Harry Terris

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Rates Tied to Unemployment: Holy mackerel. The Delphic confusion of Fedspeak past vanished from headlines on the central bank's policy statement Wednesday. Both the Journal and the Times went with "Fed Ties Rates to Joblessness," and FT wasn't far off (different font, different space to fill, presumably).

The jump in Bank of America’s Basel III capital ratio in the third quarter reflected favorable moves in rates and credit spreads, not retained earnings.

As growth in the credit card industry has stalled nationally, a group of small issuers have kept their foot on the gas.

The expansion by small credit card issuers comes as some of the biggest lenders continue to reengineer their businesses after being sideswiped during the recession, and amid weakness in consumer demand.

These banks have outperformed industry averages for years and continued to do so in 2012, avoiding the exceptional losses that often follow exceptional returns.

Willing sellers have pretty much replaced failed banks among targets with less than $1 billion of assets. Volume has perked up in other size classes simultaneously.

Hurricane Sandy is likely to stir up credit card delinquencies in the next month or so, but performance remained strong in the batch of recent reports.

Sandy is likely to roil delinquencies in the next month or so, but issuers posted another round of strong reports for October.

Some banks bucked the trend and others buckled under it. Overall, about two-thirds of publicly listed banks posted quarter-over-quarter declines in margins during the most recent round of earnings reports.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Intergalactically Systemic: The list of really, really, waywayway too-big-to-fail banks is out, and Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase are on it. The Financial Stability Board, which is coordinating the international regulatory reform effort for the G20 economies, said Thursday that it had put the two New York banks in an echelon that would subject them to a 2.5% capital surcharge. That means that they would have to maintain common equity equal to 9.5% of risk-weighted assets, compared with a universal 7% baseline. Deutsche Bank and HSBC are also in the 2.5% bucket, while other American firms like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs are in the 1.5% bucket and Wells Fargo is at 1%. The list is subject to change and the requirements for the additional loss cushions will be phased in beginning in 2016.

Even before the recent increases, prices Fannie and Freddie charge for credit risk were far higher than when their share of originations was at a low.

Some banks are recovering deferred tax assets. Will others ever get the chance?

To guess what might happen once unlimited deposit insurance ends, look at how corporations have handled their cash lately.

About $1.4 trillion of deposits are covered by federal insurance due to lapse in two months. How corporations have handled their cash over the last few years provides a guide to what might happen to the money.

A rapid improvement this year in the performance of Citi’s card portfolio has put the company firmly in the middle of the pack among the Big Six issuers, as the interactive graphic in this article shows.

The gap between consumer and secondary market mortgage rates has blown out to a 12-year high, as this interactive graphic shows. Lenders have trouble explaining what will replace mortgage earnings once production fizzles, however.

Growth in business lending by commercial banks remained brisk in the third quarter according to preliminary data, but continued to slide from a recent peak.

Big banks' interchange revenue appears to be climbing out of the Durbin crater. At banks exempt from the Dodd-Frank price controls, meanwhile, such revenue is speeding along unscathed. Check out our interactive graphic that breaks out revenue for each institution.

Banks have recovered maybe $1 billion in tax assets written down because of doubts about future profitability. As third quarter reports approach, that leaves more than $5 billion to go.

Swipe fees jumped at an annual rate of 40% in the second quarter among a group of institutions subject to the new debit card price caps. Interactive data on interchange revenue at 900 companies.