Fed’s Bullard: Housing should be key in reg reform (Daly, Reuters) A good point. And the Fed should use its authority under HOEPA to make sure all mortgages are underwritten so that borrowers can make a full payment.

Fed group eyes insurance fund for repo market (Cooke/Comlay, Reuters) Insurance funds are dangerous. They have a habit of increasing moral hazard.

Fed to bare tightening plan (Hilsenrath, WSJ) Wouldn’t it be better to increase reserve requirements than to increase interest rates paid on excess reserves? The second plan pays banks to do something the Fed could simply require if it wanted to…

Hedge-funder sues to keep rent at $380 (Dealbook)

Red Mist: Who matters in China’s financial system is barely understood (Economist)

Madison WI bus driver highest paid city employee (Mosiman, WIStJournal) $159k….thanks to a great union contract.

The world capital of killing (Kritsof, NYT)

WW1 camoflauge to defeat Uboats (Twistedsifter) Fascinating.

Worst airline ad ever?

…CoStar Group Inc., a provider of commercial real estate data, announced that it had agreed to buy the MBA’s 10-story headquarters building in Washington, D.C., for $41.3 million. The price is far below the $79 million the trade group says it paid for the glass-walled building in 2007, while it was still under construction. The price also is far below the $75 million financing that the MBA received from a group of banks led by PNC Financial Services Group Inc. to finance the purchase.

The 48% loss is a bit worse than average for commercial estate, which has declined 43% from the peak according to the Moody’s/REAL commercial real estate index.

Kempner announced the plans for the new building near the top of the market in January 2007. It quickly proved an albatross. At the time we wrote about it in 2008, MBA hadn’t found any tenants to occupy the 60% of the building it wasn’t using. To date, they’ve filled just a sixth of that space according to the Wall Street Journal.

A few days after our story, Kempner said he would resign.

Though it must have been clear towards the end of 2007 that the building would prove a costly financial mistake, MBA still paid Kempner handsomely.

According to Forms 990 filed by MBA with the IRS, Kempner made $1.4 million in the year ending 9/30/08, down only $50k from the prior year and still $250k above what he made in fiscal 2006.

Just happen to be in DC today — yes, there is A LOT of snow — and 1331L was on my walk to work…

…still lots of space available for anyone interested.

But this ignores bond market realities. The PIIGS on Europe’s periphery — Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain — have huge budget deficits as a percent of GDP, but don’t have the power to print money to pay it back. So bond markets are bidding up the cost to insure their debt:

Readers should offer their own view, but seems to me there are three options here, two bad and one nuclear.

1) The PIIGS cut their budgets to pay back debt. Such austerity programs are typically very difficult to get done in democracies. Deficit spending stays high long past the point that it’s possible to work off debt over any reasonable period. To successfully dig out of the hole requires cuts so deep, voters never agree to them.

2) Europe bails them out, which is the easiest solution in the short-run. Richer European countries certainly have the wherewithal to bail out a small country like Greece or Portugal. But it’s a dangerous precedent to set. What about Spain? It’s 14% of the Euro economy compared to 6% for Portugal/Ireland/Greece combined. If economies keep spending with an eye towards a bailout from the ECB, eventually you get #3.

3) The monetary union breaks apart. The customary way out of a debt crisis is to devalue one’s currency, see Argentina in 2001. It couldn’t maintain it’s dollar peg and still service its debt, so it devalued its currency and defaulted on debt. But this locked the country out of the international capital markets and drove them into a deep, though brief, Depression. For Greece to devalue, it would have to pull out of the Euro, pass a law that it’s debts are payable in new local currency and then devalue.

Some combination of #2 and #1 is probably the only sustainable solution. And that’s what the market appears to expect, what with Greek 5-yr CDS falling back to $389,000 from $425,000 yesterday.

But any help must come with tough conditions. Cuts must be deep enough that further rounds of bailouts won’t be needed.

UPDATE: Nick Gogerty points out that the IMF is another potential source of rescue funds. But whether bailout cash originates from the Germans or the IMF doesn’t change the fundamental problem, which is that Greek state is living well beyond its means…

#16

• Failed bank: First American State Bank of Minnesota, Hancock MN
• Acquiring bank: Community Development Bank, Ogema MN
• Vitals: at 12/31/09, assets of $18.2 million, deposits of $16.3 million
• Estimated DIF damage: $3.1 million

Moody’s warns about U.S. credit rating (FT) These warnings have been fairly frequent.

Bernanke’s exit strategy: tighter reserve requirements (Kessler, WSJ) A good op-ed from yesterday. Another way of sequestering excess reserves, besides paying banks not to lend them out, is to just require them not to.

Unemployment rate falls despite declining payrolls (Mutikani, Reuters) The hard data, for those interested, is here.

How banks can win despite being second (Eavis, WSJ) Modifying the first mortgage frees up homeowner income to service their home equity lines of credit and other second lien mortgages…

Why we keep getting poorer: housing costs rising as % of income (Charles Hugh Smith)

Biggest bubble in history is growing every day (Pesak, Bloomberg) He’s referring to China’s reserves.

13-year-old QB commits to USC (Carrosquillo, FoxNY)

Toyota… (imgur)

New ski warnings (CollegeHumor)

Global air traffic volume (note how it varies with the sun)…

Bank of New York Mellon is growing – at a price. The giant trust bank on Tuesday agreed to buy PNC Financial Services’ back-office operations for $2.3 billion. That works out to 23 times annualized fourth-quarter 2009 earnings. That is a heady multiple for only a marginal boost in market share.

PNC’s shareholders seem to be getting the better end of the transaction. The sale of the PNC Global Investment Servicing (GIS) unit boosts its capital and should help it repay $7.6 billion of bailout money received from the government.

Thanks to the deal, PNC’s Tier 1 capital ratio rises to 6.7 percent from 6 percent. PNC probably needs to raise yet more equity to pay back its Troubled Asset Relief Program funds, but this is a good start.

The advantages for BNY Mellon shareholders look less certain. The bank says the acquisition complements multiple business lines. But Robert Kelly, the chief executive, seems to be coughing up too much cash for just a 4 percent gain in assets under administration. The GIS business has been lumpy. And even using last quarter’s earnings as the basis for analysis – the unit’s strongest quarter of 2009 – BNY Mellon is paying a chunky multiple.

The purchaser reckons it can squeeze out $120 million a year of cost cuts. Taxed and capitalized, those savings are worth around $720 million today. Take that off the purchase price, and BNY Mellon is still paying $1.6 billion for the GIS business – a price-to-earnings ratio of 16 times, which still looks a full price. It’s the same multiple that leading rival Northern Trust trades on, while BNY Mellon’s own shares trade at just 12 times this year’s estimated earnings.

So to sell the deal to shareholders, management is talking about between $200 million and $300 million of extra revenue based on integrating GIS into BNY Mellon. But such cross-selling opportunities often turn out to be elusive, and even BNY Mellon acknowledges they could take three to four years to transpire.

If Mr. Kelly and his crew can find a way to produce such revenue benefits, both sides eventually may be able to call the deal a success. But for now, PNC holders have more to cheer.

U.S. could extend bank fee beyond 10 years, Geithner says (Di Leo/Crittenden, WSJ) The proposed tax on non-deposit liabilities should be permanent, and should target ALL liabilities, including repos. Deposits are guaranteed via FDIC. While that insurance is dramatically underpriced (witness the cash-strapped state of the DIF) at least banks pay something for it. Non-deposit liabilities are also effectively guaranteed, for the biggest banks anyway, via the promise that none which is too big will be allowed to fail. To counter moral hazard, this implicit guarantee must be taxed in order to offset any benefit derived from lower funding costs.

Must-Read: What’s a college degree really worth? (Pilon, WSJ) A lot less than you think, as argued here before. This piece is well-written with lots of good data!

AIG derivatives staff said to forgo $20 million in retention bonuses (Katz/Son, Bloomberg) They’re still well-paid, but this is better than nothing I suppose.

Deficits as a national security issue — Sanger NYT & Seib WSJ — Good to see prominent columnists picking up the thread. A refresher on the Suez Crisis of 1956 offers helpful background.

Rising FHA default rate foreshadows foreclosure crush (ElBoghdady/Keating, WaPo) Key line: “the FHA projects that it will pay out claims to lenders on one out of every four loans made in 2007 — the worst rate in at least three decades. The claim rate should be nearly the same on the vastly larger volume of loans made in 2008.”

Goldman spokesman’s most withering rebuttals (Daily Intel) Methinks he doth protest too much…

North Korea propaganda, with translations (nikopop)

VIDEO — Reporter filing report on the blindfold half court shot, makes own impossible shot (fox4)

Trader caught taking a break…

Barney Frank: The poor should rent, not own (Indiviglio, Atlantic)

Citigroup said to plan sale of private equity unit (Keoun/Keehner, Bloomberg) Citi cites raising cash to pay down debt as the reason to sell this unit. Of course this would also get Pandit some brownie points with Paul Volcker, who wants commercial banks out of private equity, hedge funds and proprietary trading…

HCA owners get $1.75 billion payout (Lattam, WSJ) Speaking of private equity…a nice payout for investors in one of the biggest LBOs in history.

All those little Stuy towns (Morgenson, NYT) Bullying as a business model…

Goldman Sachs and the $100 million question (Times UK) This is a thinly sourced article that claims Lloyd Blankfein will get a blowout $100m bonus for 2009. If true, talk about giving the finger to, well, pretty much everyone.

Five myths about America’s credit card debt (Manning, WaPo)

Happy palindrome day! (imgur)

Barefoot running: How humans ran comfortably, and safely, before the invention of shoes (Science Daily)

Accidental time capsule…

The President thinks he can help the economy with more deficit spending. But debt is the reason we have a jobs problem in the first place. We’ve accumulated more debt than our incomes can support (see chart at bottom) so the economy is trying to pay it down, leading to less spending and higher unemployment. Adding to the debt pile only makes the employment picture uglier in the long-run.

In his blog entry introducing the budget, Office of Management and Budget Chief Peter Orszag tries to argue that the administration is working to close the deficit. Meanwhile the spin from the White House is that this budget marks the beginning of a “new era of responsibility.” Of course that’s not at all what we’re getting. Orszag even trots out the line that we can grow our way out of debt:

Economic recovery – on its own – would take our deficits from 10 percent of GDP to 5 percent of GDP.

But GDP — a measure of spending — can’t grow unless we’re spending more. Seems to me the only way for aggregate spending to grow faster than government spending is for the private sector to spend more. But households are tapped out. They’re saving more to repair already busted balance sheets.

We’ve published the following chart here at Reuters, which illustrates a key talking point for deficit doves:

At 10%, the deficit is far smaller as a share of GDP than during WWII. We’ve spent far more before, the argument goes, so it’s no trouble to spend so much today. One problem with this argument is that it ignores unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security. If the budget was calculated according to the same accounting principles that apply to corporations, the deficit would look much worse. We had no such unfunded liabilities in the ’40s.

The argument is also incomplete. Americans’ total debt burden amounts to much more than what the federal government owes. Including private debt makes the picture look far worse than the ’40s:

It was easier to service higher public debt in the ’40s because de-leveraging during the Depression had wiped out most private debts.

Debt is the problem. We (should have) learned that after the Depression, yet we’re piling on more in a misguided effort to prop up an economy that desperately needs to de-lever.

Obama certainly inherited a mess, but driving us deeper into debt only compounds the unemployment problem.

Avatar breaks $2 billion worldwide box office mark (Box Office Mojo) Very impressive of course, though on an inflation-adjusted basis, Avatar ranks just 25th all time. Nothing will ever beat Gone with the Wind.

Volcker Op-Ed: How to reform the financial system (NYT) Unfortunately not a lot of additional detail over his proposed reform plan. But for those not already familiar with it, this does offer a helpful articulation of Volcker’s reform philosophy. Yves is happy Volcker has entered the fray, but believes he needs to go beyond his current thinking.

Frank says banks “recognize reality” by throwing support behind wind-down fund (Howell, Reuters) Am I alone in my fear that a wind-down fund will make matters worse? The idea that new “resolution authority” must be accompanied by a pool of funds to bail out systemic failures compounds moral hazard greatly. Even assuming that banks will be charged high enough insurance premiums to give the fund sufficient financial heft — how well has that worked with the Deposit Insurance Fund? — the very existence of this fund will provide an implicit guarantee to the creditors of the firms’ backed by it. The DIF already creates major moral hazard by removing all depositor incentives to worry about the health of their banks. Now an even larger slice of creditors would be insulated from risk.

PDF — TARP inspector general says program will cost less than expected, warns that little has changed (SIGTARP) In his latest quarterly report, Neil Barofsky acknowledges that TARP won’t cost as much as once expected. But he also warns that “even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.” Section 3 of the report emphasizes that present government policy risks re-flating the housing bubble.

PDF – Treasury releases first quarterly PPIP report (Treasury) A breakdown of the the legacy securities program, which combined public and private capital in order to support the price of toxic assets. The use of non-recourse government leverage, plus Treasury’s equity investment, shifted principal risk on these assets to the public’s balance sheet. It took a while to get off the ground, and the program isn’t very large — less than $25 billion of investments. So far the funds are breaking even.

Justice, medieval style (Leeson, Boston.com) Interesting article, though the author offers little evidence to support his claim that trials by “ordeal” worked. (e.g. judging innocence/guilt based on whether the accused sank/floated when tied up and thrown in water.) ht reader Paul M.

New amateur video of Challenger disaster (LiveLeak)

Your brain on football (Time) Is brain trauma the rule more than the exception?

Awesome impressions (Funny Ordie) Comedian does DeNiro, Ahnold, Stallone and Morgan Freeman

Actor Rip Torn arrested drunk, armed in bank (Michaud, Reuters)

• Failed bank: First National Bank of Georgia, Carrollton GA
• Acquiring bank: Community & Southern Bank, Carrollton GA
• Vitals: at 9/30/09, assets of $832.6m, deposits of $757.9m
• Estimated DIF damage: $260.4m

#11

• Failed bank: Florida Community Bank, Immokalee FL
• Acquiring bank: Premier American Bank NA, Miami FL
• Vitals: at 9/30/09, assets of $875.5m, depoists of $795.5m
• Estimated DIF damage: $352.6m
  

#12

• Failed bank: Marshall Bank NA, Hallock MN
• Acquiring bank: United Valley Bank, Cavalier ND
• Vitals: at 9/30/09, assets of $59.9m, deposits of $54.7m
• Estimated DIF damage: $4.1m

#13

• Failed bank: Community Bank & Trust, Cornelia GA
• Acquiring bank: SCBT Bank NA, Orangeburg SC
• Vitals: at 9/30/09, assets of $1.21 billion, deposits of $1.11 billion
• Estimated DIF damage: $354.5m

#14

• Failed bank: First Regional Bank, LA CA
• Acquiring bank: First Citizens Bank & Trust, Raleigh NC
• Vitals: assets of $2.18 billion, deposits of $1.87 billion
• Estimated DIF damage: $825.5m

#15

• Failed bank: American Marine Bank, Bainbridge Island WA
• Acquiring bank: Columbia State Bank, Tacoma WA
• Vitals: at 9/30/09, assets of $373.2m, deposits of $308.5m
• Estimated DIF damage: $58.9 m

While Greece gets much of the news, Chandler argues that it’s in Spain where the policy dilemma is “most stark.”

Today Spain reported that its unemployment rate in Q4 rose to 18.8% from 17.9% in Q3.  The consensus was for a rise toward 18.5%.  The unemployment rate has doubled in the past two years.  As seems to be typical in  Europe, the unemployment [rate] is especially pronounced for young people. In Spain it’s 40%…

Cyclical forces and the €8 billion public works program pushed Spain’s deficit to around 11.2% of GDP last year according to the EC.  This is almost as large as Greece’s.  One key difference between the two in this context is that Spain’s debt to GDP is considerably lower than Greece, giving it perhaps greater chance to stabilize the debt/GDP ratios before they become ruinous.

In the face of such sobering news on the labor market today, Spain officials have felt compelled to indicate that they are considering increasing their efforts to cut the budget deficit quicker.  The government is contemplating proposals that will cut another €50 billion or 5% of GDP by 2013.

Rolfe here. Victor Mallet at FT has the news: Spain unveils radical austerity budget.

This illustrates the dilemma policy makers face.  The economy does not warrant an end to fiscal support yet.  The IMF has argued this.  The EC has argued this.  But the dramatic market response to Greece has been a siren call, seemingly forcing policy makers–not just in Spain, but Portugal earlier this week and Poland earlier today too–to mitigate the wrath of the bond vigilantes.

By appeasing the vigilantes, officials risk aggravating the economic downturn, which offsets some of the fiscal austerity and spurs social tensions.   [But] if the vigilantes’ concerns are not addressed in a satisfactory fashion, capital will strike, at least partially, and interest rates will rise…also exacerbating the economic downturn.

Many developed economies have borrowed so much, they can borrow no more. While borrowers love to hate their lender, they need him desperately if they’ve levered up their lifestyle past a point supported by their income.

Governments that rely too much on the bond market for funding should expect the market to turn against them eventually.

MS looking into legal action against ZeroHedge (Teri Buhl) Will they actually sue? Probably not. Still, ZH’s emphasis on quantity over quality means they too often lift the work of others. Blogs link to content all the time of course, but proper attribution is important. And ZH most certainly DOES NOT have permission to reprint research coming from Wall St. analysts.

Wall St. tries to put price on Volcker rule (Sanati, Dealbook) Goldman is said to be in the most trouble, since a larger piece of its business is driven by proprietary trading. But can’t they just give up the bank charter they got last year in order to avoid any new Volcker-rule regs?

Simon Johnson joins HuffPo (Felix) As part-time biz editor.

GDP grows 5.7% (Mutikani, Reuters) The guys at Variant Perception have been saying to expect blowout growth this year coming off a low number, but they warn that it’s all dependent on government largess, which is not sustainable. The market knows this. Stocks are flat on this news.

Bank sues victim to avoid replacing stolen funds (Consumerist) Hackers got away with $800,000, but the bank can’t make it all up. So it’s pre-emptively suing the victim…

Are they AIG conspiracy theories really so nutty? (Reilly, Bloomberg) Geithner, Paulson and Bernanke have all said they had nothing to do with the decision to make a full pay out to AIG’s CDS counterparties. So who was in charge??

Bin Laden rebukes U.S. on climate change (Healy, NYT) No, really.

Bunch of phonies mourn JD Salinger (The Onion)

Dog saved after floating away on Baltic sea ice (Guardian)

Baby platypi…

The broadcast can be seen here.

For users that are twitterers, you can send questions for Felix to ask Roubini via #askroubini.

Mine: Mr. Roubini, when was the last time you gave a sound bite to the press that didn’t include a letter of the alphabet to describe the economic cycle?

Or: Could the recession, in fact, be Q-shaped instead of W, L or U-shaped?

Simple maneuver: As with most business in the Senate, Bernanke’s confirmation only required 51 votes. But before getting to the final vote, the Senate must first vote to cut off debate. Cloture, it’s called.

Seven senators, including six Democrats, voted aye on cloture and then flipped to nay on the motion to confirm:

Six Dems: Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Al Franken (Minn.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Kaufman (Del.), Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), and Byron Dorgan (N.D.)

One Rep: George LeMieux (Fla.)

Great cast too…in order of sheer coolness: obviously Douglas, toss up between Frank Langella and Eli Wallach, Josh Brolin, and Shia LaBeouf.

Love the cell phone bit.

Fed as chump or Fed as crony (Yves Smith) Long form thoughts about why Tim Geithner’s defense yesterday was troubling.

Bernanke seen winning second term (Felsenthal, Reuters)

FOMC statement, redacted (David Merkel) Picking apart the Fed’s FOMC Statement yesterday. The headline is that they still see rates staying low for an “extended period,” which is problematic language/policy in my opinion because it will lead to bank/investor complacency. Quantitative easing, i.e. printing electronic money to buy MBS and other paper, will end on schedule at the end of March. Look for it to pick up again in the future. To fight off deflation, the Fed will be forced into multiple rounds of quantitative easing….just like the Bank of Japan.

Bono invests in Yelp (Bits) Elevation Partners, the VC firm funded by U2’s lead singer (among others), is committing $100 million to the local search site. No word on the % stake the money will buy, but $75 million will be paid to existing shareholders to cash them out. Good deal for Yelp? We know that they turned down a $500m offer from Google recently. If Elevation is getting anything less than 20% of the company for this investment, it would value the company at greater than $500 million.

Prime Minister: Greece victim of “rumors” (Bloomberg) Yeah, uh huh. And Wall Street was unfairly maligned by short sellers worried about capital shortages in fall ‘08.

Freddie delinquencies increase sharply (CR)

Divided SEC makes climate another “risk” (Scannell/Hughes, WSJ) Investors aren’t clamoring for this information in 10-Qs. The Republican commissioners have this one nailed: “a breathtaking waste” of the SEC’s time/resources and a foolish, misguided gesture to put the SEC’s imprimatur on an agenda about which it has zero expertise.

How to report the news (YouTube) Brilliant.

Academics fight rise of creationism at universities (Guardian) I had no idea this was a problem outside of the American bible belt.

VIDEO: Dump truck destroys pedestrian bridge in Turkey (Break) A guy on the bridge sees trouble coming but freezes…..doesn’t think to run back….

Jon Stewart on Obama’s war against bankers…

What they lacked in knowledge and nuance, Congress made up for in volume and OUTRAGE. The worst moment I saw was the utterly bogus comparison by Rep. Stephen Lynch between AIG’s payout to Goldman (100¢ on the dollar!) and the bailout offer for Bear Stearns shareholders (only $2 per share). 100 is a bigger number than 2, you see.

Geithner was lucky to be doing battle with such an unprepared, unimpressive group.

His defense, such as it was, amounted to the following:

Had the Fed imposed haircuts on AIG counterparties, it would have led to AIG’s credit rating being downgraded and the company (and consequently the economy) would have collapsed.

But AIG had already been downgraded, that’s why the government stepped in with a bailout. At that point the firm’s liabilities were taxpayer backed, so it strains credulity to say that extinguishing certain CDS it had written would cause systemic fallout in and of itself. Essentially what was happening here was unused insurance contracts were being extinguished. (Imagine a pro-rata refund from your insurer for a homeowner’s policy it wants to cancel…)

And there was precedent for this kind of negotiation. Eric Dinallo, former Commissioner of the NYS Dept. of Insurance and current candidate for Eliot Spitzer’s old job, had previously negotiated haircuts on CDS written by the monoline bond insurers. They were never forced into a taxpayer bailout. Did anyone at the Fed pick up the phone to consult Dinallo? Why not?

At the hearing, Geithner said he took “great pride” in his judgment to pay out 100¢ on the dollar to AIG counterparties because, he claims, it saved us from economic catastrophe.

No doubt the system was on the verge of collapse. But the biggest threat was undercapitalized banks. The payout to AIG counterparties was just a backdoor bailout for them. As Dan Alpert of Westwood Capital points out:

Every dollar of [haircut] would…amount to a dollar less of capital on bank balance sheets today (actually more, because in the interim the affected banks made money with that capital). If the discount was more than a little, some of the institutions would have required “front door” bailouts, or would have failed.

That’s why everyone is still so angry about this, and Goldman’s ridiculous claims that it would have been fine even absent the $12.9 billion it received from taxpayers via AIG. Sure, they’ve paid back TARP. But here’s another $12.9 billion of your money that’s helping to fund their bonus pool.

Jim Rickards offers a good closing thought on the matter:

What was actually done [in the AIG bailout] shows a breathtaking lack of imagination and legal skill on the part of the people involved.  The Fed and Treasury do have an obligation to save the system, but they have no obligation to save each and every member of the system.  That’s a big difference.  You may need to build a firewall but it’s important to build it in the right place.  Makes sense to protect the little guy but where was the national security interest in protecting Goldman? This is why I am just speechless when I hear Geithner testify that though he was utterly surrounded by ex-Goldman people they somehow had NO IMPACT on his judgment to save Goldman.  How blind and unaware can you be?

Not so blind that you can’t be Treasury Secretary…

SEC to vote on new money fund rules (Johnson, WSJ) Unfortunately, the SEC won’t do away with $1 NAVs, price fluctuations will be published on a 60 day lag. So investors will continue to treat money funds as cash equivalents, even though they aren’t, and the systemic risk they pose won’t really go away.

Fed weighs interest on reserves as new benchmark (Lanman, Bloomberg) This will be a key interest rate to watch whether or not the Fed makes it the benchmark. The expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet over the past year+ has stuffed banks full of excess reserves, reserves that banks will lend out if the economy — and loan demand — picks up. The Fed needs to keep those excess reserves sequestered in order to prevent inflation. To do so, it may have to pay higher rates. For a fuller explanation see this previous column.

Failed Senate vote on budget commission shows difficulty in cutting deficits (Faler, Bloomberg) So much for a fiscal commission based on the base-closing commission…

After three months, only 35 subscriptions to Newsday’s website (Koblin, NY Observer) Print subscribers get free online access. But this is still not a good showing for selling online only subscriptions. The NYT needn’t worry that it’s pick up will be this small when they put up their pay wall. I, for one, will pay for their content, as I pay for WSJ. I ‘d subscribe to FT too if their website wasn’t so slow…

Top English central banker supports splitting banks (Thomas, NYT) This should come as no surprise. A speech by Mr. King in October laid out his support for steps similar to those Obama just released.

Roubini: Greece is bankrupt (Khan, CNBC) Thank you, Captain Obvious.

Obama aims to ax moon mission (Block/Matthews, O.S.) There’s no constituency for budget cuts, so Obama deserves support from budget hawks for moves like this. We all like the moon I’m sure. But I like things like veterans benefits much more.

Iraqi government spends $85m on dowsing rods sold as “bomb detectors” (Hawley/Jones, BBC) Those not familiar with dowsing rods, see Wikipedia.

Wait, how much snow? (YouTube) No. He didn’t.

Wow…

Specifics are being worked out, but what is clear is that Paul Volcker’s “size” proposal will limit future growth by acquisition only. It won’t force existing firms to shrink nor limit their ability to grow organically.

But if Obama wants to end the too-big-to-fail paradigm, if he wants to eliminate the possibility that one firm’s failure could cause a cascading financial collapse, he needs to engineer a system with more circuit breakers. Shrinking banks is crucial.

Like the power grid, the financial system is huge, dynamically complex and interconnected. A single point of failure can cause a cascading collapse. In 2003, some overgrown trees in Ohio were enough to cause a blackout that hit 55 million from Ontario to New York. In 2008, the failure of any one of a handful of financial firms could have plunged the economy into Depression.

True, size isn’t the only factor contributing to systemic risk. Yet despite thousands of bank failures during the savings and loan crisis, there was never a risk of systemic collapse because no bank was large enough to crash the system.

Another counter-argument is that gross balance sheet size isn’t by itself an indicator of risk. Certainly some balance sheets are riskier than others, but there remain 10 to 20 in the United States, of varying risk profiles, that are systemically dangerous.

Some argue that shrinking big banks would eliminate efficiencies. While size may have first order benefits, recent events show these are outweighed by second order bailout costs.

Nor do we need large banks to finance large deals. Big loans can be handled via syndication.

No doubt it would be tough to break up big banks, but we’ve done something similar before. Standard Oil and AT&T were split into Baby Oils and Baby Bells. Why not figure out a way to split too-big-to-fail financials into Baby Banks?

From Reuters’ Stephen Culp:

Here’s the report from the National Association of Realtors. They try to put a positive spin on the plunge by noting that prices rose. First American CoreLogic reported last week, however, that prices are again heading down.

SEC mulled national security status for AIG details (Goldstein, Reuters) “U.S. securities regulators originally treated the New York Federal Reserve’s bid to keep secret many of the details of the American International Group bailout like a request to protect matters of national security…”

Avatar to surpass Titanic as top box office draw of all time (Box Office Mojo) Inflation in the price of movie tickets plus the fact that many are paying $16 to watch Avatar in 3D, mean the comparison isn’t totally fair. But whatever. James Cameron has directed the two best grossing movies of all time. And Avatar is poised to go well over $2 billion…in less than two months!

BOJ open to extending loans, bond buying (Hidaka/Otsuma, Bloomberg) The Japanese central bank has engaged in various rounds of quantitative easing since the late ’90s I believe. Yet they’re still unable to keep deflation at bay. There are those that say this is proof that QE doesn’t necessarily lead to inflation. The bet being made by guys like David Einhorn is that eventually the debt load overwhelms the Japanese economy causing the yen to collapse. Indeed, the inflation that people fear here in the U.S. isn’t so much the old wage-push variety. Rather it’s a sudden loss of confidence in the dollar when it becomes clear the U.S. can’t pay its bills.

Bernanke confirmation looks set (Gelsi, Marketwatch) When Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold pulled their support last Friday, it appeared Ben Bernanke might not get Senate confirmation for a second term. Now he look safe.

Fannie, Freddie should be eliminated, Frank says (Timiraos/Crittenden, WSJ) Unlikely this means Barney Frank will stop rolling the dice to subsidize housing with the public purse.

Leviathan stirs again (Economist) The return of big government the world over. This is not a good thing. Federal government is probably the least efficient allocator of resources in the economy. Not that we need smaller government overall, we just need smaller federal government. States and localities govern more efficiently. The federal government should be shrunk dramatically and the power/tax base of state and local gov’ts should expand.

Right-wing flame war (Dee, NYT) The story of Charles Johnson and his blog Little Green Footballs.

Newspapers are failing because their articles are too long (Kinsley, Atlantic) Shameless self-promotion: Reuters BreakingViews tells you what you need to know about financial news in 350 words or less!

2010: The year of the renter? (Toy, NYT) This story is NY specific. But I must say it’s good to live in the Hudson Yards area of Manhattan. Some of the best deals on apts in NYC at the moment as there’s way too much inventory around here….

Will NY soda tax drive some to drink? (CityRoom) This is a pretty stupid argument from soda bottlers who are opposed to new taxes on their product. Beer and soda aren’t exactly perfect substitutes…

Cat vs. Bear

By the way….Adam from BearishNews reminds us that the FDIC opened a temporary midwest satellite office to help with asset sales and bank closings.

#5

• Failed bank: Premier American Bank, Miami FL
• Acquiring bank: Premier American Bank Natl Assoc., Miami FL
• Vitals: as of 9/30/09, assets of $350.9 million, deposits of $326.3 million
• Estimated DIF damage: $85 million

#6

• Failed bank: Bank of Leeton, Leeton MO
• Acquiring bank: Sunflower Bank Natl Assoc., Salina KS
• Vitals: as of 12/31/09, assets of $20.1m, deposits of $20.4m
• Estimated DIF damage: $8.1 million

#7

• Failed bank: Charter Bank, Santa Fe NM
• Acquiring bank: Charter Bank, Albuquerque NM
• Vitals: as of 9/30/09, assets of $1.2 billion, deposits of $851.5m
• Estimated DIF damage: $201.9 million

#8

• Failed bank: Evergreen Bank, Seattle WA
• Acquiring bank: Umpqua Bank, Roseburg OR
• Vitals: as of 9/30/09, assets of $488.5m, deposits of $439.4m
• Estimated DIF damage: $64.2m

#9

• Failed bank: Columbia River Bank, The Dalles OR
• Acquiring bank: Columbia State Bank, Tacoma WA
• Vitals: as of 9/30/09, assets of $1.1 billion, deposits of $1.0 billion
• Estimated DIF damage: $172.5 million

A closer look at the Volcker rule (Felix) Capitol Hill may not be taking Obama’s rule very seriously. They think it was just a way to spin the news cycle away from the fact that healthcare will fail now that the Dems have lost their 60th vote in the Senate. Moreover, they don’t think Obama’s actually going to wage the fight against Wall Street that he claims he’s ready for.

Bernanke faces tougher vote in Senate (Reddy/Paletta, WSJ)

Fed secrecy claims bogus redacted AIG details already public (Adams, Naked Capitalism) More detail in a second post here.

FDIC and Bank of England to cooperate on resolution of troubled cross-border financials (FDIC) Next time a big financial blows itself up, Sheila Bair and Mervyn King want to make sure they’re prepared to deal with it in tandem.

NYC will move (a little bit) of its money (Traub, HuffPo) Bloomberg puts a little bit of support behind the Move Your Money campaign.

Chavez accuses U.S. of using weapon to cause Haiti quake (Moran, Digital Journal) “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has accused the United States of causing the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti, which killed possibly 200,000 people. Chavez believes the U.S. was testing a tectonic weapon to produce eco-type devastations.”

National Enquirer eyes Pulitzer (Kurtz, WaPo) …for breaking the John Edwards affair/love child story. Incidentally, he admitted paternity in a press release yesterday. Where was he when the release went out? Haiti, helping earthquake victims. I’m not going to criticize anyone for going to help Haitians, but it’s not hard to see that Edwards isn’t doing this because he’s the charitable type….

Quote of the Day, from Behind the Numbers:

A trend we are noticing is that many companies are reporting their results and comparing them to last year, or the last two years, and claiming that they have returned to margin and revenue growth. However, when compared to two or three years ago (i.e. pre-meltdown), the companies are reporting lower margins and lower growth rates (revenue, stores, etc.). Yet, these companies have now returned to pre-meltdown valuations. In other words, the companies are trading at “historic” valuations, but with lower margins and much lower prospects for future revenue growth than was true when those historic valuations were set.

Smart Bottlenose Dolphins….