Mmm, what a tasty way to start a Tuesday morning — with reports of an obscenity-laden tussle between government money nerds over the very sexy topic of bank regulation! Here is what you need to know: Tim Geithner wants a single authority called the National Bank Supervisor providing oversight over our nation’s many banks, and Sheila Bair opposes this consolidation. On Friday, Geithner gathered Bair and Ben Bernanke and Mary Schapiro, the SEC Chairman, to quit running their yaps to newspapers about how much they hated all his ideas. MORE »

Look everyone, a wacky sentence: “WASHINGTON — Federal bank regulators plan to release the much-anticipated results of their ’stress tests’ on the nation’s 19 biggest banks next Thursday, several days later than they had originally expected, in part because some of the banks continue to disagree with the government’s initial conclusions.” You do remember these things — the banks, the government bailouts, the stress tests, YOUR LIFE, and that thing that ties them all together, the Economy — right? They’re still “big deals” even if they aren’t so much in the news, because now the issue of whether or not we should throw a few dumb ex-government lawyers in jail has become ALL THAT MATTERS, while people continue to starve. MORE »

North Carolinians, did you know your only national senator besides godless Kay Hagan is some guy who wanted his wife to withdraw his family’s entire savings from his local bank one ATM transaction at a time? If everyone had done this back in September, maybe we really could have had a good old-fashioned Depressiony bank run like in olden times. MORE »

Oh hey here is a novel idea: in order to save our tragically beleaguered financial system, we must 1) replace the management at failing banks and 2) liquidate the banks that are completely hosed beyond repair. This makes sense to pretty much everyone, and our new boyfriend Simon Johnson said something like that a while ago on NPR so it must be true. MORE »

Earlier we showed Barney Frank yelling at the goddamn Code Pink hippies on multiple occasions, but what else happened during this latest 94-hour grandstanding spectacle of a House Financial Services Committee hearing? Why the economy got saved, of course! Ha ha. (Kill us.) America’s C-SPAN watchers did, however, get to see such luminaries as Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann and Maxine Waters confuse and/or irritate the hell out of Geithner and Bernanke (mostly Geithner — he scowls!) Plus there was this crazy guy from Illinois whom Bernanke shot down during a rare burst of self-confidence. Hooray for Congress! Burn it! MORE »

ABOUT FRIGGING TIME: The delightfully named Finger Interests Number One Ltd. is trying to persuade other Bank of America shareholders to get rid of Ken Lewis and two other people on the bank’s board of directors. Imagine that! Imagine throwing out the terrible bums who just dropped their trousers and peed all over their shareholders while doing whatever they wanted (making billions of dollars in exchange for running their companies into the ground). It’s certainly more than the government is capable of. Yay Finger Interests. [New York Times]

The stock market has rallied in response to Tim Geithner’s latest details on his plan to fix America’s Banks by giving them lots of money for their trash, which makes sense, because the new plan is good good GOOD for Wall Street! Imagine a world where the government put up like 85% of the financing for something that you wanted — a robot, say — and you only had to throw in 5%. But after realizing that the robot was, indeed a piece of crap, made from defaulted mortgage contracts instead of the usual metals, the government lost all of that 85% investment, and you only lost 5%, so whatever. Let us look into this modern marvel of financial engineering known as the “Public-Private Investment Fund.” MORE »

Do you know what is happening to your America, America? Communism! Yesterday our friends at the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP invited a crazy European monster to our country to outline the nuclear option — “The Swedish Model” — for fixing our banks. Boo! Go “fix” yourself! MORE »

• 56% OF AMERICANS ARE SOCIALIST COMMIE MARX-MAOIST STALINFURRIES: Hey looky here, the Newsweek magazine says that 56% of Americans support “nationalizing large banks at risk of failing,” while only 29% support the Responsible Centrist option of giving crappy insolvent banks run by actual hell demons all the money they want forever, on their own terms. Who knew that a majority of Americans are in favor of gay abortions and giving AIDS to our children? [Newsweek]

Your friendly neighborhood Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the nice people who insure consumers’ bank deposits — has been having a sort of a rough time lately, what with all the banks constantly going broke. The insurance fund was pretty heavily depleted over the past year, thanks to horrific failures like IndyMac which cost the FDIC more than $10 billion. And it’s not like we have seen the end of bank failures, nosir! MORE »

For the past seven million hours, conservative aggregateur Matt Drudge has been blaring the main headline, “OBAMA MOVES TOWARD ‘SWEDISH MODEL’ FOR BANKS,” replete with a sacrilege photo of the profane Swedish flag. The “Swedish Model” is “code” for the evil thing the Swedish government did in the early 1990s after a major real estate and financial bubble: nationalized the biggest insolvent banks, fixed them, and put them back on the market, the end. In other words, it is basically Red Marxism and Islam combined. And now, free-market fappers Lindsey Graham, his “live-in” John McCain, and even Alan Greenspan — who caused the entire crisis, for fun — are voicing their support for Swedish Communist Revolution! MORE »