Just two days ago, Yves Smith wrote of the "move to clip the wings of TARP overseer Elizabeth Warren."

Smith linked to a Politico piece piece about Warren which had some absurd anti-Warren quotes like "a number of people wonder if this is the new Warren commission or the congressional oversight panel."

Predictably, Joe Weisenthal at Clusterstock joins the anti-Warren chorus with a post titled "TARP Watchdog Elizabeth Warren Blowing Her Credibility, Overstepping Her Bounds." [More...]

From my perspective, this is good news:

The Obama administration and trade advocates in Congress are trying to put a series of long-delayed trade pacts back on the front burner, despite widespread skepticism on Capitol Hill about the benefits of expanded international commerce. On the heels of the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said Monday that a delegation from Panama will visit Washington this week to try to resolve disputes over the U.S.-Panama trade deal. Kirk added that President Obama hopes to clear remaining obstacles to a separate pact with Colombia.

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Fascinating piece in New York Magazine this week on how Wall Streeters are adapting to the new realities presented by the financial crisis.

The most telling parts of the piece, however, come not from the writer of the story but from a source identified only as a "Goldman vet"

“When I talked to my friends in November and December at firms like Goldman, they would tell me, ‘If the government doesn’t bail us out, we’re going down.’ They really thought they were going to zero, and without exception, they all forget that now. They forget that their company’s stock was going to zero. It’s a state of delusion; they don’t remember those days. The flip side of that is, every guy except the Goldman guy remembers that Goldman was bailed out.”

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Via Atrios, apparently some TARP repayment is more equal than others:

TCF Financial Corp (TCB.N) said it received approval to pay back $361 million in funds it received from the U.S. Treasury's Capital Purchase Program, and cut its quarterly dividend by 80 percent. . . . TCF Financial said it will buy back all of its 361,172 shares of its preferred stock from the U.S. Treasury at a price of $361.2 million plus a final pro rata accrued dividend.

Meanwhile, back of the megabank ranch, the Obama Administration is rearranging the deck chairs, floating the idea of converting its preferred shares to common stock. As Krugman notes, this is pointless:

Boy, how could that have happened?:

Citigroup, the battered banking giant, announced a first-quarter net profit on Friday after more than a year of staggering losses and three bailouts from Washington. The New York-based bank reported first-quarter net income of $1.6 billion, after a loss of $5.11 billion in the period a year earlier. It announced a loss, however, of 18 cents a share, because of changes in its stock structure. The results were also helped by an accounting adjustment that allowed the bank to post a one-off gain of $2.5 billion on its derivative positions.

(Emphasis supplied.) Can you spell A-I-G?

Speaking for me only

Bell Curve Sully:

[I]ntelligence is not infinitely alterable. My point was that growing inequality will be very, very hard to prevent or restrain in the face of these factors.

What factors? The fact "IQ" (No, IQ does not accurately measure intelligence, which is impossible to define anyway) is significantly alterable, but not "infinitely alterable? Really?

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It seems to me that the Media should start asking that question. Via Atrios, JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon says they are:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon . . . said his firm could repay U.S. government rescue funds “tomorrow.” Dimon, calling money received through the Troubled Asset Relief Program “a scarlet letter,” and “the TARP baby,” said on a conference call today that the New York-based bank is awaiting guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department. “We could pay it back tomorrow,” he said.

So pay it. Don't wait for guidance, unless the Obama Administration is prohibiting repayment. The question needs to be asked by the Media.

Speaking for me only

That's what Martin Wolf asks in a strong column over at the Financial Times.

I'd made the US/Russia comparison here recently, prompted by the Paulson/Geithner approach to the financial crisis which I believe is hobbled by a total lack of transparency and a fundamental misunderstanding of the crisis itself (Geithner and co. don't seem to believe that the banks are insolvent). Put simply, the bailout is worthy a banana republic or perhaps Russia but not a supposedly first world democracy like the U.S. [More...]

Brad DeLong argues for learning from the Bank Of England's actions in 1825:

Monday morning, in the pre-dawn dark, Henry Thornton was at the Bank of England with Governor Buller and Deputy Governor Richards. For security reasons, they were alone. Buller and Richards counted out £400,000 in bank notes. "I hope this won't overset you, my young man," Marianne Thornton claims one of the two said to Henry, “to see the Governor and Deputy Governor of the Bank [of England] acting as your two clerks." Henry Thornton arrived at his own bank before opening with £400,000 in cash. The run on bank funds then recommenced. But "rumours that the Bank of England had taken them under its wing soon spread, and people brought back money [on Monday] as fast as they had taken it out on Saturday." This was the birth of central banking as we know it.

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Re-legalize it now!
Tax marijuana today! Control it tomorrow!
Re-legalize it!
Pot prohibition's failed!
Let's tax and control it!
Pay down the US deficit!
Tax and control marijuana!
Please tax me!
Hey US Treasury! Make my day, TAX ME!

What are your thoughts on April 15, taxes and how they are collected and spent?

Pop the champagne!:

Consumer prices dipped unexpectedly in March, leaving inflation in the last year falling at the fastest clip in more than a half-century. The Labor Department says consumer prices edged down 0.1 percent last month as a drop in energy prices offset the biggest rise in tobacco prices since 1998. It was a better performance than the 0.1 percent rise that economists had expected.

Lower prices!! Great!? Ugh, no. Demand drops, and so do prices. And interests rates are already at zero. That's what happens in a depression. BTW, the big rise in tobacco prices is not due to increased demand, but to a big federal tax hike.

Via Matt Yglesias, President Obama answers a whole bunch of people

[T]here have been some who don’t dispute that we need to shore up the banking system, but suggest that we have been too timid in how we go about it. They say that the federal government should have already preemptively stepped in and taken over major financial institutions the way that the FDIC currently intervenes in smaller banks, and that our failure to do so is yet another example of Washington coddling Wall Street. So let me be clear – the reason we have not taken this step has nothing to do with any ideological or political judgment we’ve made about government involvement in banks, and it’s certainly not because of any concern we have for the management and shareholders whose actions have helped cause this mess.

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