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.

Banks' arguments against stricter capital reserve requirements seem to be getting a hearing from regulators such as Tim Geithner and the Basel Committee, but a recent paper suggests they should not.

This was alluded to in a blog today by Simon Johnson over at the Baseline Scenario, but the relevant passages are worth reading.

A column published on Tuesday by Project Syndicate sums up the world's flailing (if not downright cynical) response to the financial crisis in particularly apt terms, I'd say.

The governments' efforts to restore confidence in the banking sector without really addressing the causes of its loss of confidence is akin to trying to tickle oneself, observed Paul Seabright of the University of Toulouse in the piece, entitled "Financial History's False Lessons."

Tim Geithner once again says taxpayers are getting a good return on the funds they provided banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

And his line about 75 percent of the money being repaid may be true enough. It may even reflect this uncomfortable fact.

Anyone who thinks the Federal Reserve ought to oversee systemic risk ought to take a close look at this article.

By now, of course, it's no surprise that banks used yet another financing gimmick to make their capital look stronger than it really was. This one, involving Trust Preferred Securities known as TruPS, is doubly gimmicky, in so far as it involves both hybrid securities (i.e., a have your cake and eat it combination of debt and equity) and off-balance-sheet treatment. In terms of magnitude and significance, this stuff makes Andy Fastow look like a piker. Then again, Enron violated the letter as well as the spirit of the accounting rules. The banks were smarter than Fastow in that respect, or at least their lawyers and lobbyists were.

Despite the prospective "success" of financial reform legislation, my sense is that very little will change on Wall Street as the bills passed by the House and Senate are likely to emerge from conference committee. And that will prevent any economic recovery that isn't just another asset bubble in disguise.

The fundamental problem, or at least one such obstacle, as I see it, is that reform as currently likely will do little or nothing to restructure the banking industry, instead leaving it to regulators to impose new rules with which to limit risk.

As a follow-up to yesterday's rant, I see that investors are applauding the moves of European governments to reduce their budget deficits, as if the answer to deflation is more deflation.

Hasn't anyone ever heard of Keynes and the false dawn of 1937?

Gretchen Morgenson's piece in Sunday's Times points out how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are serving as a source of back-door bailouts for the banks.

And she quotes Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washingto,n DC, to the effect that their continuing status as half governmental agency, half private enterprise creates an irreconcilable conflict between taxpayers and shareholders.

The violent backlash against the rescue plan that Europe has come up with for Greece should be a warning sign for those who think the bond market should rule public policy.

Yes, Greece must get its act together in terms of the black market and corruption, and tighten its belt on public finances. It simply has no other choice. But austerity isn't going to help the country repay its debt, not when the global economy continues to suffer from weak demand.

Lost in the hubbub over the end of the GOP filibuster of bank reform and Goldman Sachs' role in the crisis that spawned the need for it is the news that Tim Geithner's spine has stiffened on what exactly to do. Or at least that's how I read this Times article.

I'm talking about Geithner's position on the so-called bank tax. Several months ago, he threw cold water on the idea of a special levy on banks, despite pressure for such a tax from his European counterparts.