There were some other very interesting presentations at the conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston last week. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke spoke on Financial Regulation and Supervision after the Crisis while Princeton Professor Alan Blinder's message was

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div style="text-align: justify;"Deutsche Banks is making a catch-up call in span style="font-weight: bold;"CarMax (NYSE:KMX)/span raising their rating to Buy from Hold and bumping price tgt to $15 (prev. $10).br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"Improvement in wholesale funding market has positive implications for CAF/spanbr /The combination of vastly stronger demand and contracting spreads on Auto ABS deals has mitigated one of our key concerns: That captive (non-bank) finance co's such as Carmax Auto Finance might be structurally impaired. Improving liquidity and lower borrowing costs suggest that this business can once again become an important contributor to KMX earnings (as well as a support to sales).br /br /span style="font-weight: bold;"April deal appears profitable, and the market is now even better/spanbr /KMX completed its first ABS issuance since early July 2008 on April 9, 2009. The gross collateral spread was 7.3%, which was actually the highest on record. While this number does not account ...

Is Purchasing $700 billion of Toxic Assets the Best Way to Recapitalize the Financial System? No! It is Rather a Disgrace and Rip-Off Benefitting only the Shareholders and Unsecured Creditors of Banks Whenever there is a systemic banking crisis there is a need to recapitalize the banking/financial system to avoid an excessive and destructive credit contraction. But purchasing toxic/illiquid assets of the financial system is not the most effective and efficient way to recapitalize the banking system. Such recapitalization - via the use of public resources - can occur in a number of alternative ways: purchase of bad assets/loans; government injection of preferred shares; government injection of common shares; government purchase of subordinated debt; government issuance of government bonds to be placed on the banks' balance sheet; government injection of cash; government credit lines extended to the banks; government ...

NY Times, August 24
“The size of the commercial paper market, a crucial source of short-term financing for businesses, decreased 4.2 percent last week, the biggest drop in at least seven years, as investors fled asset-backed debt and opted for the safety of Treasuries….

… The retreat may indicate that the Fed’s decision to lower the discount rate last week failed to instill enough calm to draw back investors. Commercial paper backed by assets led the fall as buyers fled debt linked to subprime mortgages. …