No wonder Warren Buffett says the U.S. economy has improved "tremendously." Just look at Wells Fargo's record third-quarter profit. Buffett's the bank's biggest shareholder, at 6.5 percent, or more than 300 million shares.

Details of the earnings picture, at 247wallst.com, about what you can reasonably call Buffett's banks. A bigger picture? Buffett as a "lagging indicator" of the bubblicious current market.

Stating the obvious six months after the fact, the NYT tells America that Paul Volcker's not being listened to, splashing on today's front page, "Volcker Fails to Sell a Bank Strategy."

The aging (82 years old), giant (6-7) former Fed chairman was marginalized months ago by Barack Obama, relegated to do-nothing, dog-and-pony panel called the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Volcker's voice — particularly his view that the megabanks be reined in from their risky behavior — was drowned out way early this year by the nattering of Larry Summers, the current administration's version of Karl Rove. (See my "Obama de-regulates Larry Summers, reins in Volcker," March 26.)

Americans Plan to Limit Spending on Recovery Concern (Bloomberg)

Wall Street's pissed at you for not wanting to spend more money during the recession.

Pen to paper: Will Madoff make him rich? (Philadelphia Daily News)

K.C. White sketched a portrait of fellow convict Bernie Madoff in the Butner, N.C., federal pen and hopes to peddle it. Its title? "Fuck My Victims." The recently freed White says Madoff autographed it for him and told him, "I made them millions of dollars. I'm doing 150 years. Fuck my victims."

The Specter of Lehman Shadows Trade Partners (WSJ)

"The ghost of Lehman Brothers' derivatives business is haunting hundreds of schools, municipalities and companies, which remain entangled in financial transactions with the failed firm."

Volcker Sees 'Long Slog' for U.S. Economy, Seeks Bank Limits (Bloomberg)

Pushing way harder than the Obama administration for limits on trading in risky capital markets by "too-big-to-fail" banks, which is why the Obama administration has marginalized the old codger.

U.S. Stock-Index Futures Advance; Citigroup, Nucor Shares Gain (Bloomberg)

Cuomo Calls In 5 BofA Directors (WSJ)

NY's AG issues subpoenas, scaring the shit out of board members across the country.

Next Up: Dow 10,000? Does Anyone Care? (Seeking Alpha)

When it happens, you'll see big, bold headlines, but not that big a deal. The S&P 500 passing 1,000 — now that was big.

MORE HEADLINES FOLLOW

Worst case scenario: The recession may recover while the recovery recedes.

Stay tuned for more wordplay today, when current Fed chair Ben Bernanke talks with the House Budget Committee. Bernanke is expected to echo Volcker, said Bloomberg.

But in his prepared remarks, according to this morning's Wall Street Journal, Bernanke notes that the debt is killing us, but he's sounding fairly optimistic. Or fairly gloomy.

"[R]ecent data . . . suggest that the pace of economic contraction may be slowing," his statement says. That doesn't mean that it has stopped contracting.

Volcker is much gloomier. Bernanke, though, doesn't sound any more or less opaque than most other Fed chairs (aside from Volcker). You read his statement and figure it out.

Great news for bankers, though. In his prepared remarks, Bernanke says the ability of banks to raise new capital "suggests that investors are gaining greater confidence in the banking system." We already know why that is: We saved the bankers, whether or not we should have done so.

Volcker

I must have been really naive to think that Larry Summers wouldn't win a power struggle with Paul Volcker.

During the Clinton Administration, Summers was hot enough to melt down Glass-Steagall, the Depression Era law that kept Wall Street schemers from forming trusts and banks from getting into the securities business.

You know, the law that would have prevented the current overall meltdown and the kind of regulation that former Fed chair Volcker has been pushing for.

So why are Summers and his fellow non-regulator, investment banker Robert Rubin, Barack Obama's golden boys while Volcker's influence is waning?

Over at MonkeyBusinessBlog, Eric Salzman admits he has a "man-crush" on Volcker but then gets serious about the aged Volcker's being taken off the front lines and sent back home to work on "tax reform":

As to Summers, Arianna Huffington takes more than a star turn with her "Larry Summers: Brilliant Mind, Toxic Ideas."

Overseas finance ministers want actual regulation; U.S. pushes only for more transparency.

For all the bluster in Congress about increased regulation of Wall Street, it's Europe that is leading the fight to regulate hedge funds.

In "Hedge-Fund Regulation Splits G-20 as Conference Begins," the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend on the maneuvering in D.C. during the run-up to April 2's formal meeting in London of the world's biggest economies:

One question is how much clout President Barack Obama's elderly adviser Paul Volcker — a harsh critic of "financial engineering" by hedge funds and other Street manipulators — has. Reading between the lines, it seems clear that Obama's National Economic Council director, Larry Summers, may not be so keen on regulation, but Obama is under pressure from overseas. The WSJ notes:

Financial engineers — they're the x-axis (and y-axis) of evil

Volcker: ""If you think that you're a financial engineer, you're not a very good financial analyst."

Paul Volcker is blistering the hide off of Wall Street's so-called financial engineers, and if he doesn't stop, these "quants" are destined to become much more widely known.

Think of quants as the x-axis (and y-axis) of evil for Barack Obama's nascent administration.

You may be hearing the Q-word with increasing frequency, and what you'll hear won't be very nice. Before the meltdown, quants were golden. Now we know that that was just on paper.

They're the people engaged in computational finance. Loosely speaking, they focus on the math of the markets, figuring out such things as the complex derivatives and schemes that appear to have taken us down. (For more on the derivatives schemes themselves, see James Lieber's "What Cooked the World's Economy?")

As the brains behind the bankers' schemes, quants aren't necessarily business people; they could be mathematicians or physicists or the like — although the "profession" is becoming more popular and has its own trade organization, the New York-based International Association of Financial Engineers. (This is elementary background for many of you, but not for us commoners.)

The 81-year-old Volcker, chairman of Obama's hopefully named Economic Recovery Advisory Board, prefers to call quants "financial engineers." And in his February 20 speech at Columbia's Center on Capitalism and Society — where there are a whole bunch of people hoping to join the already large number of financial engineers — he preferred to sneer at what they do:

People far less well-known (like Julian Delasantellis in a recent Asia Times article) have had some choice words on the topic:

But have you ever had an 6-foot-7, 81-year-old economist like Paul Volcker sneer at you? It must hurt. Especially when veteran Volcker is likely to become such a familiar face on TV as the Obama administration's public face about the economy.

In a recent speech in Canada, he even used an anecdote about his grandson to deride quants.