Receiving Wide Coverage ...
The Bird Is the Word: The Morning Scan is as sick of hearing about the Twitter IPO as you probably are, but it still dominates business news pages this morning. The social network's shares jumped nearly 75% on their first day of trading, in sharp contrast to the Facebook debacle last year. Hence the FT's take: "Tech industry enters new era with Twitter's IPO success.
The shadow of Facebook's troubled IPO has finally passed from the financial markets.
[An]y number of tech hopefuls are now lined up to cash in.
Twitter appears poised to become both symbol and catalyst for a new tech investment mania." That was enough for us, but if you want more Twitter coverage, there's plenty in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Fast Company
Washington Nods: The Obama administration has picked Timothy Assad, who has overseen the Tarp program for the past three years, to succeed Gary Gensler as head of the CFTC in January, the Journal reports, citing the usual unnamed officials. A lawyer by training, Assad previously worked for the Congressional Oversight Panel for Tarp under Elizabeth Warren. Meanwhile the White House nominated a Bank of America executive, Stefan Selig, to be the Commerce Department's undersecretary for international trade. The Times calls this "a rare appointment of a Wall Street banker by the Obama administration." Jack Lew and Bill Daley would be among the other rarities.
Is Forex the New Libor? A global probe into possible manipulation of foreign exchange markets has spread to the U.S. The Times wryly notes, "In a regulatory filing on Thursday, Goldman [Sachs] added the word 'currencies' to a series of regulatory investigations and reviews it is facing." The FT makes the same observation, and further reports that Barclays put three New York-based traders on leave and Morgan Stanley is cooperating with the probe. The British paper also has a handy timeline of the international forex investigation.
RBS Settles Over MBS: Royal Bank of Scotland agreed to a $150 million fine to settle SEC charges that its U.S. securities unit, the former Greenwich Capital Markets, misled investors in a 2007 mortgage-backed security deal. Financial Times, New York Times
Wall Street Journal
"Fed Publishes 'Stress Test' Procedures" "The move is partly a response to concerns from banking-industry officials who say the central bank hasn't done enough to disclose its methods or variables."
The "Heard on the Street" column pokes fun at the Clearing House for its upcoming series of working papers on "the value of big banks," noting that the trade group has a dog in the fight.
New York Times
"Card Act Cleared Up Credit Cards' Hidden Costs" A recent study by economists found the 2009 law "cut down the costs of credit cards, particularly for borrowers with poor credit," columnist Floyd Norris writes. However, as American Banker's Kevin Wack recently reported, the same study questioned the effectiveness of some of the legislation's disclosure requirements.
Washington Post
If you like game theory, you'll enjoy this: "No, Bitcoin isn't broken," in which Timothy Lee, the Post's savvy tech columnist, rebuts a claim by two Cornell computer scientists that the decentralized system is more vulnerable to conquest by a single party than previously assumed. Whatever the merits of the professors' argument, we're just happy to read a more sophisticated discussion of Bitcoin than the usual boring, blinkered stories that focus on the currency's price and ignore its broader implications for payments.
Holiday Notice: The Morning Scan will not publish on Monday, Veterans Day.
