According to a report on Reuters, on Monday Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that the government should not be involved in setting corporate executive pay levels. 

What impact, if any, this will have on how regulation of compensation plays out is unclear, but it does once again bring to the fore the arguments on both sides of the executive pay discussion.

On Thursday something happened in the UK that has not happened for 100 years: a new retail bank opened for business. Metro Bank is the brain child of Vernon Hill who founded Commerce Bank ın the US back in 1973. Metro Bank opened its first branch ın the London street of High Holborn and is expected to open a further 200 branches ın coming years.

A panel sponsored by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association on Monday on what banks can expect from financial reform warned that higher capital reserves and other limits Congress imposes on their profitability would hurt the economy as they curbed their ability to lend.

Several panelists, including Adam Gilbert, head of regulatory policy in the corporate risk management group of JP Morgan Chase, and Gary Mandelblatt, chief risk officer of Nomura, warned repeatedly of such "unintended consequences" from financial reform.

The Morgan Stanley case may not go as far as the one involving Goldman. And it is way too early to know what exactly prosecutors would charge the firm with doing.

But it's possible to venture a guess based on Yves Smith's observations today at Naked Capitalism.

Much of the blather at today's first public hearing of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was decidedly unenlightening. But the data requests of former Commodities Futures Trading Commissioner Brooksley Born might turn out to be enlightening indeed.

Born asked the four bank CEOs on the first panel this morning, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, to estimate how much of the credit default swaps they've sold during the past four years could be traded on the exchanges or clearinghouses that regulators propose to create.

Morgan Stanley is knuckling under (a little) to populist pressure this holiday season to rein in banker bonuses even as JP Morgan Chase continues to rage against the night.

Morgan, by a detailed account in today's WSJ, doesn't want to go as far as Goldman Sachs has gone, although the latter's execs aren't exactly in the poorhouse. Goldman revised its bonus policy this month so that execs would be paid only in deferred stock. Morgan would still dole out three-quarters of most bonuses in cash, leaving the rest in stock to be issued based on the bank's actual performance over time.