BankThink

Several billion consumers and 35 million merchants worldwide take the enormous convenience and security of branded payment cards for granted.

Since the news broke about Freddie Mac's use of an arcane set of derivatives called collateralized mortgage obligation inverse floaters, a considerable amount of energy has been spent linking their use to some sinister plot to prevent underwater homeowners from refinancing their mortgages.

Breaking News This Morning ...UBS Profits Tumble: The Swiss bank’s “wealth management unit failed to make up for a loss in investment banking” in the fourth quarter, according to the Times. Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times

Some random thoughts while cleaning out the notebook in this paper-based log, from henceforth to be known as a plog.

With the increase in membership and many members looking for smart ways to save money, a growing number of credit unions are partnering with auto and home insurance providers. Here are five compelling reasons credit unions are enhancing member benefit packages with an auto and home insurance program.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...The Home Stretch? Today is the deadline (extended from Friday) for states to sign on to the nationwide robo-signing settlement, and that is one of the few things the papers seem to agree on. The Times says California attorney general Kamala Harris is back at the table. Her state’s “participation would result in having more money available for many other states, including an estimated $500 million in additional money for Florida,” the paper says. But the Journal says the negotiators have offered Harris “a commitment that a certain portion of the deal's benefits go to California,” and suggests that other AGs, including Florida’s Pam Bondi, may balk precisely at this carve-out.

After Brian Moynihan became CEO at the start of 2010, B of A's stock lost more than half its value. Meanwhile, the leading bank stock index, KBW, scarcely went down at all. And B of A was recently selling for about 1/3 of book, a remarkably low valuation. Evidently enormous further losses are expected. Why?

Michael Stockman and Michael Roseman may have had the same title at MF Global, chief risk officer, but their testimony Thursday for the House Oversight Committee highlighted distinct differences in actual roles, responsibilities, and personal perspectives.

To suggest that MMFs exist in a hidden “shadow” world simply distorts reality.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...‘A Lowly Clerk’: Lawmakers grilled Michael Stockman, who was chief risk officer of MF Global when the brokerage collapsed last year, in a tense hearing Thursday. (OK, that sounds a little hackneyed – are these hearings ever anything other than “tense” and “testy”?) One lawmaker called Stockman a “yes man.” Another said Stockman was apparently hired to tell Jon Corzine “what he wanted to hear,” and chided him that he should have controlled the CEO’s risk-taking: “You were not a lowly clerk.” Some of the headlines make much of the revelation that in early October, weeks before its bankruptcy filing, MF Global drew up a “break-the-glass” emergency plan mapping out what the firm would do if it got downgraded to junk. But this kind of what-if contingency planning seems fairly standard, or at least we’d think it should be; what’s more surprising to us is that, according to the Journal, Stockman told lawmakers “he had little role in its preparation and didn't see it before MF Global's Oct. 31 bankruptcy declaration. He said the firm's treasury and finance departments were primarily responsible for the document but added that a senior member of the risk-management team was involved in its preparation.” Uh, isn’t this exactly the kind of exercise the chief risk officer should be intimately involved in preparing? Also at the hearing, Stockman’s predecessor, Michael Roseman, described his unsuccessful attempt to warn the board about the dangers of Corzine’s gambles on European sovereign debt (which was around the same time Corzine began the search to replace Roseman, a search that ultimately led to Stockman's hiring). Even though we’ve already plugged not one, but two, DealBreaker stories this week, we’re going to give the last word on this to that site’s Matt Levine, because we can’t resist a headline like this: “Jon Corzine Was The Mark Zuckerberg Of MF Global, But In A Bad Way.” Noting that only about six months ago Corzine “was viewed as essential to MF Global’s business plan, so much so that they were going to pay bondholders more if he left,” Levine quips: “in hindsight maybe they should have paid bondholders more when Roseman left.”