2010. The consultant says it was anger over Maverick’s outstanding tab that prompted him to send a brief and alarming email this week to Ainslie warning him that his $11 billion fund may “soon be charged with insider trading.”

By Matthew Goldstein

It looks like the problems that Phil Falcone’s upstart wireless network may cause with some airline navigation systems may be impacting the price of the more than $1 billion in high-yield debt LightSquared has sold to hedge funds and mutual funds.

Over the past two weeks, the prevailing market price of LightSquared”s four-year term “junk” loans has slumped to about 95 cents on the dollar. That’s still a solid price for the high-yield offering that carries a 12 percent coupon. But it’s down considerably from late May, when the loans were fetching as much as 102 cents on the dollar.

By Matthew Goldstein

Valuing derivatives–especially complex ones tied to esoteric assets–is always a tough proposition. And maybe that’s what a previously unknown whistleblower action involving Deutsche Bank is all about.

The other day I wrote about a big settlement Deutsche reached in that matter with a former trader, who claims some of the bank’s most esoteric derivatives were improperly valued to hide trading losses. Deutsche denies the allegation and says an internal investigation found no substance to the trader’s charge.