Breaking News This Morning ...
Earnings: First Horizon, First Niagara, General Electric, SunTrust, Morgan Stanley
Receiving Wide Coverage ...
Taper Timetable: December now looks like the earliest the Fed will begin to scale back its purchases of mortgage-backed and Treasury securities. It's unlikely to do so at the policy meeting at the end of this month. "Fed officials have said the decision depends on how the economic data evolve, but the data won't be very illuminating into November because the partial government shutdown closed the agencies that collect them." Wall Street Journal, Financial Times
Big Judgment for HSBC: A U.S. district judge ordered the British bank to pay investors $2.46 billion in a securities case inherited from Household International, the consumer lender HSBC acquired more than a decade ago. The bank says it will appeal the judgment. Four years ago, a jury found that Household had misled investors about loan quality and engaged in predatory lending practices during the early aughts. Wall Street Journal, Financial Times
Wall Street Journal
Trial balloon time. Bank of America is considering the introduction of a checking account that would prohibit overdrafts on ATM withdrawals or automatic bill payments, "people familiar with the bank's strategy" tell the paper. This follows the bank's decision a few years ago to forbid overdrafts from debit purchases. If B of A goes through with the plan, it would be the first big bank to disallow overdrafts of any kind on an account.
"British prosecutors
obtained a court order prohibiting the Wall Street Journal from publishing names of individuals the [U.K.] government planned to implicate in a criminal-fraud case" related to Libor manipulation. The Journal is contesting the order, which it calls "a serious affront to press freedom." In the meantime, the paper has removed from its website a story that named the two dozen traders and brokers. But the article appears in today's U.S. and Asia print editions. And the names are elsewhere on the web anyway, but we're not providing any links that's dangerous these days.
Financial Times
In case you missed it in American Banker last month: Rep. Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, is working on her own housing finance reform bill that would compete with the Corker-Warner and GSE reform bills.
New York Times
Share this one with your institution's OFAC compliance officers. "White House Weighs Easing Iran Sanctions' Bite With Slow Release of Assets" but a champion of the plan cautions: "If Iran refused to make concessions, the United States
could pair its offer to free Iranian money with a new sanction that would immediately freeze all of its foreign exchange reserves by cutting off from the American financial system any bank that gives Iran use of those funds."
