BankThink

The agency's final rule contains glaring legal errors and whitewashes the role preemption played in enabling the lending excesses that precipitated the crisis.

Receiving Wide Coverage ... To Downgrade or Not to Downgrade... At a hearing on Capitol Hill the president of Standard & Poor's, Deven Sharma said that some newspapers have misreported his company's position on the U.S. debt crisis as having set a $4 trillion deficit reduction target in order for the country to preserve its triple-A credit rating. He said that some of the plans being considered that would reduce the U.S deficit by less than...

In attempting to prevent abuses of the interchange cap exemption for reloadable prepaid cards, the Fed may have inadvertently scuttled an opportunity for banks to serve low-balance account holders.

Receiving Wide Coverage ... Two Tales of A Nation: The deal on debt relief for Greece will remove uncertainty, helping prevent a loss of confidence in banks, said Charles Dallara, the managing director of the Institute of International Finance, the Times reported. Dallara was a negotiator for the deal. The Post reported that Moody's cut Greek debt three notches to Ca and warned that the nation will likely default before stabilizing. Wall Street Journal, Washington Post Wall...

Receiving Wide Coverage ... Contemplating Disaster: Regulators are giving banks scant guidance on how to deal with a possible government default or downgrade, the Journal reports this morning. The big banks "are spending hundreds of hours on contingency planning scenarios," the article says. But without certain answers, it's hard to plan. For instance, "Fed officials haven't said if their collateral requirements would change after a default, which would affect banks' ability to borrow from the central...