Banco Popular de Puerto Rico

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Sandra Fisher Martins will brook no lawyerly explanations for impenetrable, convoluted writing. People have a “right to understand,” she says in a recently posted TED video.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Unlucky Seven: Investors dumped Italian government bonds, pushing their yields up past 7% -- a "psychologically important" level - after LCH Clearnet, a clearing house for European repo trades, raised margin requirements for the debt. As the FT explains, 7% yields had previously "led to both Ireland and Portugal requesting emergency bail-out loans," and while Rome could handle borrowing costs at this level for a year or so, the concern is that these costs could get stuck in a self-reinforcing spiral. (Is that a redundant phrase? We can't decide.) Moreover, Italy's a lot bigger than those other two countries, so a full-blown financing crisis there could be a "game-changer," the FT says. Italy is "too big to bail," and an attempt to rescue it "would stretch the European financial stability facility, the eurozone rescue fund, to breaking point." The fear in the fixed-income market spread to the global stock markets, which tanked. But here comes the cavalry: this morning the FT reports Italian yields have dropped back below 7% following reports that the European Central Bank had intervened. European stock markets are calmer after Italy pulled off a successful debt sale this morning. Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post

We assumed the story on the front of Section C of the Journal was more important than the one inside. Dead wrong.

Receiving Wide Coverage ...Messy MF: Regulators looking for that missing $600 million have a big problem, the Journal reports this morning. It turns out that MF Global’s recordkeeping was “in shambles,” as an executive from Interactive, the brokerage that almost rescued Jon Corzine’s firm, puts it. People who’ve examined the books have found “incomplete transactions, numbers that didn't seem to add up and other inconsistencies,” the Journal says. Meanwhile, the CFTC has decided to audit every futures trading firm “to verify that customer money is protected,” the Times’ “DealBook” says. We certainly hope so, for the sake of all those goldbugs who thought they were flocking to safety by investing in gold futures. The FT has a neat video in which one of its journalists reminds us that the CFTC proposed a year ago to restrict the range of options for investing customer funds – including a pullback from, you guessed it, foreign sovereign debt. Now Bart Chilton, a CFTC commissioner, wants to revive this plan, and has cleverly branded it the “MF Global rule.” (The other fun part of the video is the interview footage of Corzine from last summer, in which he sounds like Rip van Winkle talking about how much the financial system had changed during his hiatus as a politician.) Incidentally, we made a judgment error in yesterday’s Scan and picked the wrong MF Global story to mention. It’s yesterday’s papers, as they say, but if you want a link to the story we should have told you about, and an explanation of our goof, click here.