Contrarian Pundit

“Mr. Blankfein, you’re trying to seduce me. … Aren’t you?”
Check out the rest of the intimate White House photos at The Awl.

Today I received an e-mail from an anxious Tamalpais Bank customer wondering whether he should withdraw his money.  Judging from the hits coming to this site from Google searches like “Tamalpais Bank buyout” and “Tamalpais Bank deadline,” I gather he is not alone in his fears.  In general, what should bank customers do when their [...]

It looks like federal regulators are taking the allegations of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy examiner’s report seriously.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has announced that it is sending letters of inquiry to nearly two dozen large financial and insurance companies, asking them to discuss in detail how they account for repurchase agreements in their financial statements.  [...]

The vultures are circling the North Bay, according to San Francisco Business Times reporter Mark Calvey:
North Bay banks struggling with troubled loans are expected to become acquisition targets for other banks operating in the Bay Area.
Banks in the North Bay got hit hard by the deep recession that turned construction loans into lead weights on [...]

It looks like the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board may wish to discuss the leaking of that Ernst & Young letter:
PCAOB to Consider Proposing Auditing Standard on Communications With Audit Committees, Amendments to PCAOB Interim Standards
Washington, D.C. , March 24, 2010
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has scheduled an Open Meeting for Monday, March [...]

CONTRARIAN OF THE WEEK:

Jeremy Scahill, award-winning journalist and bane of Blackwater Xe …
… for claiming the second annual Izzy Award, named after the heroic muckraker I.F. Stone, for outstanding achievement in independent journalism.
Quote:
I would define an independent journalist as someone that’s totally un-embedded when it comes to their relationship with the powerful. In other words, [...]

A follow-up to my post on the GOP’s Obama’s HCR victory …
Harper’s Magazine’s Scott Horton points us to an interesting comment from conservative writer and former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett, in his discussion of David Frum’s firing from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank:
Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel [...]

How easy is it to get an “EnergyStar” government-approved label for your product?
Very easy, according to Congressional investigators:
Does a “gasoline-powered alarm clock” qualify for the EnergyStar label, the government stamp of approval for an energy-saving product?
Like more than a dozen other bogus products submitted for approval since last June by Congressional auditors posing as companies, [...]

Yesterday I posted a letter from Ernst & Young to the audit committee of one of its clients, defending itself against the charges of Anton Valukas, the bankruptcy examiner for Lehman Brothers.  I didn’t have time to analyze it until today, but posting it proved to be a good idea, since it has been picked [...]

Since publication of the Valukas report, the 2,200–page examination of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, accounting firm Ernst & Young has come under scrutiny for approving Lehman’s “materially misleading” financial statements.
Someone forwarded me a March 23 letter that Ernst & Young sent to the audit committee of one of its other clients to “address certain media [...]