Juggling Dynamite

This interview gives insight on the proposed amendment that would stop taxpayer-backed commercial banks from trading risky assets. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) explains his proposal on Kudlow.

Total firewall is the only way to control the slippery slop between the lending side and the risk-taking side. It is the right thing to restore. It is time for bankers to give up their magician mantle and go back to banking and for tax payers to get out of the risk subsidizing business.
Interesting that McCain says he is leaning away from endorsing Bernanke's re-appointment…could real change be actually coming?

Last Thursday Rick Sharga of Realty Trac appeared on Bloomberg and warned that the recent spate of less-bad housing data is a “false-positive trend” not likely to continue in 2010:
“I think that first quarter of next year we'll see a new wave of foreclosure activity. Delinquencies have been going up – we have five and a half million homeowners who are late on their mortgage payments right now, and many of those, under normal circumstances, would have already been in foreclosure. But the Treasury is asking lenders to make doubly sure that anybody who qualifies for the HAMP program or other modification program gets in those programs. We think we'll probably hit the historic peak next year, in 2010, as a lot of the Option-ARM loans reset, as unemployment related foreclosures peak, before numbers finally start to settle down a little bit in 2011. We're expecting the first quarter to be pretty ugly.”
Watch his interview here.

Obama was on 60 Minutes last night talking about the problems he is having with “Fat Cat bankers”:

Watch CBS News Videos Online
Interesting…could his administration be actually starting to get serious about reforms and regulation? I would love to be a fly on the wall in his meetings today with the Too-Big-To-Fail crew.