Tim Geithner has changed his tune somewhat, backing a bill that would clarify the Treasury’s right to allow Hardest Hit Fund grant money to be used for foreclosure legal aid, but it’s unclear whether there’s enough time in the end of the legislative session to get this done.

The Portuguese government isn’t as deeply committed to keeping the banking system afloat as the Irish government, but the banks are experiencing significant liquidity problems as a result of the contracting economy and the increasing pressure from international bond markets. So once again we have the government of an EU member state willing to adopt draconian austerity measures on a more or less voluntary basis and it isn’t making the problems go away.

I come to Steven Rattner’s Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry from a very particular perspective. As a Michigander whose husband still works in the auto industry and whose town has benefited from battery subsidies, I’m a grateful direct beneficiary of the work the Obama Administration did to save the auto industry. But that also means I read this book, which might have been subtitled, “Wall Street gapes at Detroit” from the perspective, “Detroit gapes back at Wall Street.”

Proponents of TARP insisted that there was no alternative to handing hundreds of billions to the banks with no questions asked. They are still pushing this line.

Letting the giant Wall Street banks collapse would have ended the high-risk, credit-default-swap casino culture, and the culture of multi-million-dollar bonuses.

Many of the banks lack the proper paper trail to prevail in foreclosure and that judges are beginning to wake up to this, and sometimes even cancel mortgages outright, it is not surprising that the banks are beginning to realize that their own bad faith, their own shoddy dealing, their own rupturing of the social contract has put them in a position where they may not be in the driver’s seat on foreclosures much longer. No wonder the baks are starting to preach the gospel of mortgage modification.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner uses the Washington Post’s op-ed page to tell us “How to prevent America’s next financial crisis.” His solution is to support the Senate bill, which mostly trusts those who failed last time to get it right next time.

Does Obama have what it takes to reinstate banking regulations?

The Banksters have been fighting tooth and nail against financial reform, and have been having a good bit of success while the nation is focused on health care reform. Their strategy is the same as it always is: they call on the members of Congress with money past and future peeking out of their pockets; they invent some minimal justification for the weakest possible regulation; and they find someone to front for their faulty arguments.

Your auditors just told you that you don’t know how to value your own insurance contracts, Goldman Sachs and other trading partners are asking you to post more collateral –indicating that they disagree with how you have valued these contracts, the guy in charge of these products cannot come up with a way to explain them in layman’s terms, yet you have the chutzpah to tell your investors that your products are “carefully underwritten”? And probability of loss is zero? WTF? Where did you get that from?