houston wegot a problem, page-19

The Treasury spokesman just said "There is no basis for that report; we do not even have results yet,".

The spokesman's reference to "we" in the "denial" appears to be a reference to he and Mrs. Spokesman, because it is impossible for senior US Treasury officials not to have seen the results yet. Or, is US Treasury not getting a copy until we all get one, on May 4?

Ayway, the stress-test results seem unlikely to supply a glowing endorsement of the condition of US banks.

It might be reasonable to expect a fair-dinkum "stress test" on the financial treadmill to give some of these sclerotic US banks a stroke, given recent history.

Presumably, it will be the de-risking of banks by the government's "socialism by stealth" (which the same brand of right-wingers decry) which will be the stress-test saviour.

Whatever is in the report, presumably it will be heavily conditioned to explain how government action is succesfully mitigating the identified risks - and probably that is true - because without that, how many banks would be there to be tested?

I'm not sure if I was the US Treasury, or a banker, or the US government, that I would be too upset to see a bit of the sting taken out by the "leaking" of a false, much worse-looking one, first. Especially if the publisher of the "leak" was some already despised and marginalised group. Provided the falsely reported results prove sufficiently innaccurate, of course - and you would hope they do.

It is easy to see the result is sensitive - if you crank any treadmill up high enough, you fly off and the testers won't want the results misconstrued.

It will be interesting when they do publish and bloggers and posters get to work on bits of it.