I am less thankful about what our leaders are doing to our currency. Last year I introduced a new tradition on Thanksgiving – watching the carving of our currency as it is sliced by administration fiscal policy and diced by Fed monetary policy.

Your 2010 Thanksgiving dollar dinner leftovers are served:

For our main course, let us check in with Peter Schiff, who you may recall was right in 2006-07 predicting the impending recession and crash of the real estate bubble. He was right in 2008 about the dollar and early in 2009 when he warned President-elect Obama about the folly of trying to borrow and spend ourselves into prosperity. Monotonously he was right again one year ago when he told us to keep buying gold at $1,084 /oz (up 27% to Wednesday’s close of $1,372/oz) as a hedge against the devaluing dollar.

We cannot expect this remarkable record to continue. Schiff is an economist a financial consultant* – a profession second only to economists with a reputation for being more wrong than right (Paul Krugman being a notable high profile example, having correctly predicted eight of the last one recessions). But, while he is on a hot streak, it behooves us to pay attention to what he has to say.

Serving up the meat and potatoes – Schiff on the insanity of Congress mandating a two headed Fed charter. They are required to manage monetary policy to maintain a stable currency, and also to promote maximum employment by umm.. devaluing the currency:

The Chimera of the Fed’s Schizophrenic Mission - Peter Schiff

For a side dish, Peter Schiff checks in with CNBC and browbeats the usual suspects on Fast Money:

C’mon. A six minute long primitive animation about economics, Fed policy, and quantitative easing – going viral? Three million views? How does that happen?

Finally, for a relaxing after dinner smoke – Enjoy “The Bernanke” as he hits the road to defend the QE2 policy to the world. Good luck with that, Ben.

Cross=posted from “Divided We Stand United We Fall“

It’s almost been two months since Geithner announced the details of how the stress tests would go down, and now the government is set to announce the results for a bunch of banks.

Still, the focus is certainly on the top two.

From Financial Times:

Citigroup and Bank of America are working on plans to raise more than $10bn each in fresh capital, even as they launch last-ditch attempts to convince the US government they do not need to bolster their balance sheets.

People close to the situation said Citi, BofA and at least two other lenders will on Monday attempt to convince the Treasury and the Federal Reserve that the findings of “stress tests” into their financial health were too pessimistic.

But with time running out – the government will present the final test results to 19 banks tomorrow with an announcement scheduled for Thursday – both Citi and BofA are looking at how they could raise extra capital.

Preliminary findings have revealed that Citi, which has already been bailed out three times by the authorities, could need an extra $10bn or more if the economy worsens. BofA, which has had $45bn in government aid, was found to need well in excess of $10bn, people familiar with the matter said.

Here’s the thing…Treasury and the Fed may indeed be too pessimistic, but I’d rather have that so the banks are flush with cash than anything close to what we once had.

In other words, maybe these banks don’t know what pessimism is anymore after two decades of irrational optimism that led to the near collapse our entire economy.

I’m just saying…

At the center of President Obama’s overhaul strategy for Wall Street are the “stress tests” which will be applied to all financial institutions. But how accurate will the test results be? That will depend on whether the treasury takes off-balance-sheet assets into account, experts say.

This is Danielle Ivory, reporting from the American News Project and Alternet.

Back in February, in the House Financial Service Committee, when asked a question about the value of Citigroup’s assets, CEO Vikram Pandit provided a less-than-clear response: “It’s an extraordinarily difficult question.”

Click the video below to WATCH the exchange between Rep. Louis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Vikram Pandit.

Rob Weissman, director of the corporate watchdog group, Essential Action, and author of a new report called Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America, said that, in addition to what Pandit said, there’s an additional factor that could fog the test results: off-the-book assets.

“If you don’t include the off-balance sheet assets in the stress test, then it’s not a legitimate stress test,” Weissman said. “It’s pretty plain that the off-balance-sheet operations are a central part of the story of why we don’t know what the banks own.” The Treasury Department declined to comment on whether they would take off-book-assets into account when running the stress tests.

Weissman says that recipients of bailout money, like Citigroup, Bank of America and JP Morgan, have been engaging in “fanciful accounting” of what they owe and what they own by relocating of their less-than-healthy assets off the books, in shadow corporations. Rep. Brad Sherman has described the process as, “apples on one balance sheet and oranges on another.”

According to RGE Monitor, off-balance-sheet operations have skyrocketed over the last 15 years. From 1992 to 2007, on-balance-sheet assets grew by 200 percent, while off-balance-sheet assets grew by 1,518 percent. In 2007, it was estimated that there was 15.9 times more money parked in off-balance-sheet operations than in on-the-book operations. Not all off-book assets are toxic. Some financial institutions might park assets off their books if they are planning, for instance, to sell them. However, in rough economic times, off-balance sheet accounting allows banks to veil their losses from investors, regulators, and even insiders.

“This turns out to be a really important benefit [for a bank] if it happens to be insolvent,” Weissman added. “And many believe that if you total Citigroup’s assets and liabilities, it is insolvent.”

As of July, Citigroup appeared to have the most off-book assets — an estimated $1.1 trillion. But they aren’t alone. As of July 2008, JP Morgan Chase & Co. had more than $400 billion off their books. Bank of America had $48.2 billion off the books before it bought Merrill Lynch. “If you start adding up all the potential exposures, it’s a huge number,” Sam Golden, former ombudsman for the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, told Bloomberg. “The banks will say that it was disclosed. Investors are saying, ‘Yeah, but it was cryptic.’”

Disclosure rules for off-balance sheet operations are notably less strict than those for assets on the books. Neri Bukspan, chief accountant for Standard & Poor’s told Bloomberg, “A lot of information tends to disappear.”

The use of the off-balance-sheet assets was a core part of the Enron scandal, where they were able to wrap debt inside of debt, using obscure corporations, so no one could track what they owed and what they owned. After the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was set in place, there were efforts to address the problems with off-book assets. But after heavy lobbying by two main trade groups, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the American Securitization Forum, banks were given special exemptions.

In September of 2008 as the financial crisis was coming into full view, the Senate Baking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee held a hearing, discussing off-balance sheet operations. Senator Jack Reed recalled Enron: “This phenomenon of moving assets off the balance sheets is eerily familiar. We recall back in the days of Enron that its schemes to manufacture false profits included special purpose entities that conducted transactions off-balance sheet. The goal was to avoid financial reporting. While no one is necessarily suggesting scandals of the Enron kind, we cannot fail to admit the irony. We are dealing with a similar problem yet again, only six years later.”

George P. Miller, Executive Director of the American Securitization Forum, said that moving assets off-book back on to the books would cause dangerous swelling of balance sheets. He added, “There are many other steps that the industry can and should undertake to promote broader and better transparency about risk exposures in these vehicles, whether they are on or off-balance sheet.”

But Donald Young, former member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board countered, “We just had an investment bank [Lehman Brothers] go bankrupt with a fair value balance sheet that showed it had plenty of assets and liabilities. And it almost seems like financial reporting is out of control and not trusted and not believed in. And I think what we do here has got to establish transparency. If the transparency is such that we’re going to bring out some bad news that wasn’t there before, that’s a risk. But I think the benefits of reestablishing confidence in the markets will overwhelm that.”

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) are revising the rules so some off-book assets will have to be reported on the books. However, the changes won’t be effective until January 2010 at the earliest. In March at a House Financial Services Subcommittee hearing, Rep. Sherman complained about this lag. He told the chairman of the FASB, Bob Herz, “If you guys can’t act quickly and logically, perhaps the regulatory accountants need to act and depart from what is a somewhat illogical and certainly slow process that you’ve got.”

In the meantime, in a recent letter to his employees, Pandit has said Citigroup is having its best quarter since 2007 and the bank had conducted its own internal stress tests with positive results. But Weissman says something doesn’t add up. “Either they’ve done a lot of due diligence in a short amount of time that they hadn’t done before, or the stories are incompatible.”

Crossposted at Alternet.

Today, political columnist E. J. Dionne lays out the central conundrum to Barack Obama’s economic policies:

Describing what Obama is up to leads quickly to sentences freighted with contradictions. He wants to regulate the market more tightly in order to save it. He thinks big government is required now if we are to return to a less-restricted economic system later. You might say that he is using collectivist means to capitalist ends.

Obama, I think, understands the importance and superiority of the free market system, but he consistently gravitates towards solutions which rely on the powers of big government. Part of that is because you use the tools you have. As president, Obama has the hammers of state at his disposal. But I also think he is preconditioned by his liberal ideology to believe all problems have a government solution. He is thus left balancing his instincts with his intellect, and that has confounded many of us on the sidelines.

Dionne goes on in his column to write specifically about Treasury Secretary Geithner’s plans to save the banks, noting that the administration is wielding a lot of federal power but is still placing a lot of confidence in the free market by not nationalizing the banks like some liberal economists believe is necessary (Paul Krugman being the most vocal):

[T]he core question of whether the banks are insolvent is maddeningly difficult to resolve. If Geithner is correct, he will move us to recovery with less disruption. If he’s wrong, he will waste a lot of taxpayer money before eventually reaching the Krugman solution.

…

That’s the Obama enigma: boldness wrapped in caution rooted in an ambivalent relationship to the status quo. This is why Obama will, by turns, challenge not only his entrenched adversaries but also his natural allies.

If Obama fails, the right will say he reached too far to the left will say he didn’t reach far enough. Even though I think Obama has been cavalier on the deficit and too intransigent on cutting back his pet projects, I do appreciate that his administration has made an effort keep the free market viable, rather than running roughshod over it.

That’s why Obama’s “firing” of the CEO of GM was not socialism. Socialism would be the government seizure of GM. Like with the banks, what Obama is engaged in is statist-directed free market recovery. Sounds like an oxymoron. But I believe that’s what Obama is trying to achieve, even though I’m not sure it’ll work. As such, Obama is likely continue to confound me and others with each new response to the economic crisis. Whether or not that’s a bad thing depends entirely on whether or not the plans work.