Bear with me here. This is going to be one of those "out there" posts. But Steve Randy Waldman takes an interesting stab at a problem I've been wrestling with, at least in the furthest reaches of the financial corner of my brain, since the financial crisis began.

And that is how to stimulate the economy without creating another asset bubble. It sounds easy enough to the Keynesians, but as Waldman has pointed out before, rebooting aggregate demand through traditional government action may simply create another bubble. And ultimately, the distinction between monetary and fiscal policy may be moot.

There's some additional recent work out there that's worth citing in connection with Karen's post on Tuesday.

In particular, I would point readers to the piece posted Monday on voxeu.org by Enrico Perotti, a finance professor at the Amsterdam Business School. Essentially, Perotti's piece explains why Kotlikoff's prescription is necessary. As it did the US Congress, the banking industry has fought off international attempts to get the so-called Basel Committee to force the industry to de-leverage its business model. And Kotlikoff's idea does exactly that, simply because mutual funds are financed entirely by equity.

The latest revelations  concerning the dispute between AIG and Goldman over collateral show how weak the new financial reform package really is.

After all, Goldman's demands for collateral from AIG as it was failing ended up costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Yet according to the testimony today during the crisis panel's latest hearings, the whole question hinged on what constituted fair value.

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. 

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.

European regulators in countries throughout Europe are in the midst of proposing a wave of new regulations to resolve the current crisis and reduce the threat of future ones. So is the European Commission. But not all of the regulators’ proposals are complementary, which could lead to a wealth of difficulties should conflicting proposals go forward in different jurisdictions, especially if they contradict EC proposals.

As the WSJ reported on Friday, the EC has set out numerous draft proposals in further efforts to improve banking market strength—proposing a maximum limit on board memberships for individuals; forbidding individuals from being both CEO and chairman of a given company; setting risk management responsibility at board level; restricting pay packages for top executives; and consolidating oversight of rating agencies under a new EU agency that can levy fees, set penalties and demand information. The proposed new rating agency overseer is a change from proposals made by the EC last fall, which left oversight to each country.