After throwing $1 trillion at the mortgage problem, the president's working group realized that it needed someone who actually knew what the problem was, so it hired TREPP a few weeks ago. And now that they have a cash flow modeling system, the gentle souls with the invisible hands have expanded their hiring efforts, with the latest fat fingered talent sought by the New York Fed being that of an MBS Quant.

Alright...

I'm reading two books right now, which I will deal with in two posts. The first is The Forgotten Continent by Michael Reid, the former bureau Chief for Latam at The Economist about modern Latin American history and development.

In the absence of our daily CDS market closing commentary (some people actually enjoy taking vacations), I provide you with RANsquawk's equity and credit EOD wraps.

It was only a week ago that we were conjecturing about the prospects for Austrian mega-bank Raiffeisen. This being Zero Hedge of course, we came to the conclusion that the prospects were not that hot. Some readers vehemently disagreed. Maybe news today out of RZB will make them a tad less skeptical: the bank announced that it was scrapping the exchange offer without providing much of a reason.

Today is EOQ, yet the NYSE traded with the lowest volume since January 5. The correlation continues: low volume - market up; high volume - market plunge. Rinse. Repeat.

Long perceived as a bastion of stability due to their oil-extraction based economy, and socialist system that the US can only dream to emulate, today the Norwegian Central Bank conducted a Dutch auction in which it exchanged NOK10 billion of government securities for residential and commercial mortgage loans. And not just any loans, but including those denominated in SEK, DKK, EUR, USD, GBP and CHF (well, in retrospect, looks like pretty much any loans). Exchange swaps will cover maturities between December 2012 and 2014. But aside from the specifics, it seems that even the Norges are starting to monetize MBS: a process demonstrated to work phenomenally well at propping up a hollow economy by the likes of economic alchemists such as Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner.

• Danish officials confirm swine flu victim resisting Tamiflu
• VIX drops to 25.65, below closing level before Lehman collapse
• Qatar has made offer for Porsche: Qatar’s offer includes for Porsche’s VW options.
• Germany's Vice Chancellor Steinmeier says no room for further tax cuts
• Bank of America (BAC) 2009 estimate cut to USD 0.65 from USD 0.71 by Rochdale's Bove
• Government to stop outright purchases of stock, State Street to stop rolling buy ins (relax, i jest)

And I thought the Sanford letters were going to be the funniest thing posted here this afternoon. Oops...

The FDIC today made public for the first time host state loan-to-deposit ratios. Alas, the data is quite dated, as it represents the June 30, 2008 snapshot. Since then one can imagine things have changed quite a bit. The data are being released in order to calculate complaince with "section 109 of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994."

In keeping up with relevant current topics, the San Francisco Fed has issued a new paper analyzing how proposed new changes to health insurance planning may impact the broad economy by comparing to the example of the Prepaid Health Care Act (PHCA) adopted by Hawaii in the 1970's. Presumably, the administration has done its empirical homework as it pushes for various expensive adjustments to insurance plans, however it bears to read this piece for the conclusions, which essentially notes that not only are business likely to suffer higher incremental costs, the marginal employment of full time workers will likely suffer as more and more shift to find loopholes in proposed legislation, putting further stress on the already broken (un)employment landscape.

Some afternoon levity: now that Madoff is set to spend the remainder of his life behind bars, the public's attention is shifting to whatever other scandal will fill the pages of the yellow press. And as this summer has progressed very slowly, with the SEC cowering in its cave, afraid to do anything about the unprecedented market manipulation evident to anyone but the market regulator, the general public likely will have to make do with the tryst of Gov. Mark Sanford and his Argentinian beau as the topic de jour.