Michael Moore has been irritating me with his "Roger & Me" shitck: It's funny to go once to try to do a drop-by interview or citizen's arrest of the CEO once. It's not funny the fifth or sixth time around.

That said, am so totally watching this documentary if only for Marcy Kaptur, the best US Congresswoman New York never had. What her in all her glory:

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Do me a favor: When you hear a wanker go on about how the market can take care of itself, just punch them in the face. Don't even think about it twice: Just fuck their shit up real good and in the name of people like you and mean who have to deal with bullshit like the two news items below.

From FT.com / Companies / Banks - Banks make $38bn from overdraft fees:

US banks stand to collect a record $38.5bn in fees for customer overdrafts this year, with the bulk of the revenue coming from the most financially stretched consumers amid the deepest recession since the 1930s, according to research. The fees are nearly double those reported in 2000.

The finding is likely to increase public hostility towards the financial sector, which has been under political pressure to ease the burden on consumers by increasing credit availability and lending more fairly after being bailed out by taxpayers.

Angry? No? Ok, how about this article from the New York Times --which will get the dubious distinction of being blogged by me in two separate posts!

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For those of us who follow and participate in microloan programs, it iswell known that poorer people all over the world are far more likely to pay back a loan (assuming reasonable terms) than are wealthy people. I have seen amazing payback rates with almost every microloan program no matter how poor their clientele.

The key, of course, is assuring that the business relationship between the lender and the debtor is fair and reasonable.

In more traditional banking I have not been sure if the same dynamic applies where poorer borrowers are more likely to repay than richer. What is clear, though, is that banks have mostly been using unfair business practices to try and gouge the poor, and under those circumstances everyone loses. The collapse of Citigroup and Bank of America's stock price is a direct result of their use of predatory practices to gouge poorer borrowers who then couldn't repay. Of course the banks beg taxpayers for bailouts to get them through while the poor who were the victims of these practices are left to suffer.
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From Hempton's Law of the Conservation of Subsidy - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com:

The critics of the subsidy implicit in the Geithner plan aren't in general critics on the grounds that it constitutes excessive government spending --we're mostly supporters of the stimulus package, for instance. Rather, my problem with the implicit subsidy is more about the "implicit" part than the "subsidy" part. If you're going to subsidize the banks, let's make it very clear which banks you're subsidizing, and how much you're subsidizing them by.

This is all connected to the nationalization debate, of course. Every time the government throws a certain amount of cash at a bank, it's quite easy to calculate the ownership stake that quantity of money could buy, given the prevailing share price. And so you get pro-nationalization rhetoric along the lines of "we could have bought Citigroup X times over for the amount of money we've given them".

If you hide that money in some combination of PPIPs and the FDIC, however, then it's never possible to calculate how much any given bank has benefitted from the taxpayer plan.
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As in they have no money, no assets, no equity, no nada :

Tyler Cowen : U.S. banks have been known to be insolvent for some time and everyone is simply afraid to come out and admit it.

Brad Delong : Recapitalize the banks so that the risk tolerance of the private sector recovers to more normal levels--ideally through something like the Swedish model of temporary nationalization in order to avoid the creation of zombies.

Calculated RIsk : We should definitely stress test the banks. My suggestion: announce when this will be complete (within 30 days), make the results public, and preprivatize the insolvent ones.

Martin Wolf (via Matt Yglesias) : Under the first view, the prices of a defined set of “toxic assets” have been driven below their long-run value and in some cases have become impossible to sell [...] Under the second view, a sizeable proportion of financial institutions are insolvent: their assets are, under plausible assumptions, worth less than their liabilities.

Yves Smith : Let's start with the basics. The US banking system is insolvent. Got that? Insolvent. That does not mean every bank in the US is toast, in fact quite a few are probably just fine, and another large group is no doubt hurting and undercapitalized, but a couple of years of not shooting themselves in the foot again would enable therm (via earnings) to rebuild their equity bases sufficiently to proceed more or less as normal.

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I don't know if it is that economics and financial journalists ultimately do not know what the fuck they're talking about OR if they're so immersed into their own little worlds, they don't get that most of what they write is not even academic, it's just utter jargon.

Herewith is a partial and quite short list of words I'd love to see defined more often in articles addressing the current banking crisis. I will be updating today as I find more of my favorites and will start (hopefully with your help) to define them in the coming days.

Oh, and given how many words and terms I am finding myself looking up, the list I'm compiling is in alphabetic order :
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