A stressful day

I was gonna write a little song and dance on the whole bank-stress-test-oscar-winning-extravaganza show, but then i thought otherwise. You see, why not leave it to the guys who started this thing to tell their own story…

And the winner is…Only 10 banks need to raise capital and only 75bn of it!!!

75bn is a nice number. By now you guys are numb enough from the TARPnaisthisia to not really feel the pain so here’s some comp shots.

75 = 10 more than Madoff made off with

75 = 13 more than AIG lost by itself last quarter (and 35 more than it received in Fed funding in order to have the privilege to report this quarter)

75 = 70 more than AIG lost this quarter (without the 30 option payment to get to today) and last, just to list a non-negative one…

75 is a little over a third of what AIG has gotten in funding so far in order to stay alive and keep losing money, so i think we got some room to grow here

PS you know that the recession is over when the numbers thrown around fail miserably to impress anyone

Stronger than Ever

So the big news of the day, and certainly the one that everyone is going to be talking about for the next 30 seconds or so is that Goldman Sachs is returning the TARP money, all 10bn of it.

So i guess the general idea is that they are doing ok, and they don't need it, and they have other pressing issues to attend to, say like, finalizing their bonus structure and the pay raises for 2009. Good. Now i was never that good at math but i seem to recall that they did manage to get more than that (NYTimes say 13bn) through AIG’s TARP money so i guess they are good to go.

If we are to believe C.Gasparino, then this is like, the head of the mob family returning back to the helm after a short stay in the hospital from that murder attempt at the local restaurant.