Here are 12 specific actions Obama could take that would make many within the Occupy Wall Street movement happier.
Read the full Forbes post here.
LinkedIn's bankers did try create a feeding frenzy yesterday over shares. Mission accomplished.
Read the full post here at Forbes.
By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
9/13/2010 5:00 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson
The market feared much higher levels than 7%, thus leading to this morning's rally. But, put another way, 7% capital requirements really mean that for every $1 in deposits, banks can make $14.29 in loans -- eight years from now.
Perhaps the Basel Committee thought 20:1 leverage -- when banks were asked to set aside only 5% of their capital on loans -- was perfectly acceptable and now 14:1 is severely conservative. Maybe when you compare it with the 25:1 ratio carried by Goldman Sachs (GS - commentary -Trade Now) or the 32:1 ratio carried by Morgan Stanley (MS - commentary - Trade Now) back in 2007, these new standards seem austere.
Yet the Canadian banks such as Royal Bank(RY - commentary - Trade Now), Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS - commentary - Trade Now), Bank of Montreal (BMO - commentary - Trade Now) and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce(CM - commentary - Trade Now) have current leverage ratios (and did through the crisis) of 21x, 23x, 19x, and 29x respectively. Yes, you read that last one correctly: Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has a current leverage ratio of 29:1.
I thought the Canadian banks were the ones we were supposed to emulate. I thought they were smart. I thought they were conservative. They had a single regulator who was on the job. Even men's magazines are writing articles declaring these obvious facts, so it must be true.
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By Eric Jackson, Senior Contributor 
01/13/10 - 06:01 AM EST
Stock quotes in this article: C , BAC , WFC , GS , MS
With last Friday's announcement that the economy lost another 85,000 jobs in the month of December and an unemployment rate still above 10%, renewed pressure is on the federal government to create jobs.
However, the truth is that it can't create any new jobs -- at least ones that are going to last beyond any short-term project. A new study shows the government's efforts had virtually no impact on changing the jobless rate.
We endlessly hear about the unemployment rate and the need for jobs. Many economists and politicians are now talking about the need for more jobs and a second stimulus. However, we need some clear headedness about this discussion.
What exactly can government do to fix this problem of too many unemployed or under-employed? I think the honest answer is not much directly or immediately. It can only create jobs in the long term and indirectly, through following policies that enable businesses to better compete.
The government passed a $700 billion TARP program to aid the country's financial institutions in the fall of 2008. By measure of the fact that all the big banks and brokers are still around today, with much of the money repaid to the American taxpayer, this program was a success.
We can quibble about whether the big banks such as Citigroup(C Quote), Bank of America(BAC Quote), and Wells Fargo(WFC Quote) are lending enough or how much Goldman Sachs(GS Quote) and Morgan Stanley(MS Quote) are paying their top performers, but the fact remains that these institutions are still standing today. We weren't so sure they would be 12 short months ago.
By Eric Jackson Citi's price was so much lower than expected that the government decided to hold back from selling $5 billion of its holdings as part of the offering. The offer price was actually a dime lower than the price at which the federal government bought its stake. Instead, the government said it would wait up to a year to sell its stake. It would be a political nightmare to have to explain to the American people that the government had lost money bailing out Citigroup. These two banks are following the lead of others, including JPMorgan Chase (JPM - commentary - Trade Now), Goldman Sachs (GS - commentary - Trade Now), Morgan Stanley (MS - commentary - Trade Now) and Bank of America (BAC - commentary - Trade Now), which have already paid back the TARP. Bank of America was the last of these to pay back the government, and it raised the most money in the public markets to do this: $19 billion on Dec. 8. Some have speculated that the tepid response to Citi's stock offering was because the market was fatigued after the stock sales of Bank of America and Wells in the last few weeks. I believe this logic is off. The market's response was tepid because there was a reason why Citi was the last one to go to the market to raise money. It has a lot of problems still facing it. Wells is in a similarly challenging position. [This is an excerpt from the full article on RealMoney.com. To read the full article, click here.]
TheStreet.com Senior Contributor
12/18/2009 1:00 PM EST
Earlier this week, both Citigroup (C - commentary - Trade Now) and Wells Fargo (WFC - commentary - Trade Now) announced that they were going to sell stock in order to get out from under the constraints put on them by the government when they needed help a year ago. Of the big banks, these were the last to get out from TARP.Wells Fargo sold $12 billion in stock at the beginning of the week, and on Wednesday night, Citigroup priced $17 billion for sale at $3.15 a share. It was only last week that Citi had floated the idea to the press of doing a capital raise at $4 a share. What's a 22% haircut between friends?
