News from around the web: 2009-09-15

"Could the divergent economic fortunes of euro-zone countries pose a problem for the currency union itself?"

"I also think the administration should have moved faster "to restrict institutions’ size, their risk-taking, and their interconnectedness," but I haven’t completely given up hope that they will get this done. But I doubt it will go as far as I’d like. "

We’re talking both money supply and credit here.

America’s third-biggest mobile phone network, Sprint Nextel, saw its shares jump 14pc on Monday as the market welcomed news that Deutsche Telekom is considering bidding for it.

As my colleague Jeremy Warner puts it, Lehman no more caused the economic convulsions of the last year than the assassination of an Austrian prince caused the First World War

"Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, has called on politicians to ditch GDP as a measure of national wealth and replace it with one that quantifies well-being alongside economic strength."

"Even the oratorical skills of Barack Obama must be stretched by this one. How do you deliver a speech to Wall Street on the eve of the first anniversary of its near-collapse and explain to the world how virtually nothing has changed? How do you explain to American taxpayers how their trillion dollar bailout of the banks has merely allowed the bankers to take back billions in bonuses? How do you persuade the world that the masters of the universe who brought us to the brink of a global economic depression will not do so all over again?"

Europeans care a lot more than Americans and Brits about privacy

Federal District Judge Jed S. Rakoff rejected a proposed $33 million settlement of allegations by the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bank of America Corp. "materially lied" in shareholder communications about bonuses to employees of Merrill Lynch & Co.

"This is not good. Not good at all. Barack Obama seems ready to respond to an International Trade Commission recommendation that America handle "dumping" of Chinese tyre imports by raising tariffs by…raising tariffs."

"U.K. banks are less than half way through posting 240 billion pounds ($398 billion) of losses on loans and securities, a reflection of the country’s economic weakness, according to Moody’s Investors Service Ltd."

"Capacity utilization — the portion of a company’s use of its facilities — fell 2.8 percentage points to 67.4% during the quarter, Statistics Canada said Monday."

Widespread condemnation for Obama here.

"I don’t know that publications designed for laypeople are the best places to hash out major academic differences. In newspapers one gets these sorts of dueling caricatures and a lot of talking past each other (and a lot of retreat into ideological corners, readily identifiable and joinable by lay-readers)."

Adam Levinson runs two hedge funds at Fortress Investments. It was so keen to keep hold of him that they reportedly gave him a $300m slice of the company.

This is the interventionist regulatory approach. It also operates at a State and not a Federal level.

Roll Call calculates net worth based on the minimum assets and minimum liabilities listed in each lawmaker’s annual financial disclosure report. These reports exclude some assets including primary residences, however, and may not provide a full representation of a Member’s financial portfolio.

"Barack Obama’s big health care speech last week has, in general, been deemed a success by the media and the political class. But beneath that consensus lie some interesting differences in the criteria used by observers to evaluate the president’s address—differences that, in turn, reveal competing theories about how political power is obtained and wielded. These are probably legion, but for the purposes of the present roundup, we can see three categories. Call them the straightforward polling theory, the sophisticated polling theory, and the it’s-not-about-the-polls theory."

Distraction of the Day: Kanye West meltdown

What is happening to civility in America?