Economics Update

China, in response to inflationary pressures, and the fact that a number of their banks are insolvent by western standards, just hiked their reserve requirements, meaning that they have to keep more in reserve, and lend less out of their deposits, which, not surprisingly has tanked Asian markets.

Given that the US trade deficit widened under the pressure of rising oil prices, there may be another purpose: to slow things down before US demand drops off a cliff, particularly when Ben Bernanke is signaling rate hike strongly.

In any case, oil fell a bit, but gasoline is still hitting new records, which implies that a lot of money is still going to petro-economies.

It looks like the British Bankers Association may be taking steps to fix the problems with LIBOR reporting, where this critical rate looks increasingly to have been gamed by member banks, by tightening scrutiny on the transactions, though they are still whining about how it will hurt, "What we do here in the U.K. must match others ... maintaining competitiveness is essential to the U.K. industry."

If you crank out phony numbers, it will hurt your bank more than any other thing that you can do.

Meanwhile, back in the good old USA, Q1 delinquencies rose 62% over a year ago.