Bad news for President Obama. The morning after our leader joined the rest of Americans and finally acknowledged that jobs are the most important issue facing the country, chief financial officers signaled they don't expect the employment picture to improve anytime soon.

Sure, 62 percent of the 371 corporate CFOs who participated in the latest quarterly survey conducted by Financial Executives International (FEI) and Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business said they do not plan any layoffs for this year. Big deal. Most companies have already gotten around to this cost-cutting measure. In fact, 77 percent of those surveyed said they already cut rank and file during the economic downturn.

Matt Quinn and I are struck by the contradiction at the heart of Tim Geithner's stated role in the bailout of AIG when he was president of the New York Fed.

On the one hand, Geithner claims he had very little to do with it, and so isn't responsible for the fact that the bank failed to use its leverage to negotiate better terms for taxpayers instead of paying Goldman Sachs and other AIG counterparties 100 cents on the dollar.

I've ranted before about why government spending is necessary to help get us out of recession, but in light of the latest hysteria over the federal deficit, I see no choice but to do so again, even though I claimed only earlier today to want to avoid politics to the extent I can.

Sorry, but that's impossible, not today, when the press and blogosphere are all atwitter over President Obama's gimmicky spending "freeze." So to restate a simple fact, the deficit is being driven by the economy, not the other way around, as the latest report of the Congressional Budget Office makes clear.

We normally try to steer clear of purely political stuff here, just because it's so, well, political.

But the back and forth over President Obama's proposal to freeze non-defense discretionary spending, to be unveiled tomorrow night during the State of the Union address, is just too ironic to pass up.

I'm finding it particularly difficult right now to sort through the controversies raging over the Bernanke nomination, the latest revelations regarding Tim Geithner's dealings with AIG, and the pros and cons of the so-called Volcker Rule for banks too big to fail.

The other day I said that the tea party, for want of a better term, wasn't much fun for Wall Street. Now it looks like Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner aren't enjoying the aftermath of the Massachusetts special election either.

In fact, there is growing opposition to Bernanke's re-nomination in Congress, as is widely reported, though Bloomberg naturally has stressed the positive here via the go-to source for never-rock-the-boat Democrats, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh.

The press coverage today of the Obama administration's latest proposals to deal with banks too big to fail predictably does little but muddy the waters.

First off, by falling 200 points, the market isn't expressing doubts about the effectiveness of the plan, but just the opposite. So why do outlets like the Times and Bloomberg today once again fail to distinguish between Wall Street and Main?

It looks as if one lesson President Obama has drawn from the shellacking the Democrats took on Tuesday in the special election for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat is that he needs to crack down much harder on Wall Street.

According to the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, big banks will have to jettison at least some of their investment banking activities, though how exactly is unclear. But the idea sure seems to go beyond the TARP tax on asset size.

This New York times article on the bank lobby's plans to challenge the constitutionality of the bank tax proposed by the Obama administration last week fails to point out several clear-cut historical precedents in support of it.

Yes, the article notes that legal experts say the challenge rests on shaky ground, but it never really explains why.

This Times story doesn't say how it calculated the amount of tax that it reports big banks would pay under the Obama administration's plan to recoup federal assistance to them.

But much depends on how the banks' regulatory capital is defined, and as tax and accounting guru Bob Willens pointed out in a report posted to his site on Friday, that isn't clear from the administration's pronouncements so far.