In a blog Thursday on FinanSer--the Financial Services Club blogsite—commentator Chris Skinner posed the following question: Since payments are becoming so commoditized that it is foreseeable at some point they may become free, what does this do to the role of a bank as an intermediary in the payments business?

Skinner suggests that banks should and are moving towards becoming repositories of information, as they are further disintermediated from the payments space, and as margins disappear for payments processing.

I have to disagree with my colleague Steve Taub on this, not because my heart bleeds for jobless, underwater homeowners, but to keep foreclosures from driving home prices ever downward.

Here's the thing: What is the "natural" price that Steve wants the market to find?

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."

 Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

 Just last week we mentioned the American Bankers Association and its efforts to undermine the FASB's latest fair value proposal that, in the ABA's mind, could bring down civilization as we know it.

Anyone counting on regulation alone to prevent the world from falling into another financial black hole will be sorely disappointed, a group of experts warned in an article published yesterday by the International Federation of Accountants.

The experts say that all key parties to the financial disaster--from regulators to managers and investors--share the blame and that tighter regulation alone can therefore go only so far to prevent another crisis from materializing. 

Anyone counting on regulation alone to prevent the world from falling into another financial black hole will be sorely disappointed, a group of experts warned in an article published yesterday by the International Federation of Accountants.

The experts say that all key parties to the financial disaster--from regulators to managers and investors--share the blame and that tighter regulation alone can therefore go only so far to prevent another crisis from materializing. 

Submitted by Adrienne Gonzalez, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

Now £15.7 billion may not seem like much to you if you are, say, Bill Gates or Ben Bernanke but for PricewaterhouseCoopers UK, it may be the magic number that gets the firm into a whole steaming pile of trouble.

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.