Apparently the way to make money in publishing the news is to have a good database of past stories so you can paste the new name of the next story into your old copy. The folks over at MarketWatch appear to have taken the stories about the Greek debt crisis and replaced "Greece" with "Cyprus"

Seriously, don't these claims and fears sound familiar? To us it sounds like the same thing we read about when Iceland, Ireland, and Greece were set to destroy the E.U. and bring the global economy down with it.

"The problems may be worse than imagined, requiring changes to the bailout or making it unworkable."

"... the effect of capital controls ... will mean a prolonged recession which will make it impossible for [name_of_country] to meet its targets and repay its bailout debt..."

"the guarantee [plan_detail] is from the insolvent [name_of_country] government"

"...allocating losses to investors and bondholders may prove challenging in practice."

Source: 7 reasons Cyprus is more important than you think

Yup. Been there, done that. Time to go buy more high-yield bonds while the prices are cheap [again].

The Whipsaw Song, by The Trading Tribe

Can't pass this up -- five old fogey stock traders get down and dirty with some Kentucky blue grass written especially for market-a-holics.

Happy Fourth of July!



You can find out more about The Trading Tribe at their web site.

Banks Are Not Intended to be Safe Place To Keep Money

We've been seeing rules like this lately with the phrase "prohibits branches of banks … from operating primarily for the purpose of deposit production."

Let that sink in for a minute --- if you want to run a bank, you can do X, Y, and Z, and many other things, but if you have a primary purpose of attracting deposits, it's a no-no -- slap you on the wrist, bad boy!!

Now put on your consumer hat. Why do you put your money in a bank? Isn't the primary purpose to ensure your wealth is in a safe place so you don't have to stash a bunch of money in a steel, tamper-proof, fire-proof, locked-down safe, and then carry wads of cash around where thieves can separate you from your wealth when you go buy something? From your point of view, a bank's primary purpose is to be a safe place to keep your money.

But the bank is prohibited from primarily attracting your interest in their safekeeping services.

We can't speak for you, but that explains a lot.

PIIGS - Propped Up By Hope

Maybe Governor Daniel K. Tarullo's testimony to Congress helped the stock market sell off yesterday. There's nothing better than a federal official making an official proclamation that "Europe is still in trouble, and it can mess up the U.S.,too. We don't expect another U.S. bank crisis, but ya never know!" That, of course, was a paraphrase. Actually, the direct quote was

...holding out hope that further financial disruptions can be averted

There ya go, Europe is propped up by hope!

Too bad the fed can't just get involved in more swap markets. Their excess profits are returned back to the US Treasury, and the last crisis not only earned $5.8 billion in interest on forex swaps alone, but cut the cost of federal funding from the flight to dollars.

It's good business being a central bank.

Over the life of the previous temporary swap program (from December 2007 to February 2010), all swaps were repaid in full, and the Federal Reserve earned $5.8 billion in interest. Finally, the Federal Reserve bears no market pricing risk in these drawings.

Incontinent Spending

Kudos to Donald J. Boudreaux who used the phrase Incontinent Spending over at our friends' site Cafe Hayek to describe the fiscal policies of the Obama administration.

We've seen or heard some with less self control call that administration full of ... well, you know what, but we try to be family friendly here. Nevertheless, we find this to be one of the best word pictures of the week. We leave it as an exercise for the reader to find the other puns, double entendres, and innuendos in this angle.