Alistair Darling will this week tell fellow European finance ministers that the buck has to stop with national regulators when its comes to monitoring the activities of banks and other financial institutions.

It will be the chancellor's first important meeting since last week's intense speculation that he was about to be moved out of the Treasury - which he successfully fought off.

Hh will backl steps to enhance coordination of financial regulation at European level. However, he will say that ultimate responsibility must continue to rest with national regulators, not least because the banking crisis has revealed that taxpayers in individual countries are left to pick up the bill after regulatory failures.

"The fiscal aspect is very important in this," said a senior Treasury official.

For years, a network of underground smugglers' routes from Egypt to the Gaza Strip has supplied a besieged population with everything from cement to cattle. But now a series of major scams has destroyed the dreams of desperate investors who saw the tunnels as a path out of poverty

In the "intolerable" situation that is Gaza, as described last week by President Barack Obama in Cairo, the lure of such schemes was understandable. With few opportunities to do business, trade or even work, the chance to make money out of the illicit cross-border trade with Egypt seemed like a godsend. But this is the tale of a Gaza success story that turned sour.

Readers have been sending various Pangloss/Orwell sightings on a daily basis, with one's take on whether they fall in the absurdist or merely creeping authoritarian camp depending on one's degree of cynicism. I have only posed about 1/10th of them simply because it often takes a fair bit of parsing (headline v. meaningful comment close to the end that undercuts it). plus in many cases guest bloggers have already taken a cut at the topic (overly optimistic reports on employment data, for instance) so a piece on a paricular new item looked to be overkill.

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While the "nary a bad word will be said", or to the extent it is, it is countermanded by an even more positive take, has gotten some notice in the MSM. But I cannot recall anyone taking issue with it frontally. So an article today in the New York Times, "The Economy Is Still at the Brink" by Sandy Lewis and William Cohan, is a badly needed contirbution:

Yves here. Finally, someone besides folks like Willem Buiter, who is well respected but not widely read, is saying the obvious. Back to the story:

It's fair to say that 10-year and 30-year Treasury bonds are not subjects that enthrall the American public the way, say, Kate Gosselin does. In the last six months, however, the state of those bonds has become the subject of feverish argument in the economic elite. The interest rate of the 10-year Treasury bond has spiked from 2.07 percent in December 2008, when the world was falling apart, to a recent high of 3.715 percent on June 1--a 79 percent increase. The 30-year bond has risen from 2.5 percent last December to about 4.5 percent today. Now factions led by economist Paul Krugman and historian Niall Ferguson are feuding bitterly about the import of these charts. In late April, Krugman and Ferguson squared off at a New York Review of Books/PEN panel, and they've continued with an op-ed war in the Financial Times and New York Times (Ferguson here and Krugman here).

An excellent article contextualizing the ongoing argument about bond rates and setting out the agendas of each side.  It is full of links, including a 30 year chart of bond rates that puts the recent run up clearly in the context of the aberration that was the December, '08 low.  H/T to Phillip Durden.  

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."