BankThink

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Goodnight, Irene: Evacuation and contingency plans ahead of Hurricane Irene were the topic of a DealBook item Friday. Luckily, the storm did not cause as much damage as expected and the downtown area is "open for business" today. The headquarters of Goldman Sachs headquarters and the World Financial Center office of American Express are located in the low-lying areas on Manhattan that were evacuated ahead of Hurricane Irene. Deutsche Bank was just outside the first evacuation zone, DealBook noted. The AmEx building will be closed today, with employees working from home, according to Bloomberg. Stock, bond and commodities markets are open, all this despite some interruptions in MTA service and outages on LIRR and Metro-North service. Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg News

Remember that fuss about the dire danger of having an unknowable but evidently substantial number of banks that are Too Big to Fail? The message was: "Stop that!"

In the Washington Post last week, housing columnist Kenneth Harney took an interesting look at mortgage loans guaranteed by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A prepaid card breach disclosed in May was accomplished by hackers who turned off the withdrawal limits on multiple card accounts, according to a new report.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...B of A Buffed Up: Crédit Agricole analyst Mike Mayo summed up Warren Buffett's $5 billion investment in Bank of America by saying, "Bank of America got the Good Housekeeping seal of approval and Buffett got a sweetheart deal, but the company hasn't been able to get its arms around the magnitude of the losses." The Times also noted that B of A's board met less than 24 hours after Buffett called Brian Moynihan to approve the deal. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is now in a position to become the biggest shareholder in Bank of America, and it's already the top shareholder in Wells Fargo and American Express. The Journal called the investment "a desperately needed jolt of confidence at a time when investors are questioning" the bank's health.

Twenty years ago I engineered the sale of Security Pacific Bank, at the time the nation's fifth largest bank, to Bank of America. On August 12, 1991, the day the deal was announced BofA's stock closed at $10.00. Today it closed at $7.65 a decline of 23% over the past two decades.

The FDIC and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will soon finalize one of the more significant requirements of the Dodd-Frank Act — the mandate for large banking organizations and systemically important nonbank financial institutions to prepare resolution plans, more commonly known as "living wills."

Breaking News This Morning ...The Oracle to the Rescue: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway announced this morning that it was making a $5 billion investment in Bank of America. Markets quickly responded by sending the Charlotte company's stock up 23% in pre-market trading. Wall Street Journal, New York Times

Global custodians have spent decades using bundled fees to mask egregious conflicts of interest and overcharge pension funds, and by extension the taxpayers and public servants who underwrite them.

When Hewlett-Packard discontinued its TouchPad tablet, it sold its remaining inventory at a price that was too good to be true. Pranksters, and possibly fraudsters, caught on quick.