BankThink

Unpredictable card terms and conditions make it hard for small-business owners to budget. If they can't allocate funds with confidence, they're less likely to hire employees, hurting the economy.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Carl Levin, Whale Hunter: Just when you thought you'd heard the last about the London Whale affair … Senator Carl Levin's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is conducting a probe of the JPMorgan chief investment office's derivative trades, the FT and Bloomberg News report. The subcommittee has subpoenaed JPM's regulators for documents and is seeking testimony from CIO veterans, the reports say. If the bank's executives are asked to testify before the subcommittee, we suspect it'll be a less decorous affair than Jamie Dimon's June appearances before the Senate and House banking panels, given Levin's penchant for indignant showboating. Especially since Dimon could give Levin a run for his money in a grandstanding competition. We wonder if Levin might also take the opportunity to ask someone at JPM about its planned copper exchange-traded fund, which the senator warns could corner the copper market but that the bank insists won't affect prices.

Retail credit unions can improve their net worth only through retained earnings. That's made a stressful period for all financial institutions particularly challenging for this category. Let them raise capital.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke doesn't want community bankers to stay up at night worrying about Dodd-Frank. Most of the provisions don't apply, he says. Well, what about the concern that the big bank requirements eventually be the norm for all? He assures us that won't be the case.

At the Democratic convention Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Senate candidate and pioneer of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, offered “the week's highest profile defense of the Dodd-Frank Act,” writes American Banker’s Kevin Wack.

Some courts will deem financial institutions liable simply for knowing about the red flags, while others require proof the bank knew about their customers' schemes. This subjective standard is often unfair and difficult to manage.

The anonymous blackmailers may be trying to manipulate the market price of bitcoins, even if their claim to possesses Mitt Romney's tax returns is hoax.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Another U.K. Banking Probe: Lloyd's Banking Group is at the center of the U.K. Financial Services Authority's crackdown on the mis-selling of financial products. According to the Journal, the FSA found Lloyd's to be "particularly aggressive in its sales strategies" of products, such as payment protection insurance, during its wider investigation of the practice and, as such, have launched an official probe into the commissions the bank offered branch employees on sales. Lloyd's, which has come under fire for mis-sold payment protection insurance before, says it has "made significant changes" to its "incentive schemes" since the start of the year.

The capital markets are where growth is occurring today and if banks want to be profitable in the future they won't be able to do it solely or even principally by making loans.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's first report this year on a Big Four firm confirms my long-held suspicion: Auditors have been too easy on banks when they book reserves for loan losses and repurchase demands.