Wall Street Journal
Squabbling over who should pay less has delayed a settlement between banks and 50 state attorneys general over the mortgage foreclosure mess, sources told the Journal. "The latest disagreement among banks is a contrast to the largely unified public stance taken by financial firms as they work to put the foreclosure woes behind them," the paper said.
A recovery in commercial real estate prices will help creditors of the defunct Lehman Brothers as the estate manager ramps up sales efforts for the properties owned by the estate of the failed investment bank. Estimates of how much the portfolio will bring in have grown by $1 billion in the past six months.
Looking to avoid another "flash crash," the SEC will collect trading data from banks and other "high volume traders" within a day of the trades. The rules apply for stock and equity option deals of those trading at least $20 million in shares a day.
While admitting it cannot predict the exact threats to the financial system, the Financial Stability Oversight Council in a report called for improvement in the "triparty repo" market, and warned that the European crisis could cause problems in the U.S., so banks need to improve their balance sheets to protect themselves.
UBS announced it will not make its pretax profit target of about $18.6 billion by 2014, and it will review its fixed-income division as tougher regulations led to declines.
Who said two heads are better than one? Deutsche Bank's announcement that Josef Ackermann will join its supervisory board next year and be replaced by two co-CEOs has raised questions from investors about how the company plans to assure that Ackermann will not try to run the company via the board. "Critics fear the dual-CEO model could create tension between the bank's leaders, a concern they say is compounded by the nomination of current CEO Josef Ackermann as supervisory board chairman."
New York Times
Although South Florida is ground zero for mortgage defaults, Miami is in the midst of housing mania, partly because of affluent buyers, with home sales rising 16% from a year earlier in the metro area. Two-thirds of the sales are all cash. Some observers credit the resurgence to the foreclosure mills law firms caught using illegal methods that brought about a freeze in foreclosures, shifting the supply-demand balance.
Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and five other banks are providing a $5.4 billion bridge loan to California to provide a cushion if a deal isn't reached on the federal debt crisis.
Republicans make a strong argument about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau needing to be subject to board supervision, rather than one person, Steven M. Davidoff writes in DealBook.
Interest rates would rise on products tied to Treasuries if the U.S. loses its AAA credit rating, including mortgages, credit cards, auto loans and college loans, analysts said.
Washington Post
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and people who study the central bank say that there is no way that the Federal Reserve can bail out the country in the event of a failure to raise the debt ceiling.
Raj Date, a top deputy to Elizabeth Warren at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will take over day-to-day operations of the new watchdog agency when she departs at the end of this month, Treasury officials announced Tuesday.
