Creative Q1 Accounting, Systemically Important Department

Wells Fargo projects record $3 billion 1Q profit

Of the four remaining major national banks (Chase, Citi, BofA and Wells), Wells Fargo and Citi have a far lower amount of loss reserves as a percentage of loans than do JPM and Citi.

Notwithstanding, in conjunction with newly restored "mark-to-make-believe" accounting from their friends at FASB (who were bribed by the Fed and threatened by the SEC), the banks likely will report stellar Q1 earnings, by design, meaning the feds (that seamless Bush-Obama transition) implicitly will allow them to now under-reserve for bad loans, thus dramtically improving net income and capital ratios.

Combined with "stress tests" to be graded, not "pass/fail" but "present," the entire exercise appears to have been created to dupe private investors into buying new issues of common stock offered by the banks, such as Goldman Sachs' upcoming issue, to "prove" capital markets are functioning again.

Add the PPIP government-sanctioned looting of what little taxpayer money yet can be borrowed from China and we will be able to call off Depression 2.0.

(Pay no attention to those unemployment numbers, or tent city numbers, or mass shootings numbers because, HEY!, the banks are OK!)

Which will, of course, prop things up for 6-12 months and lift the stock market sufficiently for Wall Street insiders to "distribute" their remaining equity holdings to the rube small investors who mistakenly believe the government has solved all our problems.

And which, of course, sets up the "big one" sometime in 2010. The big what? I don't know, but it's coming.

Check local listings, but stay tuned...