UBS, Switzerland's largest bank, will hand over to the IRS at least 4,450 names of Americans suspected of hiding money in secret accounts that at one time contained $18 billion.

Among the collateral damage: Writers will now have to add an asterisk to the phrase "as secret as a Swiss bank account."

UBS got off easy, and so did thousands more rich Americans: The U.S. government had demanded that UBS identify the holders of 52,000 accounts. As part of the deal finalized today, the U.S. is dropping its lawsuit against the bank, and the bank won't get fined.

Be sure to read the backgrounder on Bradley Birkenfeld, the American employee of UBS who blew the whistle. Not that he's a hero, because he was one of the schemers and has pled guilty, but he stands to possibly rake in money for snitching. Birkenfeld is probably no longer welcome in Switzerland.

President Barack Obama may very well be getting in the faces of the lobbyist-orchestrated teabaggers at a New Hampshire "town hall" this very minute. Click above to listen in.

Too bad it would be impolitic for Obama to talk about the so-called teabaggers (and the lobbyists like Dick Armey who are organizing them to rile the Democrats) the way David Shuster discussed teabagging while guest-hosting Keith Olbermann's MSNBC show this past April 13. Here's that video:

A classic oral report, and if the video's not working for you, click on the jump line right below for the next page to see the transcript:

What they're working on is a far cry from what Barack Obama was talking about on the campaign trail. It's a deal that wouldn't require large businesses to offer coverage to their workers and wouldn't include a government insurance option. More on these "centrist" senators here.

That may matter to you, but not to people like Daniel Suelo, a guy who lives in a cave near Moab, Utah. In "COULD YOU SURVIVE WITHOUT MONEY? MEET THE GUY WHO DOES," Christopher Ketcham profiles him in Details. Best line: In describing Suelo's cave, Ketcham writes, "Suelo's been here for three years, and it smells like it."

The Senate's health-care deal may also smell, but that may fade. Congress is simply trying to get something preliminarily accomplished before its August vacation. Pretty clear that Congress won't settle things before its members flee.

One major money deal is already done: Bank of America (the biggest bank, and the one with the most branches) is revving up the chainsaws to lop off 10 percent of those 6,100 branch banks. Not that people really need so many branches with online and mobile banking so available.

This is the kind of pruning that would happen even if we weren't in a recession. No big deal. Bigger news looms this week, as more earnings reports pour in. Stock futures are down before the opening bell in dread of some of those figures.

Sexier items may or may not emerge from this week's hearings from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. And sometime next month, the CFTC will officially release a major report on price shenanigans. It seems that suspicions are confirmed that speculators — not just supply and demand — drove the wild swings in oil prices.

Other stuff:

"U.S. Effort to Modify Mortgages Falters" (WSJ)

"CONGRESS DEBATES ONUS FOR GOLDMAN BONUS" (NY Post)

"'Clunker' Rebates Stir Car Buyers" (WSJ)

"JAILHOUSE CROCK: ACCUSED SCAMMER STANFORD WHINES ABOUT CELL" (NY Post)

"Foreclosures Are Often In Lenders' Best Interest: Numbers Work Against Government Efforts To Help Homeowners" (WashPost)

"Cost of treating obese patients soars to $147 billion" (USA Today)

Geithner: There's a lot of power in his hands, and more's on the way.

Barack Obama's power trip against the SEC would give the banks that melted down Wall Street even more clout than they already had and still have.

You can see the giant handprints of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (a former top Fed official) and his coterie of banking industry advisers ("Geithner's inner circle jerks") all over this plan to strip the SEC of some of its regulatory power and give it to what he describes as a "retooled" Fed.

The SEC has its problems, as whistleblower Harry Markopolos so bluntly pointed out, but the Fed has a radically different setup — the banks themselves have a formal say in who serves on the regional Feds. Geithner himself had to formally pass muster with the banks when he became chair of the New York branch of the Fed, the job he held before becoming Treasury secretary.

Geithner was close enough a pal of Wall Street's banks to be heavily courted to run Citigroup by its former CEO Sandy Weill and to have advocated ways to reduce the amount of capital required to run a bank (the opposite of his current policy). See "Geithner, Member and Overseer of Finance Club," a good New York Times piece from last month, for details.)

It's one thing to have the Fed focus on the flow of money; it's another thing altogether to have it also step in as a regulator of the banks. In general, you could argue that the banks would be regulating themselves.

More on the Fed from Eliot Spitzer here ("Fed Dread"). The ex-governor has always had a lot to say about financial issues — other than how much to pay prostitutes. And a good Seeking Alpha piece, "The Bernanke Fed's Bogus Transparency," points out the Fed's built-in secrecy — the SEC may have its problems but at least it doesn't operate that way. As the Seeking Alpha piece says about the Fed:

A more benign view of the Fed is available here, but for a better overall look, check out Arohan's "Get Ready for a Changing Regulatory Environment," which gives some good background on both the SEC and Fed.

Resistance from the SEC is futile, but it's already fierce: Obama's new SEC chair, Mary Schapiro, has already gone public with her disagreement with her boss, as the Wall Street Journal reports this morning ("SEC Objects to Idea of Losing Some Oversight Power").

Obama's plan may face "big hurdles," but the SEC's resistance is likely to be futile because it has been at least a good enough regulator to not have many allies on Capitol Hill or in the banking industry.

Now Johnson is sounding the same themes in "The Quiet Coup," an Atlantic piece that isn't the most exciting thing you'll read unless you stick with it. And then you realize that he's describing Wall Street's amassing of cultural capital — and that that is probably more responsible than anything else for the fix we're in now of no seeming end to the spectacle of bankers bailing out bankers with our money.

And you realize that, although Johnson doesn't say it, a worship of Wall Street explains as well as anything else how such scams as the Hevesi pension-fund scandal can take place — can even become a normal and even admired way of doing business.

So normal that even a spark from old flames like Peggy Lipton can set off a financial disaster. (See my colleague Tom Robbins's "Peggy Lipton, The Girlfriend Who Sparked the Pension Scandal.")

Mother of mercy, is this the start of RICO?

Federal prosecutors in San Diego are using the RICO anti-racketeering laws to charge 24 people in an alleged $100 million mortgage-fraud ring.

They're claiming that this is the first time in the U.S. that RICO, commonly used against mobsters, has been used in a mortgage-fraud case.

Take Seeking Alpha contributor Harold Goodman's intriguing analysis of this week's market movement (see my item here): He noted some particularly mysterious movement in stocks of the big banks, like Citigroup. (See his "How to Profit from Market Manipulation.")

Go back about 16 days, when Citigroup seemed to be ailing the most. Suddenly, an interoffice memo from CEO Vikram Pandit popped up, claiming that the bank conglom was actually profitable in January and February. Citi's stock started rallying on the news, sparking a slow rise from its near-zero value and helped along by news that the U.S. government planned to absorb the banks' toxic assets.

Pandit's memo was followed almost immediately by similar reports by other big-bank CEOs, and the sector has seemed somewhat healthier ever since.

The surprising news from the banking sector, meanwhile, sparked an overall record rise, at least in percentage. Now that the surge seems to be flagging, Bloomberg notes today:

Back to Pandit's memo: Some observers (even respectable ones) were more than skeptical at the time. As I noted back then ("Any port in a storm: Clinging to hope, market rallies on Citi memo, true or not"), SA's Tyler Durden wrote:

You could have argued even back then that the supposedly good news from the big banks, true or not, was a coordinated move by the banking sector's supposedly rival CEOs to paint a good picture. But maybe the banks were in essence taking orders from the Plunge Protection Team, the cabal of top U.S. government officials, in exchange for the government's not aggressively seeking nationalization of the ailing banks.

Yes, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that much of the market movement since the South Sea Bubble hundreds of years ago is not some sort of big manipulators' collusion, if not conspiracy. Still, this smacks of a PPT move to inject the market with more than just money to reboot it.

Kinda puts the kibosh on the idea that we're a "free-market" system that normally thrives because the government minds its own business.

At first glance, Harold Goodman's "How to Profit from Market Manipulation" seems like just a self-help guide. It's not.

Goodman's March 25 article, an Editor's Pick on Seeking Alpha, peers deeply into the stock market's machinations this week, particularly on Monday and Tuesday.

He closely charts the timing of the Obama administration's public appearances with movement of the market. That's nothing shocking — that's what the market does; it often moves up and down on various pronouncements. But the seeming artificiality of this week's market movement is particularly intriguing. And Goodman, a West Coast mortgage broker, throws in a mention or two of the Plunge Protection Team (PPT). Think of the Stonecutters on The Simpsons, but this cabal is real. It's the President's Working Group on Financial Markets. Read Drake Bennett's "The Operators: Behind a seductive Wall Street conspiracy theory," from the Boston Globe last September.

The Washington Post's Brett D. Fromson is credited in most quarters with first calling the Working Group the Plunge Protection Team more than a decade ago. And they are the masters: the Treasury secretary and the chairs of the Federal Reserve, SEC, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission. (Well, Bloomberg's Caroline Baum, in her July 2007 "Rubin Should Teach Paulson Secret PPT Handshake," did throw some cold water on the conspiracy-theory aspect of the PPT.)

Anyway, set up during the Reagan era to deal with crises in the markets, the PPT does exist. The question is what specifically it does and what happens when it does whatever it does — if it does what the conspiracy theorists think it does.