Thing One: Just When I Thought I Was Out: If you think leaving a job means leaving behind all of that job's headaches, well, think again, buster. Just ask Bob Diamond and Tim Geithner.
Former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, who has resigned already, is still in so much trouble because of his bank's constant manipulation of the key interest rate Libor that he is now going to also give up maybe $31 million of his hard-earned bonus money. Is there no end to the horrors? Apparently not: Diamond is also knee-deep in the pickle juice because of his testimony before the House of Lords or whatever the heck they have over there in Britain, which some of the Lords think may not have been entirely truthful. So now he says he's going to go right back up there and put on a powdered wig and do some more 'splainin. It's hard out there for a banker, even an ex-banker.
Meanwhile, Tim Geithner hasn't been New York Fed President for years and years, on account of his being the Treasury Secretary, and yet people are now hassling him again over stuff he did back then. By "people," I mean the Huffington Post's D.M. Levine, who dug around through Geithner's phone records and found several meetings with Barclays during 2007-2008, a time in which the bank was dealing with the New York Fed about, you guessed it, Libor manipulation. Timmah and his then-boss, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, will be asked to appear before a Senate hearing to do some 'splainin' of their own about what they knew and when they knew it.
Thing Two: Bring Out The Claw: One person who can relate to Diamond and Geithner is Ina Drew, former head of JPMorgan Chase's chief investment office. She's the one who oversaw the London Whale loss that the bank is expected to report on Friday has ballooned to $5 billion, the Wall Street Journal writes. She resigned from her job, and yet the bank apparently is going to find her on whatever Caribbean island she's on and claw back some of the stock it gave her as a parting gift, the Wall Street Journal writes. A couple of other London Whalers may get their pay clawed back, too.
Thing Three: Peregrine Down: It's MF Global all over again, but with possibly more interesting twists: Iowa brokerage firm Peregrine Financial filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection yesterday, a day after freezing customer accounts. And the Commodity Futures Trading Commission accused the firm of making more than $200 million in customer money disappear over a period of a couple of years. The firm's founder is in a hospital after attempting suicide, a shock to the isolated Iowa community he made a home, in what sounds like a nearly cult-like environment.
Thing Four: More Pain For Spain: Turns out maybe Spain's going to have to suffer for its latest bailout after all. The country announced new austerity measures today to meet the terms set by the European countries bailing out its banks. Spain is also going to have to cede control of those banks, the Wall Street Journal writes. And Spain's borrowing costs are still perilously high, as the market apparently doubts any of this is going to work. Seems like only a month ago that everybody was cheering the Spanish bailout. Time flies.
Thing Five: China Turns On Money Faucet: China's government is going to spend money like crazy to help its struggling economy, the Wall Street Journal writes. What are they, socialists? Oh, wait: "China is ramping up state spending to counter its sharpest decline in growth since the financial crisis, further entrenching state-owned companies and dimming the hopes of some that China would use the slowdown to restructure its economy with market-oriented changes."
Thing Six: HSBC's Beautiful Laundrette: Another British bank finds itself in a spot of bother here in the Colonies: HSBC, which will appear before a Senate subcommittee on July 17 to say, "Gosh, sorry for all the money laundering," Bloomberg reports: "U.S. prosecutors may take criminal or civil enforcement measures involving the London-based bank amid an investigation into terrorist funding, HSBC said in February. The lender has more than tripled the size of a U.S. compliance team and said it will exit businesses it sees as too risky."
Thing Seven: New Rules For Bankers To Break: The CFTC yesterday agreed on new rules governing derivatives, The New York Times writes, though those rules may have been lobbied to death: "Bart Chilton, a Democratic commissioner who cast the lone vote against the plan, raised concerns that the fine print created loopholes wide enough for Wall Street to exploit."
Thing Seven And One Half: And Then Skynet Gained Self-Awareness: A computer scientist at Paris Diderot University has developed a program that watches humans play games like Connect Four, does a little computing, and then spanks those humans repeatedly in Connect Four. Game over, man, game over.
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Calendar Du Jour:
Economic Data:
8:30 a.m. ET: Trade Balance for May
10:00 a.m. ET: Wholesale Inventories for May
2:00 p.m. ET: FOMC Minutes for the June 20 meeting
Corporate Earnings:
After Market Close:
Marriott
Heard On The Tweets:
@ObsoleteDogma: So Tim Geithner was able to notice the same problems with Libor that Gillian Tett had pointed out seven months prior.
@JustinWolfers: To those nutters who think the BLS understates inflation: Why not invest heavily given the extremely negative real rates you perceive?
@taos: Argentina tried to make a crime to estimate inflation, pushing economists underground. Now it's made it a crime to buy dollars. What's next?
@ezraklein: My main question on Romney's tax returns: Why didn't he protect himself by ordering his accountants to simplify his taxes in 2008?
@BorowitzReport: Remember the politician who wouldn't release his tax returns and it turned out he had nothing to hide? Me neither.
-- Calendar and tweets rounded up by Khadeeja Safdar.
And you can follow us on Twitter, too: @markgongloff and @byKhadeeja