BankThink

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Email Hijinks: Embarrassing trader emails are always our favorite part of regulatory settlements, and the missives uncovered by regulators investigating Barclays in the Libor-manipulation affair are pure gold. Some of our favorites:

During the boom, accounting rules kept banks from building thicker buffers against losses. This left them in a weaker position when the crisis hit. It's time to fix the mistake.

Dubious stress test results? External auditors who fail to flag insolvency in advance? The U.S. and U.K. have seen this film before.

From the CFPB to the FSOC to New York's ban on large soda cups, followers of behavioral theory have gone overboard in their rabid enthusiasm for governmental manipulation.

The California Supreme Court last week ruled in favor of preemption in a financial services case. The issue doesn't directly involve the Dodd-Frank Act, but has implications for its role in the preemption of state banking laws.

Breaking News This Morning ...Barclays Settles Libor Probe: The British bank is the first to cut a deal with regulators in the international investigation of manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate, the papers report, citing anonymous sources. The Times puts the penalty in the "hundreds of millions." A formal announcement is expected today. New York Times, Financial Times, ZeroHedge

The company's fixed network fee penalizes merchants that route debit transactions to any competing network, and subverts the competition that the Durbin amendment was designed to foster.

Do you ever have that recurring dream that it's almost the end of the semester and you have yet to write a 2,000-page essay about your death? Or is that just me and maybe a handful bank officers?

Also, it's OK just to make transactions easier and cheaper, even if consumers don't "graduate" to a bank account. And eight other lessons from the premier conference in this space.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Housing Recovery? New home sales reached a two-year high in May, and while the S&P/Case-Shiller 20-City Home Price Index has been lingering in the valley (the latest report, released this morning, showed a decline, albeit at the slowest pace in more than a year), other indexes "show a nascent recovery," the Journal says. … Fidelity National Financial appears to be hedging its bets, though; the title insurance company has agreed to buy a restaurant chain. … A bill expected to pass the Senate this week would more than double flood insurance premiums over four years in high-risk areas. … Believe it or not, the mortgage-backed security market still discriminates between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — so much so that Freddie has been forced to pay rebates to lenders to compensate for the lower prices fetched by bonds with its guarantee, according to Businessweek. … The Post profiles Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat who's become a "voice for distressed homeowners," and a vocal critic of the FHFA's resistance to principal reductions. … And though your Morning Scan rarely mentions stories from the arts section of the newspapers, Joe Nocera's Times piece on the documentary "The Queen of Versailles" is worth reading as a reminder of the housing boom's excesses. Yes, this is the same wealthy couple's Florida dream home (which they really did name after the French monarchial palace) the Journal wrote about in October, when construction was on hold. The husband, who is suing the director of the forthcoming documentary for defamation, tells Nocera that his timeshare business is as profitable as ever (despite losing possession of a resort) and that construction on Versailles has resumed. Well, that settles it: we're in a housing recovery.