Financial, Real Estate, Stock Markets Trends and Current Affairs

I got a kick out of this, excerpted from WSj's "It's time to feast on crow":

Unlikely Vision of the Next Bubble

Let us fast forward to the next bull market, in early 2013. Regulators and market participants have learned the lessons of the 2007-09 credit crunch. There are signs of a new bubble, and everyone wants to avoid the excesses that made the last downturn so dramatic.

Here is what key players might do:

Lehman Brothers' chairman emeritus, Dick Fuld, complains that stock investors have conspired to send the securities firm's share price to unsustainable highs.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, struggling to find a third new chairman in five years, announces a sweeping probe of buyers of rocketing financial stocks, aimed at rooting out market manipulation through the spreading of falsely optimistic rumors.

The SEC also sets emergency limits on investors' call-option positions.

Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman who has been raising interest rates by 0.1 percentage point each quarter for two years, talks the Federal Open Market Committee into a rapid series of sharp interest-rate increases to curb what his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, once called "irrational exuberance" in markets.

The Treasury and the Fed make a Sunday announcement of plans to temporarily increase financial institutions' capital requirements to offset the inflated value of financial assets.

Morgan Stanley's newly appointed chief and her Wall Street counterparts say bonuses for 2012 will remain unchanged from 2011 despite a 200% increase in profit. "We don't see why everyone should benefit from the huge profit on our carbon-trading desk, which was an aberration in an isolated part of the firm," she says.

The Financial Industry Alliance speaks out against fair-value accounting, saying the method has artificially inflated financial firms' assets and profits.

The industry group proposes that compensation on Wall Street should be adjusted downward to reflect this.

Credit-rating giant Poor & Moody declines to rate collateralized pollution derivative options, saying CPDOs are "untested and overly complicated" and indicating the firm has insufficient resources to rate the instruments.

--Jeffrey Goldfarb and Richard Beales