Rolfe Winkler

Kohn, Bair warn banks about interest rate risk at FDIC symposium (Wutkowski, Reuters) The Fed says rates will stay low for an “extended period.” But that doesn’t mean “forever” so the Fed, along with other bank regulators, have warned bankers to prepare their balance sheets for higher rates. The populist line that banks need to “lend more” to get the economy going is just foolish. Regulators know the score: banks that lend too much at these low rates, or are using too much cheap short-term funding, will be caught out when rates head back up. Text of Kohn’s speech here. PDF of Sheila Bair’s here. (Bair’s speech is shorter and less wonkish)

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…

Furlough alert 1–Yahoo imposes week long shut down (Vascellaro, WSJ)

Furlough alert 2 –City of Chicago to shut down Xmas Eve to save cash (CBS2)

TARP deadbeat list grows to 55 (Applebaum, WaPo) Up from 33 banks + AIG last quarter.

Mega-savant Kim Peek dies (Collins, Deseret News) Peek was the inspiration for “Rain Man.” What a fascinating brain: “Scientists [recently] learned that Kim could hold a book within eight inches of his face and read the left page with his left eye, the right with his right eye at the same time. He devoured books that way.” Much more in the article.

GDP revision suprisingly large (Evans, Real Time Econ) Q3 GDP growth was originally reported at 3.5%. The first revision put it at 2.8%. The second, released today, says it was really 2.2%.

Serious delinquencies rise for prime mortgages (Dixon, Reuters) The delinquency rate is far lower than for subprime and Alt A, but prime mortgages are much larger and there are many more of them. So total dollar volume of prime delinquencies is much larger than for subprime/Alt A.

More on existing home sales (CalculatedRisk) CR offers a number of contrarian thoughts regarding today’s surprising existing home sales report.

Her glass if half empty (Boston.com) Read the photo caption.

Relative prices of different liquids (imgur) This feels about right to me…

How a bone disease grew to fit a prescription (NPR) Inventing a “disease” so a drug can be sold to correct it…

Tolerant cat…

Something to ponder on the weekend (ht Ecopolis):

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife. And the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

RFK, speaking at the University of Kansas, Lawrence KS, 3/18/68