The dollar’s slide: 1/3 down and falling faster

FT Alphaville: The dollar’s slide: 1/3 down and falling faster

And in more fun news, the International Herald Trib's question about Henry Paulson's fiduciary CRM-114 discriminator. (Pleased to say I pointed out this little discrepancy a couple of weeks ago). On to IHT's elephant in the room:

IHT: "Yesterday's excesses" now haunting Paulson, who helped create them

NEW YORK: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson says that the United States is examining the subprime mortgage crisis to ensure that "yesterday's excesses" are not repeated. He could be talking about himself and his former firm, Goldman Sachs.

Paulson does not mention that Goldman still has on the market an estimated $13 billion of almost $37 billion in bonds backed by subprime loans or second mortgages that it created while he was its chief executive. Those bonds have an average delinquency rate of almost 22 percent, higher than the average of other subprime bonds from the period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

S&Ls and Resolution Trust Corp were so opaquely 80s-90s, and comfortably so, for the Hank Greenbergs and Paulsons and Chuck Princes. Then the interwebs happened to the Client-Bank-PR-media outlet foodchain. Good for investors, bad for 3-card Monte.

Speaking of Prince, here's an article on CIBC's Meredith Whitney, the anti-Henry Blodgett:

"Making a negative call on Citigroup was a major call, and I took it very seriously," Whitney, of CIBC World Markets, said in an interview last week. "I knew that it would be a major event. I'm not sure I expected the market event."

Whitney's downgrade of Citigroup to "sector underperform" -- Wall Street lingo for "sell" -- came after a long and painful decline of the bank's stock and followed similar downgrades by other analysts. Whitney's report captured the most attention, in part because it was published at a vulnerable time for companies in the financial services sector that she covers and also because of the grim picture she laid out for Citigroup.

In a matter-of-fact tone, unlike her sometimes colorful comments to the financial press and as a frequent guest on Fox News, Whitney made the case in her report that Citigroup's capital levels were worse than the market believed. In doing so, she employed a calculation of capitalization, tangible capital ratio, different from the measure used by Citigroup but one she argued was more accurate given the uncertainty over the true value of the assets on the books of financial institutions.